Monthly Archives: March 2010

John B. West and other non lawyers who have revolutionized legal research

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The latest issue of The American Journal of Legal History just landed on my desk.  It includes an article by Robert M. Jarvis, “John B. West:  Founder of the West Publishing Company.”   There are all sorts of fascinating facts about Mr. West in the article, including (and maybe everyone knows this but me) how he called for uniform citation way back in 1908.  From a footnote:

. . . [West] calls attention to the necessary multiplication of citations caused by the different unofficial publication of reports . . . [and] contends that reports of decisions are simply official documents which should be filed in numerical order and cited with reference to their numbers.  Under this system no matter how many decisions or systems of reporting be adopted each case can be readily found and cited by reference to this official number, entirely regardless of the volume and page of the particular publication.

The article details West’s (the man) falling out with West (the company).  “John called for the elimination of unofficial case reporters . . . [and] likewise derided the West digest system . . . “

In his conclusion to the article, Professor Jarvis remarks:

In thinking about John, two matters particularly stand out.  One is the pure randomness of his life.  If he had not moved to St. Paul and gotten a sales job with D.D. Merrill, he would not have met the lawyers he did and ended up inventing the case reporter and the digest.  It is possible, of course, that someone else might have done these things, but if not, the legal system would have developed along very different lines.

Second, there is the question of how a man who did not go to college, and was untrained in law, was able to devise methods that revolutionized legal research and, by extension, legal practice.  Why was no judge or lawyer able to see what he saw?  Perhaps the answer is that they were not looking, or perhaps it took an outsider to see what the cognoscenti could not.

This question of how a non lawyer can be such a leader in legal research struck me last quarter while we were teaching advanced legal research.  Two of our guest speakers are true revolutionaries in legal research — Carl Malamud from public.resource.org and Tom Bruce from the Cornell Legal Information Institute.   Both men are leading the free law revolution (and if Law.gov takes off, legal research will never be the same), and neither are lawyers.  Or law librarians, for that matter.

Here’s the cite to the article:

Robert M. Jarvis, “John B. West: Founder of the West Publishing Company,” The American Journal of Legal History, Volume L, Number 1, pages 1-22, January 2008-2010 (2010)

The Constitutionality of Presidential Signing Statements

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Faith Joseph Jackson, “The Constitutionality of Presidential Signing Statements: A Note on H.R. 5993 – The Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2008,” 35 Journal of Legislation 1 (2009).

Abstract:

This legislative note will examine H.R. 5993, the Presidential Signing Statement Act of 2008, by addressing the history of presidential signing statements, the use of presidential signing statements by recent administrations, and what gave rise to the American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and Separation of Powers Doctrine.   This paper will also discuss the contents of H.R. 5993, the likelihood of it passing muster through Congress and the executive branch, and if so, its impact on current administration and its immediate successor.”

FAO Gender and Land Rights Database

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In February the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched the Gender and Land Rights Database.

http://www.fao.org/gender/landrights

hat tip to Don Ford.

From the FAO press release:

The Gender and Land Rights Database produced in consultation with national statistics authorities, universities, civil society organizations and other sources worldwide, offers up-to-date information on how men and women in 78 countries differ in their legal rights and access to land. It can be searched by both country and thematic issues, including national and international legal frameworks, customary law, land tenure institutions, civil society institutions and land-related statistics.

In most of the world, women lag well behind men in ownership of agricultural land and access to income from land, even though women are major producers of food crops and play crucial roles in providing and caring for their households.

“Disparity in land access is one of the major causes for social and economic inequalities between males and females in rural areas. It jeopardizes food security at the household and community levels, and has an impact on national food security and development. It is vital information for policy makers. But until now, finding information on this phenomenon in one place has been difficult to come by,” Marcela Villarreal, Director, FAO Gender, Equity and Rural Employment Division said as the new database was placed online.

The new information tool, available to anyone with access to the Internet, provides policymakers and other users with a better picture of the major social, economic, political and cultural factors which affect access to land and enforcement of women’s land rights.

The database covers both national and customary laws governing land use; property rights and inheritance; international treaties and conventions; land tenure and related institutions; civil society organizations that work on land issues, and other related statistics.

By searching country profiles, users can find out the answers to specific questions on topics like the total number of land holders, the total number of women land holders and the number of rural households headed by women. They can also call up comparisons on a given topic between two or more countries.

“Decision-makers at all levels now have, on the one hand, a comprehensive source of information on the more relevant factors affecting the equality of land rights in their countries and, on the other hand, the possibility to make comparisons between trends and situations in their own and other countries,” FAO Gender and Development Research Officer Zoraida Garcia said.

“They can then use this information to tailor their own decisions and strategies, but also to have a clearer idea of the possible impacts which those strategies might have on the real economic empowerment of women, and on the well-being of rural communities,” she added.

“FAO had so many requests on a regular basis from member states and others in the international community who wanted to understand how gender disparities affected and were impacted by the land tenure situation. That’s why we developed this tool, to help provide a comprehensive view of the issue,” Garcia explained.

