Entries in the Category "legal publishing and information"
Cornell's Regulation Room research site | November 19, 2009
The Legal Information Institute and Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative have launched the beta of Regulation Room, to provide:
...an online environment for people to learn about, discuss, and react to selected rules (regulations) proposed by federal agencies.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 19, 2009 02:19 PM
Even more on Google Scholar and cases... | November 18, 2009
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled this week about Google's inclusion of judicial decisions in Google Scholar. Here are some highlights of the discussion:
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 18, 2009 03:42 PM
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More sources on Google Scholar case law... | November 17, 2009
Update Weds. - Monica Bay at American Lawyer Media's Common Scold quotes Rick Klau with more detail about Google's sourcing, and has statements from Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters.
By way of updates to my own initial take on Google Scholar's inclusion of cases, here are other early sources about the product launch:
The Official Google Blog now has an announcement and description of the service.
Duke Law Library's The Goodson Blogson has a nice write-up, includes important notes about Google Scholar's links to materials available only through library-based subscriptions, and also points out the limitations of this model of searching when compared to the nuance possible (but not always achieved) with Lexis' or Westlaw's boolean Terms & Connectors searching. (They also link the Duke Law Library's useful research guide to Legal Research on the Web.)
The Supreme Court of Texas Blog has a nice illustrated walk-through.
The University of Nebraska's Richard Leiter has a self-described 'mini-review' on his The Life of Books.
Laura Bergus at Social Media Law Student provides a (social-media savvy) 1L's perspective on Google Scholar's case law searching. While her critique of Westlaw/Lexis usability is informative and illustrative, I hope she and her readers do understand the limitations of the Google/ranking approach to the high-recall-required search often required in thorough legal research.
Greg Lambert uses the Google Scholar launch as a springboard for discussing the broader potential for new competition in the legal research marketplace.
Jim Calloway notes the inclusion of Hein Online material in results.
Internet for Lawyers' cites Tim Stanley's and Carl Malamud's Twitter comments for likely database scope:
While there is no documentation on the Scholar site yet regarding coverage of the database, a number of other tweets form reliable sources (including Tim Stanley and Carl Malamud) indicate that it includes:* 1 US 1 (pre 1776)
* 1 F 2d 1 (1924 +)
* F Supp Cases
* US State Cases (1950+)
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 17, 2009 01:56 PM
Case Law in Google Scholar | November 17, 2009
Google Scholar has a new radio-button selection on its front page to search for "Legal opinions and journals." This development is at least a useful new free way to quickly obtain the (cut-and-past-able, html) text of known opinions with cited opinions conveniently hyperlinked -- it remains to be seen what, if any, deeper research value the tool will have.
Based on a few minutes of tinkering, the legal opinions that turn up in searches are full-text, hosted by Google, while journal article results tend to be hosted by third parties and/or have only a "citation" result turning up from the Google Scholar search. The 'Advanced Scholar Search' interface also allows the user to limit the search to opinions only from either federal courts or from individual states. The Google-hosted Scholar results do not seem to show up in regular web-search Google results.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 17, 2009 10:05 AM
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Revised Google Books Settlement filed | November 16, 2009
A revised version was filed late Friday night of the proposed settlement of the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers class-action copyright lawsuit against Google for its Book Search product -- and in particular for the book contents scanned by Google from the collections of major participating research libraries into the "Google Library Project." It is unclear whether the revisions to the settlement, originally proposed in October 2008, will satisfy the Department of Justice's anti-trust concerns or the concerns of the other objectors.
Library representatives have, of course, been among those most involved in monitoring the lawsuit, and the consequences to the electronic book marketplace likely to result from its settlement.
The official settlement administration website includes the text of the agreement and the forms for rights-holders to claim works covered by the settlement agreement.
The Public Index (thepublicindex.org)is a project of James Grimmelmann, of the NYU Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, that gathers a 'reading room' of lawsuit documents. The site also has a useful redline mark-up of the amended settlement that allows monitoring of the changes since the initial settlement proposed last year, and a 'news timeline' linking selected news stories about the Google project, the lawsuit, and the settlement - from December 2003 to the present. The site also has a collaboratively annotated version of the settlement document, although it has seen a rather low level of participation.
Law Librarian Blog links additional resources.
Library Journal has a write-up post-revision and notes that the DOJ concerns about Google's treatment of orphan works may be unresolved by the amendments.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 16, 2009 10:06 AM
More about West and legal information competition... | November 10, 2009
This isn't the forum for yet more extended discussion on this issue, but Tom Bruce has another valuable post on the Berring-video kerfuffle. (Teasingly addressing only one of three points that "need serious attention from the library profession," with the other two left unspecified.) In the post, Prof. Bruce describes West as operating in a very distorted market. I think the most critical observation in this regard may be that the combination of bulk availability of 'raw materials' and the baseline service levels of free tools like LII's may ultimately create a much more fertile environment for smaller, entrepreneurial, commercial services than has previously existed -- and that this may play a role in the sensitivity Bruce sees West displaying in regards to free/bulk legal information. It is certainly true that West (to a greater degree than large commercial competitors Lexis and Bloomberg) has occupied a privileged position in terms of official legal publication, citation systems, and the certification of authenticity.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 10, 2009 10:00 AM
Podcast talk about Law.gov | November 05, 2009
Law librarian Richard Leiter will devote this week's show on The Law Librarian, his blogtalkradio series, to a discussion with Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org about Law.gov, digital preservation, and open access issues.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 5, 2009 12:59 PM
Librarians as key to open-access law reviews... | November 05, 2009
Tom Boone, of Loyola L.A., has a useful post on his personal blog regarding the challenges of implementing the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, in which a group of directors of major law libraries called on law schools to move to publishing law journals solely in an online, open-access, format. The Durham Statement was drafted by a group of library directors meeting in November of 2008 at Duke Law School. Additional directors, law school CIOs, and other librarians subsequently became signatories to the statement, including our own Kathy Carrick.
Tom's post usefully reminds us, though, that promoting meaningful and robust subject access to journal content requires more than merely asking our journals to kindly publish online.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 5, 2009 12:20 PM
Tempest in a legal-information teapot? | November 04, 2009
The posting on a Thomson Reuters blog of videotaped comments by Bob Berring, U.C. Berkeley's long-time law librarian, distinguished professor, and former interim dean, have created something of a stir among followers of the legal-information marketplace. In the comments featured on LegalCurrent, a blog by West's parent company Thomson Reuters, Berring expresses measured but profound skepticism of the viability of both directly government-hosted free legal information and of free legal-information efforts based on "volunteer" efforts (i.e. not based on a commercial vendor's model). There has been a fair amount of online commentary in response to this video, and I've tried to articulate a few of my thoughts about the role of the emerging free sources, below.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 4, 2009 04:00 PM
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29th Annual Charleston Conference | November 04, 2009
Today is the first day of the annual Charleston Conference, a gathering of librarians and publishers. Items of interest in the program this year include programs and presentations related to the challenges of the current economic climate, the (re)emergence of eBooks as a hot topic in the field, and the re-negotiation of the Google Book Settlement (about which there should be substantial news extremely soon).
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 4, 2009 10:17 AM
California Courts challenged by copyright and "public" access in case filings | November 03, 2009
Erika Wayne and Paul Lomio at Stanford's Legal Research Plus blog have been following a dispute regarding the California Supreme Court's practice of providing appellate briefs to Lexis and Westlaw, without the permission of the litigants or their counsel. Their batch of recent posts provides updates, and also links to reportage by the California legal press.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 3, 2009 04:30 PM
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