Articles Tagged with laws

Here is a rundown of October’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Legal Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.

Justia Legal Answers’ Top 10 Legal Answerers for October 2011

1. Dennis Chen, 1,360 points, 28 answers
2. Tanner Woods Pittman, 500 points, 10 answers
3. Rodney John Alberto, 910 points, 21 answers
4. Andrew Bresalier, 475 points, 17 answers
5. David Philip Shapiro Esq., 450 points, 9 answers
6. Paul Stanko, 400 points, 8 answers
7. J. Richard Kulerski Esq., 300 points, 6 answers
8. Evan Guthrie, 250 points, 5 answers
9. Jennifer Doerrie, 200 points, 6 answers
10. Lenore Tsakanikas, 200 points, 4 answers

It’s February 1st, and we at Justia are happy to report that in January members of our Onward and Facebook communities not only stopped by to visit us, you also liked us, and sometimes, you really, really liked us.

Our heavy hitter in January on the Onward Blog in terms of visits was Courtney’s post on the Online Blue Book – looks like there are more than a few people out there who like to get their inner citation geek on. I encourage anyone who hasn’t already to check out Courtney’s analysis and review of The Blue Book’s online features and also catch a glimpse of one of our Justia pugs, Sheba, giving a shout out to vendor-neutral citation.  Other popular posts this month included our Legal Predictions for 2011 and some thoughts on our shock over California’s new menu labeling laws (note: watch out for the 400+ calorie scones at Starbucks).

Last week, President Obama ordered a review of US Regulations to remove rules perceived to be outdated, stifling job creation, and making our economy less competitive in the world marketplace. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, he described it as thus:

“This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It’s a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.”

One of the perks of working at Justia is that our office is just a few doors down from a Starbucks. Chances are on any given day you’ll find a steady stream of Justians popping over at some point to re-fuel on caffeine and load up on something to eat.  Imagine how surprised a group of us were last week then to see that the coffee chain now posts the calorie content of their drinks and food – uh oh – we’d been busted!  While I fretted over the 400+ calorie scones, Courtney and Ken noticed the high counts of some of their favorite drinks and all three of us wondered what was going on.  Is Starbucks suddenly concerned about our health or, more likely, is there some new law we didn’t know about that now makes it mandatory to list this nutritional information.

Meet California Health and Safety Code Sec. 114094 – California’s new menu labeling law! Turns out this law has been on the books since 2008, but given that establishments covered under its provisions had until December 31, 2010 to make calorie counts and other nutritional information available to customers, none of us were aware of it.

Justia has launched a new legal portal for Mexico!

Justia Mexico provides legal information and resources for lawyers and consumers in Mexico. In keeping with Justia’s mission, these resources are all free, open, and shared.

The Justia Mexico portal provides access to Mexican Federal and State laws, including the Constitution of the United Mexican States, Codes, Laws, and Regulations.  The site also hosts legal information about the 32 Mexican States including State Constitutions, Codes, and additional government resources, such as demographic information. Justia Mexico allows pinpoint citations to the state codes. Currently, the Government only provides one PDF file for all of the laws in Mexico. Justia programmers have extracted the information from this PDF and broken it up into HTML text on our site. Now, users can quickly find and cite the specific section of code they need.