D'Angelo Law Library Blog

2011 Presidential Bracket

Although the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship tournament officially began on Tuesday, the real action begins today, and for the third year in a row, President Obama has filled out brackets for both the men's and women's tournaments and made them publicly available on The White House Blog. The President's past brackets have not been included in the Compilation of Presidential Documents, but his remarks honoring the eventual champions, such as the 2009 champs the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, are included. My research indicates that the first Presidential congratulations for an NCAA basketball team was in 1984, when President Reagan hosted the Georgetown Hoyas.

The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents began publication in 1965 and is issued by the Office of the Federal Register every Monday. It includes proclamations, executive orders, signing statements, veto messages, communications made by the president to Congress, and other materials released by the White House during the previous week. The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States is a similar publication that begins with the papers of President Hoover, and since 1977, has included everything contained in the Weekly Compilation. The Bluebook states that the preferred citation is to the Public Papers for a document that appears in both publications, although there is generally a lag time of a few years before documents first published in the Weekly Compilation will appear in the Public Papers. The Public Papers from the Clinton Administration include several transcipts of interviews with President Clinton conducted by ESPN, including a SportsCenter appearance where he discusses the 1995 NCAA championship game with with analysts Digger Phelps and Dick Vitale and suggests that Arkansas start the game playing zone defense.

For more information about researching presidential documents, see the Library's research guide.

Remembering Cost of Government Day 2010

If you felt more money in your pocket on August 20th, you weren't imagining it. Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and the Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate the Cost of Government Day. The full report is available at http://fiscalaccountability.org/userfiles/COGD2010_2_final.pdf.  August 19th was the day for the 2010 year when the average American has earned enough money to pay for their share of government costs for the year.

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.

Expanded Serial Set in LexisNexis Congressional

The University of Chicago Library recently acquired a campus-wide subscription to the LexisNexis Serial Set Digital Collection, 1970-2003, which expands our previous (1789-1969) access to the digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set. The Serial Set includes House and Senate documents and reports, Senate executive reports, and Senate treaty documents. This addition will fill in some gaps in our online access to some important Congressional documents. For example, House and Senate Reports between 1969 and 1990 were previously unavailable online, and this will fill in that gap.

LexisNexis is digitizing this collection incrementally on a chronological basis, and they have already added documents up through the mid-1980s. LexisNexis plans to complete the project by the middle of this year. The Serial Set Digital Collection, which includes full-text searchable PDFs, is fully integrated into LexisNexis Congressional and can be searched by keyword, committee name, or citation.

When complete, the collection will provide comprehensive, full-text access to over 50,000 Congressional documents and reports published in over 2,600 volumes of the Serial Set from 1970-present. The Serial Set Digital Collection also provides full text access to all Senate Executive Documents and Reports, 1817-1979.

OregonLaws.org step in the right direction

Online publication of state statutes is a big deal. According to the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2007 publication State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources, ten states, plus the District of Columbia, have declared one or more of their online primary legal resources as the official publication. One of the problems, along with authentication, is the user-unfriendliness of many of these online statutes.

Enter Robb, an enterprising law student at Lewis & Clark Law School, who has done his part to improve the situation, with a new, free website for statutory research in Oregon called OregonLaws.org.

OregonLaws.org has a clean and clear design and a number of neat features, including: indented statutory provisions (yay!); easy browsing between sections; official annotations on the side of relevant statutory language; and source/citation for all provisions.

To find out more about OregonLaws.org, check out the OregonLaws.org Blog and Twitter.

[Hat tip to Stanford's Legal Research Plus]

2006 U.S. Code now available online at GPOAccess!

The U.S. Code, 2006 Edition, is now available on GPOAccess. See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html .

GPO Access contains the 2006, 2000, and 1994 editions of the U.S. Code, plus annual supplements. Documents are available only as ASCII text files.  The Government Printing Office is working on the print version of the 2006 Code; Volumes 1-17 (Titles 1-26) are in the DLL Reading Room.  Remaining volumes will arrive as they are published.