Economic and Legal Information(EPI) is a fee-based database of Slovak legal resources; however, some information is available free of charge. It provides legislation, commentaries on statutes and codes, current awareness for Slovak and EU case law, model contracts, and financial news. All information appears is Slovak -no translations.
Ekonomické a Právne Informácie (Economic & Legal Information)
The International Peace Institute has published a study on the regulation of private security firms and private militias.
Beyond Market Forces Regulating the Global Security Industry
James Cockayne with Emily Speers Mears, Iveta Cherneva, Alison Gurin, Sheila Oviedo, and Dylan Yaeger
http://www.ipinst.org/asset/file/459/BEYOND_MARKET_FORCES_DRAFT_forGeneva.pdf
Private military and security companies play an increasingly visible role in conflict and post-conflict situations. Properly regulated, they may offer efficient and responsive means for governments to deliver security in insecure environments. But well-publicized abuses suggest that an adequate regulatory framework is urgently needed.
Beyond Market Forces surveys the existing state of national, international, and corporate-level regulation of this industry, including more than forty Codes of Conduct. It provides thirty case studies looking at frameworks for implementing and enforcing industry standards in other global industries such as the extractive, textile and apparel, toy, toxic waste, financial, sporting, chemical, and even veterinary industries. And it draws lessons from these industries specifically for the global security industry, identifying five different types of implementation and enforcement framework that the industry could consider: a watchdog, an accreditation scheme, an arbitral tribunal, a harmonization scheme, and a ‘club’
In order to effect certain budget cuts, we are looking at all journal renewals. One particular law journal just went up 20%, to an annual subscription of $ 696.00. It routes to no one. It’s been cited only eight times in law review footnotes in the last two years. No way we’re keeping this one. Double-digit price increases are an outrage, and will be given the closest scrutiny here.
Can technology offer us “continuous augmented awareness?”
An earlier post here, commenting upon an article a year ago in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stoopid?” Now an article in the July / August 2009 issue of the same magazine asks, “Is Google actually making us smarter?”
The article, “Get Smart,” by Jamais Cascio, discusses how Twitter can help us move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one of “continuous augmented awareness.” I’m a fan of Twitter but I find it hard to quickly sift through tweets about pancakes to the ones that provide truly valuable and timely information (not that pancakes aren’t important, but I use Twitter mainly for work). Here’s what Mr. Cascio writes:
But imagine if social tools like Twitter had a way to learn what kinds of messages you pay attention to, and which ones you discard. Over time, the messages that you don’t really care about might start to fade in the display, while the ones that you do want to see could get brighter. Such attention filters–or focus assistants–are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives. We’ll move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one we might call “continuous augmented awareness.”
The article suggests that:
The trouble isn’t that we have too much information at our fingertips, but that our tools for managing it are still in their infancy.
The Global Integrity Report provides scorecards on anti-corruption and rule of law measures for individual countries. The reports include citations to statutes on areas of law such as, taxation, campaign contributions, bribery, and labor law.
Global Integrity Report http://report.globalintegrity.org/
Description of Global Integrity Report Methodology
The Global Integrity Report is a tool for understanding governance and anti-corruption mechanisms at the national level. Written by local researchers and journalists, the Report is characterized by an innovative, award-winning research methodology; a robust peer review process; and start-to-finish transparency.
Methodology Overview:
Unlike most governance and corruption indicators, the Global Integrity Report mobilizes a highly qualified network of in-country researchers and journalists to generate quantitative data and qualitative reporting on the health of a country’s anti-corruption framework. Each country assessment contained in the Global Integrity Report comprises two core elements: a qualitative Reporter’s Notebook and a quantitative Integrity Indicators scorecard, the data from which is aggregated and used to generate the cross-country Global Integrity Index.
An Integrity Indicators scorecard assesses the existence, effectiveness, and citizen access to key governance and anti-corruption mechanisms through more than 300 actionable indicators. It examines issues such as transparency of the public procurement process, media freedom, asset disclosure requirements, and conflicts of interest regulations. Scorecards take into account both existing legal measures on the books and de facto realities of practical implementation in each country. They are scored by a lead in-country researcher and blindly reviewed by a panel of peer reviewers, a mix of other in-country experts as well as outside experts. Reporter’s Notebooks are reported and written by in-country journalists and blindly reviewed by the same peer review panel.
The Center for Systemic Peace has numerous Web pages with historical information related to political stability and changes in regimes.
