D'Angelo Law Library Blog

Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research...on the Internet

This new Guide, http://freelaw.classcaster.net/, is an excellent resource to introduce the new or experienced legal researcher to sources of quality legal content on the Internet.  It is written primarily for students by a librarian and legal research instructor, Sarah Glassmeyer from Valparaiso University.  There are also some resources for librarians and other legal research instructors with the promise of additional content.  As a new product, the Guide already has several nice features including a flow chart with ten basic steps for research process, and a nice organization of content by primary law (federal and state) and secondary sources. The site is sponsored by several of the free, quality providers of legal content on the Internet: Cornell's Legal Information Institute, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), and Justia.

Civil Rights Opinions from the Northern District

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois makes its opinions available at no cost through its electronic case filing website. However, it can be difficult to locate recent opinions on their website. To help fill this need, a Chicago-based attorney named Kenneth Flaxman set up this website to post recent civil rights cases from the Northern District. The opinions are posted in PDF format the day they are released by the court. The site uses a Perl script to download the recent civil rights cases and blojsom to display the most recent cases. You can subscribe to the RSS feed free of charge using Bloglines, Google Reader, or the RSS reader of your choice. Waxman also manages the Seventh Circuit Mailing List, which similarly collects recently published Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinions.

Being an attorney, Flaxman makes sure to explicitly state that his site is "in no way associated with or sponsored by the court," and that "No warranty is made for accuracy or completeness." Still, this is both a great resource for attorneys practicing in this area and a great example of how people can use relatively simple technology to make primary legal information more accessible.

RECAP - Free Public Access to Federal Court Records

About a year ago, the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University launched a new project called RECAP, with the aim of providing free public access to federal court records. RECAP is a play on words with PACER ("Public Access to Court Electronic Records"), the website the federal court system uses to make its public records (complaints, briefs, motions, etc.) available to the general public. However, PACER charges users significant fees to download documents from PACER, even though the information is in the public domain. Although the site is available to the general public, it is difficult to navigate and is therefore used mostly by attorneys and other trained legal researchers (like law librarians!).

So, what does RECAP do? According to the CITP:

RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names.

There is a more detailed description on the RECAP site, as well as a cool video of how it works.

Recently, the CITP made significant improvements to RECAP, most importantly adding search functionality.  At the RECAP Archive, you can search all of the documents that have been gathered by the RECAP Firefox extension. There are simple and advanced search options, and the latter allows you to narrow by court, date, docket number, and so on. All absolutely free of charge. Your results will include the full docket sheet for a case, alerting and allowing you to acquire any documents that are on PACER, but not yet included in RECAP.

Other cool features are the option to set up an RSS feed or e-mail alert for your search so that you can track a particular case. The system also allows you to add tags and connect related cases.

If you are a PACER user, I strongly encourage you to download RECAP so that you can add more documents to the database. If you are looking for court filings, check RECAP and you might save yourself some money.

For U of C law students: The Law Library does have a PACER account, so if you need any documents that you cannot find through RECAP, contact a reference librarian, and we will pull whatever documents you need.

JUREEKA! A Firefox extension linking legal citations

    Jureeka! is an extension to Mozilla's Firefox browser which enables links from legal citations to web pages.  Go to the Jureeka! spreadsheet for citations covered.   Jureeka! creates a toolbar which allows you to type in a citation and locate a source for it when freely available on the Internet.

    Jureeka! also allow you to create links from legal citations in web pages.  Although Jureeka! is a product in development, it has a high level of accuracy and great value for use of legal information sources on the Internet. 

For more information, or to download Jureeka! into your Firefox browser, go to http://www.jureeka.blogspot.com/