Monthly Archives: September 2010

WIPO Lex

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UN Pulse reports that the World Intellectual Property Organization has formally released WIPO  Lex, a portal of IP legislation and treaties searchable by country and subject.

http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/

From the WIPO description:

“WIPO Lex is a one-stop search facility for national laws and treaties on intellectual property (IP) of WIPO, WTO and UN Members. It also features related information which elaborates, analyzes and interprets these laws and treaties. It provides streamlined access to reference material of key importance for optimal information on the global IP System.”

Supreme Court Oral Argument Audio Recordings

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This from SCOTUS Blog:

“Starting next week, the Court will release on its own website the audiotape recordings of all of the arguments at the end of each argument week. This will be much faster release than under the prior policy, when they were not available for months — unless, as in a few high-profile cases, the Court released them on the same day of argument — a policy now discontinued.”

Starting with the October Term 2010, visitors to the Supreme Court site can download the FREE MP3 files by clicking on the “Oral Arguments” link from the home page and then clicking on the “Argument Audio”.  The argument audio will be posted on Fridays after Conference.

More details about this new policy are available in the Supreme Court’s press release.

Francophone African Legal Links

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The following article offers dozens of links to online legislation and case law from francophone African countries, as well as a discussion of the state of free online legal resources in Africa.

Text is in French.

Les Expériences Africaines de la Diffusion Libre du Droit Sur Le Web: bilan et perspective

Revue Juridique et Politique 2009 #3. pp.638-652.

Amavi Tagodoe and El Hadji Malick Ndiaye

http://www.lex-electronica.org/docs/articles_12.pdf

Resources and computers used by our students

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Last week was the first week of classes.  We have 27 students in our Advanced Legal Research class.  We started the class by going  around the room and having the students tell us about their summer work experiences this past summer and, in particular, what research resources they used the msot.  Our students worked in a fascinating array of positions — law firms, government agencies, federal courts, NGOs, and  public interest organizations.   Listed below, as a most unscientific survey,  is the list of different resources and the number of students who reported using it.

Google – 18

Westlaw – 14

LexisNexis – 11

Books – 8

Various databases licensed by Stanford University – 6

City/municipal codes – 5

PACER – 4

A librarian – 4

HeinOnline – 3

EDGAR – 2

PubMed – 2

ONLaw (California CEB database) – 1

SSRN – 1

Also interesting to me was the number of glowing apples shining back at me from their open laptops.  Of the 27 students in the class, only 4 have Windows machines — the rest all have Macs!

Two Million Dollar Gift for Law.Gov

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Today, Google announced the winners of their Project 10^100 , giving 10 million dollars in total to ideas that will help change the world.  (Short video of the winning ideas here.)

Law.Gov is one of the winners.  As the Google posting states:

Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

What great news!

Carl Malamud writes on the O”Reilly Radar today: “This grant is going to help Public.Resource.Org continue our work on Law.Gov and Video.Gov. For Law.Gov, this is going to mean a shift into real production, building on the very solid consensus that was reached earlier this year on the Core Law.Gov Principles.“

Carl Malamud also shared a status update for Law.gov efforts in that post.  Beyond the amazing gift from Google, the big updates include:

  1. Before the Law.Gov Report can be finished, video from the 15 Law.Gov workshops needs cleaning up and cataloging. ” Point.B Studio and Foolish Tree Films have been hard at work creating a 15-DVD set of workshop proceedings with approximately 70 pieces of video. The video will all get released as a final mix on the net as well as on DVDs printed at Lulu, and this core will form the basis for the next steps of the report.”
  2. To help further the National Inventory of Legal Materials,  there will soon be a “bug tracker where people can enter their survey results, in particular creating trouble tickets for jurisdictions that violate the Law.Gov Core Principles.”
  3. Carl Malamud is close to “a final agreement with UC Hastings and the Internet Archive to scan 3 million pages of 9th Circuit briefs.”  And, Malamud has sent California’s Title 24 out to be “double-keyed, turning it from PDF scans into valid marked up hypertext.”   Carl Malamud is also working on an effort to make fully available online the local codes of his surrounding North Bay Area communities.

More developments are coming up.

“Search the USCprelim” from the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Law Revision Counsel

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The U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC) has posted a new “Search the USCprelim” webpage that permits searches on what will eventually be a “posting of the next online version of the United States Code [USC].”

USCprelim is described as follows:
USCprelim: Pilot Project to Update Certain Titles Faster
Starting in 2010, the OLRC began a pilot project, called the USCprelim, to update certain titles of the U.S. Code on the website throughout the year as laws affecting those titles are enacted, rather than waiting until the end of the congressional session. Although these titles are also prepared from the same database used to prepare all other versions of the Code, they are posted to the website as a preliminary release, before all editorial notes have been added and before all work has been thoroughly reviewed. Thus, it should be expected that the preliminary release will be subject to further revision before it is released again as a final version. Nevertheless, the preliminary release should be useful to those seeking a more current version of the law. As with other online versions of the Code, the U.S. Code classification tables should be consulted for the latest laws affecting the Code. The first title being updated in this project is title 26, containing the Internal Revenue Code.

As indicated above, at present, searches on USCprelim are limited to Title 26 (the Internal Revenue Code).

A sample search “estate AND gift AND tax” brought up 221 hyper-linked results.

Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act

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On Thursday 23 September 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will mark-up, H.R. 6026, the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, a bill to require that any report required by statute to be issued to Congress and releasable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) be posted on a website managed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

OpenTheGovernment.org is circulating the below letter in support of the bill:

Dear Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa,

On behalf of the undersigned organizations concerned with government accountability and transparency, we are writing in support of H.R. 6026, the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act.

H.R. 6026 requires that any report required by statute to be issued to Congress and releasable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) be posted on a website managed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The reports would be available no later than 30 days after their transmission to Congress, and would be searchable by a number of categories.

Congressionally mandated reports contain a wealth of information about how the government is going about its work, and where it is doing, or not doing, well. H.R. 6026 makes it easier for the public to find this information and use it to hold officials accountable for their actions.

We appreciate your time and attention to this issue, and urge that you pass H.R. 6026. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this issue further, please contact Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org (pmcdermott@openthegovernment.org or 202-332-6736).

Sincerely,

OpenTheGovernment.org

Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies

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New journal from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law: Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies

Volume 1 is available online full-text:

http://law.huji.ac.il/eng/pirsumim.asp?cat=2062&in=1957

Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies is a law journal dedicated to in-depth discussions of important studies of and in law. Each issue consists of two symposia on a book or a research-project, which entail critical comments by commentators and a response by the person whose research project it is.

Additional information about the journal available on the Legal Theory Blog:

http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2010/09/journal-announcement-the-jerusalem-review-of-legal-studies.html


Recent FBI Report: Crime in the USA, 2009

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The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has just recently released its Crime in the USA (CIUS), 2009 report.

CIUS reports go back to 1996 and are available here.

It is possible to research crimes by offense, region, state and local agency, as well as to download data.

Report: “Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at Their Institutions”

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Covington & Burling LLP litigators Simon J. Frankel and Shannon M. Nestor have written an interesting 18-page overview report

“Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at Their Institutions”

examining the legal issues as to open access policies.

The report looks at:
It concludes with 5 criteria for an effective license.
The authors state –
“For the licensing portion of an open-access policy, it is recommended that an institution adopt a
license, in writing and signed by each faculty author, that contains the following five criteria:
  1. non-exclusive
  2. irrevocable
  3. worldwide
  4. perpetual, and
  5. non-commercial.”