D'Angelo Law Library Blog

Free Access to Law: Legal Information Institute (LII) of India

The Legal Information Institute (LII) of India (<http://liiofindia.org/>) is a free source of Indian case-law (including Supreme Court decisions from 1950-date), legislation (1856-date), treaties (1947-date), law reform commission reports, and law journal articles.  It includes a citator function.  LII of India opened for public access on November 25, 2010 and will formally launch in March 2011.  It was developed by four Indian law schools (NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad; National Law School of India University, Bangalore; National Law University, Delhi; Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, Indian Institute of Technology - Khargpur), and AustLII.  For more information about LII of India, check the related brochure and user guide.

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.

CCH Intelliconnect Trial and Improvements

We have a trial of business and IP libraries on CCH Intelliconnect during the autumn quarter.These databases cover corporate and securities law, commodities and derivatives, stock exchanges, antitrust, advertising, banking, consumer finance, bankruptcy, copyright, trademarks, and computer law, in addition to the tax and commercial arbitration law we already subscribe to. CCH offers explanations of the law, prepared by CCH expert editors, together with the full text of primary law--statutes, legislative history, regulations, cases, agency decisions, and enforcement guidelines. 

Users at University of Chicago no longer need to register and log in to use CCH Intelliconnect. Searching, browsing, and support for popular web browsers have all been improved.

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.

The Constitutions of the World, At Your Fingertips! HeinOnline's World Constitutions Illustrated Database

 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Hirohito_Signing.JPG

World Constitutions Illustrated via HeinOnline!

Check out the new World Constitutions Illustrated library in the HeinOnline database.  It includes current and historical constitutions for all countries in their original languages and in English translation.  The database also includes amending laws, and related texts, scholarly articles, and commentary.  You can browse the database by country and by resource.  Most materials in the database are in English, but there are also a few in French, German, and Spanish. 

The initial launch contains around 800 classic books on constitutions, constitutional history and jurisprudence, such as Amos Peaslee's Constitutions of Nations, works by Max Farrand, Joseph Story, Edward Corwin, etc.  The earliest work dates back to 1583.  The database also includes the historical constitutional hierarchy for the UK, Brazil, Colombia, and France.  More will be added in future updates.

World Constitutions Illustrated also includes the full texts of periodicals such as Constitutional Commentary, the East European Constitutional Review, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Department of State's annual human rights reports from 1976 to present, the British & Foreign State Papers (1812-19680, Library of Congress' country studies, the CIA World Fact Book from 1981 to present, Modern Legal Systems Cyclopedia, John Trone's "Print Sources for Historical Constitutions" article, and links to external websites such as the Comparative Constitutions Project and the ConstitutionMaking.org Resources for Constitutional Design page.

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]

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/ 

i.Lex (American international law cases database)

 

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) has created a database of important, landmark American international law cases called i.Lex:  The Legal Research System for International Law in U.S. Courts: 

http://ilex.asil.org/

You can search i.Lex by topic, jurisdiction, treaty, statute, keyword, and i.Lex tag cloud.

ASIL describes i.Lex as an "online database of select U.S. court cases and related materials...[for identifying and understanding] how international law is interpreted and applied by U.S. courts at both the federal and state level." 

i.Lex includes summaries of holdings of international law cases.  It contains cases covering "human rights, refugee and international law, diplomatic and consular relations, transportation and communication, trade and transactions."  i.Lex is supplemented by:

• Texts of international treaties.
• Domestic statutes.
• Implementing legislation.
• Decisions by international courts and tribunals.
• International law commentary and other explanatory materials.

i.Lex promises to be an indispensable international legal research tool.  Check it out!

U.S. Code Available in PDF on HeinOnline

This is the week for exciting news about the United States Code.  HeinOnline has digitized the U.S.C. going back to the 1925-1926 edition and made it available in a browsable and searchable form with individual documents in PDF format. Titles 1-25 of the 2006 edition are now available.  Go here for the main page of the United States Code or here to retrieve a law by U.S.C. citation.