Judge says: Keep this opinion out of Westlaw and LEXIS

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 Judges make decisions and write opinions.  Some opinions get published and some do not.  Unpublished opinions get unofficially published in West’s Federal Appendix and very often show up online.   And on infrequent occasions some opinions find their way into LexisNexis but not Westlaw; others are found in Westlaw but not LexisNexis.

Here’s a case that caught my eye while doing some docket searching (I drink POM Wonderful, so that’s why it stood out).

On December 21, 2009 Judge A. Howard Matz, of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, issued an 7-page order in the case of POM Wonderful LLC v. Welch Foods, Inc..   This opinion includes, among other things, a discussion of standing under the California Unfair Competition Act and the California False Advertising Act.  At the end of the document, the judge writes:  “This Order is not intended for publication or for inclusion in the databases of Westlaw or LEXIS.” (emphasis mine)

A quick search of Bloomberg Law dockets produces at least a dozen other orders from this same judge with this same language.

So what about Bloomberg Law.com?  Or Google Scholar?  Or Fastcase?  Justia?  May any/all of them include the order?

Or is it just the strength of the Wexis duopoly and the judge really means he does not want the order published online anywhere.

LexisNexis and Westlaw have been the big players for decades.  But Google really could be a game-changer.  As a review article in the March 8, 2010 issue of The Recorder (“Worthy Adversary”) by Oliver Benn of Google Scholar points out:

If Google wants to devote its resources to addressing its current limitations, the future of legal research could become very different.  Many courts accept briefs electronically.  Why not hyperlink cited cases in the brief to the cases’ free Google pages?

And getting back to POM Wonderful, apparently it is available in LexisNexis and Westlaw, despite the judge’s request that it not be (please see comment from Bev Butula).

Asian AIDS Law Database

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Asia Catalyst has launched the Asian AIDS Law Database

http://www.yazhoudiaocha.com/laws/

From the description and press release

This database presents and links to English-language information about HIV/AIDS-related statutes from countries in Asia. Chinese-language information is provided where available. The database is a

free, user-friendly resource, searchable in Chinese and English, to help researchers to find HIV/AIDS-related statutes throughout Asia. It is the first database exclusively dedicated to this purpose. The database has over 100 records, ranging from Cambodia’s draft law on drug control to the national policy on HIV/AIDS of Bangladesh. 

Asia Catalyst is a US-based resource for grassroots organizations working on HIV/AIDS in Asia.

hat tip : Professor Donald Clarke

Dissents from the Bench – More from the New York Times

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In today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak writes about dissents from the bench.  “In a Polarized Court, Getting the Last Word,” Liptak  describes a new study that is soon to appear in the Justice System Journal.

“The Brooding Spirit of the Law: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench” by William Blake and Hans Hacker states that dissenting from the bench  “may indicate that bargaining and accommodation have broken down irreparably.”

Liptak writes:

“There are no comprehensive records of oral dissents, and researchers reviewed audio recordings — many available on the indispensable Oyez Web site — newspaper accounts and other resources to track them down. Jill Duffy, a research librarian at the Supreme Court, and Elizabeth Lambert, a staff lawyer with a Federal District Court in New York, seem to have assembled a complete list going back to 1969 in the winter issue of the Law Library Journal.”

[And, blogged about here some time ago.]

RUNNERS – TOC service from Ritsumeikan University

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RUNNERS, Ritsumeikan University New Episteme Academic Information Retrieval System, is a free table of contents service for academic journals from around the world. RUNNERS includes journals from many disciplines, so you need to dig to find the legal publications. Author and title searching is also available. Many thanks to the folks at Ritsumeiken Univeristy in Japan for this useful service.

RUNNERS

http://runners.ritsumei.ac.jp/cgi-bin/swets/menu-query-e?mode=0&key=

Brother, can you spare $1,000?

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In the age of ever-increasing price tags it can take a lot to cause sticker shock, but I got just that when I assisted a faculty member in requesting photocopies of a lengthy case file from a trial level court.  The final bill was just under $1000.  An amount that doesn’t crack top-ten lists for outrageously priced products, but not a small amount of money either.  Especially when you consider that court records like these are public record.

It begs the question, as part of the public record how publicly accessible are court records? Should “public record” in an increasingly digital world mean a trip to a court house door (possibly states away) or a photocopy bill in the triple (or more) digits?  Neither are easily answered, but both should be considered as we begin to assess the state of public access to primary sources of law and the materials that go in to making them.

A note: I know requests like this are commonplace for many librarians and researchers, but this was my first time getting to the nitty-gritty of requesting a whole case file and doing the math on its cost.  Everyone I spoke to at the court was extremely helpful and they were able to fulfill the request even more quickly than they initially forecasted.

Fiscal Year 2009 & Related Reports of the U.S. Government

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The Fiscal Year 2009 Financial Report of the United States Government — along with various related publications — is available from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) .
As stated there:
The Secretary of the Treasury, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is required annually to submit financial statements for the U.S. Government (USG) to the President and the Congress. GAO is required to audit these statements.