Adverse Regime Changes in Africa 1955-2004 http://www.systemicpeace.org/africa/ACPPAnnex2a.pdf
Coup d’Etat in Africa 1946-2004 http://www.systemicpeace.org/africa/ACPPAnnex2b.pdf
Major Periods of Armed Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa 1946-2004 http://www.systemicpeace.org/africa/ACPPAnnex1a.pdf
Polity IV Project Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions 1800-2007 http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm
Description of the Center for Systemic Peace
The Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) was founded in 1997. It is engaged in innovative research on the problem of political violence within the structural context of the dynamic global system, that is, global systems analysis. The Center supports scientific research and quantitative analysis in many issue areas related to the fundamental problems of violence in both human relations and societal development. The focus of CSP research is on the possibilities of complex systemic management of all manner of societal and systemic conflicts. The Center regularly monitors and reports on general trends in societal-system performance, at the global, regional, and state levels of analysis and in the key systemic dimensions of conflict, governance, and (human and physical) development. The Center is now affiliated with the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University.
New on SSRN:
Abstract:
Oral dissents identify some of the Supreme Court justices’ most deeply held minority opinions. While print dissents are published routinely, oral dissents are not systematically tracked. This article presents the results of our AALL grant-funded project to locate oral dissents issued from October 1969 through today, discusses the methodology used in compiling our list, and describes various aspects of oral dissents that may make some more difficult to find. This project was funded by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Research Fund: An Endowment Established by Lexis-Nexis.
The appendix is quite handy for your reference desk as it contains a list of the oral dissents from the October Term of 1969 to the present. Just in case you were wondering: the authors found 117 oral dissents.
In a recent Tweet by Carl Malamud, he suggested (in < 140 characters) that if librarians want to improve public access [to court records], we need to do *something* about it….
So, step one in our advocacy plan: Start a petition.
Paul Lomio and I crafted a very short petition directed at the Administrative Office of the US Courts to improve PACER.
The petition is online here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-PACER
It reads:
We ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to improve PACER by enhancing the authenticity, usability and availability of the system.
We the undersigned, urge the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) to make the following changes to the PACER system:
- For verification and reliability, the AO should digitally sign every document put into PACER using readily available technology.
- PACER needs to be much more readily accessible if it is to be usable for research, education, and the practice of law. Improved accessibility includes both lowering the costs for using PACER and enhancing the web interfaces.
- Depository libraries should also have free access to PACER.
Please sign the petition, comment on the ideas and share the petition with your friends and colleagues!
With tweets and blogs, legal research is just so much more interesting.
After posting yesterday on Practitioners Beware…Research on Westlaw / Lexis is a Necessity in Texas?, a Tweet from a fellow librarian led to an interesting post on the Supreme Court of Texas Blog.
The post, Researching Unpublished COA Opinions in Texas, offers a free and pretty nifty trick for combating the problem of searching for unpublished COA opinions in Texas. It involves some handy-dandy Google searching. (Note: Google indexes all the COAs in Texas except for Dallas.)
As the blog explains:
Texas has fourteen courts of appeals. Luckily, the opinions in thirteen of those (all but Dallas) can be quickly searched in Google by including the following operator within your search query:
site:courts.state.tx.us/opinionsIf you want to focus your results on a particular court, such as the appellate district your case is in, just add that to the operator. For example, “site:3rdcoa.courts.state.tx.us/opinions” restricts the search to opinions coming out of the Austin Court.
Very nifty. So, sure it isn’t perfect, but it is a free option that the bloggers at SCOTXblog claim works pretty darn well. They also offer some tips for searching the Dallas court and the Texas Supreme Court.
And, if you can’t deal with the search strategy above, you can click on the “Search Opinions and Orders” box at the far left of their blog page. Cool!
The UN University, Care International, and Columbia University have published the following report online:
In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement
Abstract:
Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before. Climate change is already contributing to migration and displacement. All major estimates project that the trend will rise to tens of millions of migrants in coming years. Within the next few decades, the consequences of climate change for human security efforts could be devastating. These are amongst the key findings of a new report entitled, “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement”. The report was authored by UN University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), CARE International and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). It was released to the media today during the Bonn Climate Change Talks under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that there may be 200 million environmentally-induced migrants by 2050. “While human migration and displacement is usually the result of multiple factors, the influence of climate change in people’s decision to give up their livelihoods and leave their homes is growing” says Dr. Charles Ehrhart, CARE International’s Climate Change Coordinator and one of the report’s authors.
