But the death is…amicable. Altlaw.com announces that they will be shutting down in early 2010.
Filed under: Cool links, Courts, News, Technology, U.S. Law, legal research
November 17, 2009 • 6:43 pm 0
Google Scholar Now Includes Law Journals and Cases
From Google’s Official Blog:
Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
Filed under: Cool links, Courts, News, Technology, U.S. Law, legal research
October 8, 2009 • 7:00 pm 0
About those GAO legislative histories…
Despite all the controversy about Westlaw getting exclusive rights to the digitized legislative histories compiled by the GAO (see e.g. http://dukelawref.blogspot.com/2008/07/who-owns-legislative-history.html), I really didn’t take a close look until I needed some examples for class. There really is a lot of information in that database, and good quality PDF images. On the other hand, there are some questions about coverage, and some really annoying features in the database organization and search facility.
Coverage starts nominally in 1915, but more fully in 1921 (when the GAO was created). Since the GAO was mostly a green-eyeshade operation up until 1970, the legislative histories must have been to help decide if expenditures were proper. In any case, not all statutes have GAO histories. (Class example: ch. 359 of 1948 – nothing in GAO; use USCCAN instead). When a GAO history is available, especially in more recent years, it is extremely detailed, including texts of amendments. The table of contents for the PDFs, however, is broken up into several pages, sometimes with only one or two entries per page. Presumably, this preserves some information about the contents of bound volumes provided by the GAO, but it makes the set unnecessarily hard to use, and may cause some users to go away disappointed, unaware that more is available for the clicking. The default search template can also be frustrating since it doesn’t have a blank to fill in for chapter number. This is a handicap for earlier session laws that are cited only by chapter number.
Take-away: a big step forward in online access to federal legislative history material, but not one-stop shopping, and with room for improvement. -WT
Filed under: U.S. Law, legal research, library 2.0, research guides
May 5, 2009 • 6:56 pm 0
Source for free and low cost legal research
Pace University School of Law has compiled a guide to free and low cost resources for legal research. Looks great!
Filed under: Cool links, U.S. Law, legal research, research guides
February 18, 2009 • 8:39 pm 0
Tranparancy made real
From the website:
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be carried out with full transparency and accountability — and Recovery.gov is the centerpiece of that effort. In a short video, President Obama describes the site and talks about how you’ll be able to track the Recovery Act’s progress every step of the way.
Filed under: Cool links, Technology, U.S. Law, Web 2.0
December 3, 2008 • 3:26 pm 0
Get your regs before they appear in the Federal Register
The Public Inspection Desk at the Office of the Federal Register lists documents (in PDF format) that will be published in the Federal Register. From their website:
In some instances, agencies may request that documents appear on file several days prior to publication. This enables the official version of an important or complex document to be available to the public well before publication in the final typeset editions of the Federal Register.
Filed under: Cool links, U.S. Law, legal research
