D'Angelo Law Library Blog

Introducing SCOCAL: The Supreme Court of California, Annotated

While there have been an increasing number of free sources for the full text of court opinions--including Google Scholar, Public Library of Law, Justia, and others--what has thus far been lacking is the analytical material, tables of authorities, briefs, and so on that accompany case law in commercial services such as Westlaw and Lexis.  Now we are starting to see that change. 

SCOCAL is a new project between the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law School, and Justia, Inc. In addition to free access to the full text of California Supreme Court opinions from 1934 to the present, SCOCAL also provides detailed annotations of selected cases written and edited by students in the Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law School. For some cases, related California Supreme Court briefs, other documents, and news items are also available. Users may also subscribe to separate RSS feeds of new opinions, annotations, and Court news.

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.

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]

President Obama overturns Bush order on Presidential records

In one of his first actions as President, Mr. Obama has overturned an Exeuctive Order issued by Mr. Bush in 2001 that expanded the power of current and former Presidents and their heirs to restrict access to their official records. The White House press release states:

"This order ends the practice of having others besides the President assert executive privilege for records after an administration ends. Now, only the President will have that power, limiting its potential for abuse. And the order also requires the Attorney General and the White House Counsel to review claims of executive privilege about covered records to make sure those claims are fully warranted by the Constitution.”

The text of Mr. Obama's order can be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/ 

ht to the National Coalition for History, online at http://historycoalition.org/ 

Change has to come to the White House (.gov)

Approximately one hour ago, I joined several students, staff, and faculty in the University of Chicago Law School's Green Lounge (the same place where Barack Obama used to talk with faculty and students) to watch Mr. Obama sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. In the short time that's passed, a new White House website has already been launched, featuring several recent speeches, the agenda for President Obama's new administration, and the first White House blog post from Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House.  Obama's campaign made innovative use of the internet and new technologies, so it will be interesting to keep an eye on WhiteHouse.gov, which should be a much more dynamic web presence than it has been under past presidents.

For comparison, this is what WhiteHouse.gov looked like eight years ago.