To learn more about the Malamud vs. Pacer story (as blogged about here), check out public.resource.org/uscourts.gov. The site provides the paper trail on this challenge, plus good background information, and more.
Today’s New York Times features an article on Carl Malamud’s latest fight to keep the ‘operating system’ of America freely available. The article, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy,” by John Schwartz explains:
“So, using $600,000 in contributions in 2008, he bought a 50-year archive of papers from the federal appellate courts and placed them online. By this year, he was ready to take on the larger database of district courts. Those courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, had opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them.”
What happened next? The free PACER pilot had been suspended and “a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that “the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation.”
We’ll keep you posted on what follows…but it will be interesting to see what role librarians play in this fight going forward and how the new administration responds, too.
Here’s an e-mail that brightened my day:
I know we are all worried about how to maintain the quality of our collections and services in light of our uncertain economy.
We have decided to roll back our price for electronic CILP to 2005 levels or $696 for the coming year.
As with any vendor, we have expenses to pay. We are trying to reduce these to give you the best possible price we can.
Any other vendors willing to follow suit?
Penny Hazelton
University of Washington
From a SSRN announcement:
We are pleased to announce a new Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) Sponsored Subject Matter eJournal — Legal Information & Technology, sponsored by the Mid-America Law Library Consortium.
LEGAL INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Legal-Information-Technology.html
Preview the First Issue:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/sample_issues/1334262_CMBO.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Legal-Information-Technology
Editors: Randy J. Diamond, University of Missouri School of Law, and Lee F. Peoples, Oklahoma City University – School of Law
Sponsor: The Legal Information & Technology eJournal is sponsored by MALLCO, the Mid-America Law Library Consortium.
The consortium encourages and promotes cooperative endeavors among its member law school libraries in order to advance the research and educational opportunities of all member libraries, the institutions they serve, and the broader legal community.
Law schools from nine states are represented in MALLCO. Arkansas: University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, University of Arkansas-Little Rock; Illinois: Northern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University; Iowa: Drake University; Kansas: University of Kansas, Washburn University; Missouri: Saint Louis University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Washington University; Nebraska: Creighton University, University of Nebraska; North Dakota: University of North Dakota; Oklahoma: Oklahoma City University, University of Oklahoma, University of Tulsa; and South Dakota: University of South Dakota.
Description:
This eJournal includes working papers, forthcoming articles, and recently published articles in all areas of legal information scholarship. Topics include (but are not limited to):
The impact of legal information on domestic, comparative, and international legal systems;
The treatment of legal information authorities and precedents (e.g., citation studies);
The examination of rules, practices, and commentary limiting or expanding applications of legal information (e.g., citation to unpublished opinions and to foreign law);
The study of economic, legal, political, and social conditions limiting or extending access to legal information (e.g., trends in the legal publishing industry, intellectual property regimes, and open access initiatives);
The finding and use of legal information by academics to produce legal scholarship, by law students to learn the law, by attorneys in practice, and by judges and others decision makers to determine legal outcomes;
The history of legal information systems and technological advancements;
Legal information system design and assessment; and
The relationship of substantive areas of law (such as information law, intellectual freedom, intellectual property, and national security law) and other academic disciplines (e.g., information science) to legal information. This includes the scholarship of law librarians, other legal scholars, and other academic disciplines.
The eJournal also includes working papers, forthcoming articles, recently published articles, and selected documents (such as White Papers, briefings, reports, course materials) on the practice of law librarianship. Submissions are welcome in all areas of law librarianship including:
Administration, management, and leadership;
Facility design and construction;
Evaluating and marketing law library services;
All aspects of public, technical, and technology services;
Collection development, including sample collection development policies and procedures;
Electronic resource management and development including licensing, digitization, and institutional repositories;
Research and reference services; and
Legal research instruction teaching methods and substantial or innovative course materials.
Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell LLP, a full-service, national law firm of approximately 700 attorneys with offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Sacramento, San Francisco and Washington, DC, has issued legal research guidelines that calls for using Loislaw before turning to LexisNexis and Westlaw.
Hat tip to today’s Law Librarian Blog, in turn acknowledging Legal Writing Prof Blog.
In line with its stated mission to be a “complete information-services, news and media company that provides business and financial professionals with the tools and data they need on a single, all-inclusive platform,” Bloomberg — in its Bloomberg Law Search (BBLS) function — has compiled over 350 (as of today) documents related to ongoing U.S. legal and regulatory actions against Bernard L. Madoff, the investment advisor accused of running a US$50 billion Ponzi scheme that may be the largest financial crime of all time.
DocuTicker has released its new GreyGuide referencing interesting and often quite valuable research reports (usually as full-text PDFs) published by government agencies, academic institutions, NGOs and other public interest research groups.
Edizione Giuridiche Simone has made available a collection of Italian language dictionaries free of charge. The Law Dictionary (Dizionario giuridico) includes annotations to legislation. Other dictionaries inclide canonical law, political philosophy and the Historical Dictionary of Italian and European Law (Dizionario storico del dritto italiano ed europeo). These dictionaries are searchbale free of charge, but all content is in Italian. Grazie mille ai nostri amici dell’ EGS.
Edizione Giuridiche Simone online dictionaries
Voice of America provides a pronunciation guide for names of foreign leaders and dignitaries. Type in a name or choose from an alphabetical list.
Example of Sergio Viera de Mello from the VOA site. In addition to the written phonetic spelling, the site also provides an audio file of name being spoken in translation.
| DE MELLO, SERGIO VIERA | Brazil | SEH-zhee-o vee-A-rah day MEH-lo |
VOA Pronunciation Guide
http://names.voa.gov/index.cfm
Hat tip to Prof. Peggy McGuinness
Denis Borges Barbosa maintains a Web site devoted to intellectual property in Brazil. The site contains legislation, reports, PowerPoint presentations, digital books, bibliographies, and links. Most of the material is in Portuguese, but some English content is also available. Mr. Barbosa is an attorney in Rio de Janeiro who also teaches at various Brazilian universities. His site is a valuable introduction to IP law in Brazil. Obrigado Senhor Borges Barbosa.
Denis Borges Barbosa
