Articles Tagged with Legal Research

ABA authors and Cybersleuth seminar speakers Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch have revised and updated their book, The Cybersleuth’s Guide to the Internet, now in its twelfth edition.

The Cybersleuth’s Guide provides both basic and advanced information for anyone wanting to do cost-effective investigative or legal research on the Internet. The new edition features many updates, additions, and revisions to keep up with the ever-changing Internet. In fact, this edition has over 100 pages more than the prior edition.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Illinois announced that it will adopt a vendor-neutral citation system. According to the press release, the official citation of Illinois Supreme Court and Appellate Court opinions will change to a public-domain numbering and paragraph scheme.

Concurrently, the Illinois Supreme Court will also be discontinuing official printed volumes for Illinois state case law. “The official body of Illinois court opinions will now reside on the website of the Illinois Supreme Court, readily available  to lawyers, judges and law clerks for official citation and to any member of the public who wishes to read them.” This will save private lawyers as well as the court system quite a fair amount of money now that judges, law libraries and law firms will no longer have to purchase and store hundreds of printed volumes. For those concerned about authentication issues surrounding online case law, this should quiet your fears since the opinions will come directly from the courts themselves.

The Justia Latinoamerica project seeks to provide legal research tools for persons interested in laws and legal issues throughout Latin America. Today, I want to share with you Justia Cuba, our website that compiles most of Cuba’s legal resources. This project posed some unique challenges in that some of the material was hard to find, Cuban web servers were frequently down, and access to these servers were further constrained by the limited bandwidth connecting Cuba to the outside world.

In October, I wrote about the PocketJustice iPhone app from our friends at Oyez.  Since then they’ve released an iPad version (called PocketJustice HD) which takes advantage of the larger screen real estate to make researching faster.

Friday, they released both PocketJustice and PocketJustice Full for the Android Marketplace.  The Android version is much like the iPhone version, although thanks to Android phones having dedicated search and menu buttons, the Android version doesn’t waste as much screen real estate for a menu on the bottom of the screen.

Legal researchers in a hurry are also benefitted on the Android version by having access to Android’s voice search which allows you to say the name of a case and have your phone do the typing for you.

Last week marked the formal launch of a new Supreme Court of California resource center, SCOCAL (http://scocal.stanford.edu). SCOCAL is a joint project between Justia and our friends at the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford and Fastcase. There are lots of cool features in the site and, as ever, I encourage all our readers who are interested in California law to spend some time checking it out. Below is a brief summary of what you’ll find when you visit the site.

California Supreme Court Opinions – Browse through the full text of recent opinions by date, name or issue, or search the entire collection, which includes decisions from 1934 to the present. Click on the tabs located at the top of each individual case to access related information and documents.

Given that some of our favorite Justia supporters and friends are law librarians and to help get us all into the holiday spirit of the season, we thought it might be fun to put together a list of library and legal-themed gifts for those folks who keep us on track and organized when it comes to legal research and information. (And for those of our readers who practice law, fear not. We have a separate list coming out for you this week as well!)

Most of us are probably familiar with The Library of Congress THOMAS web site – a terrific resource where you can find a wealth of federal legislative information dating back to the 104th Congress. While THOMAS is a great place to find current legislative resources, the Library of Congress (LOC) also has some really interesting online collections consisting of primary and secondary source legal materials relating to the formation of the United States. As well, the LOC provides an entire century of US Congressional documents, statutes, journals and debates in their Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation collection, which covers Congress from 1774 – 1875. Below are some links to help get you started on an exploration of these incredible archives.

Creating the United States

This LOC exhibition and collection consists of the founding papers and documents of the United States. Browse through the various sections to see such things as a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence,  James Madison’s notes on “the great compromise”, or the letter notifying George Washington of his unanimous election to the be the first President of the United States. The Exhibit is broken up into three main sections: Creating the Declaration of Independence, Creating the United States Constitution, and Creating the Bill of Rights.

BlawgSearch is Justia’s law blog directory and search engine. While BlawgSearch can be used to explore new legal blogs, it really shines as a current awareness tool to keep you up-to-date on news and legal developments in your areas of practice or interest.

To take advantage of this feature, you can subscribe to one of our many category-based RSS feeds (e.g., criminal law or bankruptcy). These RSS feeds aggregate blog posts from numerous law blogs and can be read from your favorite RSS reader. Additionally, BlawgSearch allows you to create custom RSS feeds based on legal keywords or phrases, or citations to specific statutes, regulations or cases. This post will show you how to access these feeds to develop a collection of content relevant to your areas of interest and focus.

But, before we show you how to customize your feeds, let’s first make sure you know how to sign up for the general category feeds, and also explain some of your other options when viewing these feeds. From the Blawgsearch home page, select a category that is of interest to you. For example, if you are interested in civil rights law, click on the Civil Rights link.