j u s t c r i m

24 Hours of Hardcore Punk

24 Hours of Hardcore Punk

1790-1930 U.S. Census Records Available Free | Internet Archive Blogs

With the U.S. Census Bureau beginning to release statistics from the 2010 census. It seems a good time to mention that Internet Archive has a complete set of the available U.S. Census back to the first one in 1790:

From the press release of the completion of the most recent census: _________________________________________________

San Francisco, CA –Internet Archive has announced that a publicly accessible digital copy  of the complete 1930 United States Census – the largest, most detailed census released to date – is available free of charge at www.archive.org/details/1930_census. Previously, 1930 Census records were accessible only through microfilm, or subscription services in which select portions of data are provided for a fee.

via blog.archive.org

"20% of peer-reviewed articles across all disciplines are now freely available"

carl malamud for president

Public Information for All: An Interview with Carl Malamud

(Interview by Debbie Rabina.  November 1, 2010.  Library Journal) "Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme Court) and state laws. Working most recently through his foundation, PublicResources.Org, Malamud is spearheading several initiatives to digitize or otherwise make government information available. Some of his most recent initiatives include digitizing government videos available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and National Archives (NARA) and making them available through the Internet Archive and YouTube, freeing fee-based court decisions available from PACER (Paper Access to Court Electronic Records), and bringing Oregon State information into the public domain. LJ spoke to Malamud recently about some of these initiatives...." (RESTOFINTERVIEW)

 

set yourselves free

Good Legal Research Starts with Free … "You can do it for business reasons and save your future law practice thousands of dollars. You can do it to show that you’re not a slave to the marketing machine of these companies. Or you can do it because you’ve already paid for this information once with you tax dollars.   At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why you do it.  The important thing is that you CAN do it.  Technological advancements and the opening of government information have made it feasible for academic institutions, non-profits and public service oriented businesses to get into the legal information game. Instead of monetary gain, they do it because they believe that everyone has a right to access primary legal information for free..."  (RESTOFPOST)

open access legal scholarship

Danner, Richard A., The Durham Statement on Open Access One Year Later: Preservation and Access to Legal Scholarship (June 15, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1628622

Abstract:
The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship calls for US law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in “stable, open, digital formats.” The Statement asks for two things: 1) open access publication of law school-published journals; and 2) an end to print publication of law journals. This paper was written as background for a July 2010 American Association of Law Libraries conference program on the preservation implications of the call to end print publication.

[The Durham Statement (Feb. 11, 2009) is available online @ Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society]

rock paper scissors - ssrn crim downloads

Heavily edited best of SSRN crim content uploads by downloads this past week (thx SSRN Top Downloads)

The Shadow of State Secrets
Laura Donohue,
Georgetown University Law Center,
Date posted to database: March 8, 2010 [2nd last week]

Disentangling Child Pornography from Child Sex Abuse
Carissa Byrne Hessick,
Arizona State, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law,
Date posted to database: March 28, 2010 [3rd last week]

Vigilante Justice: Prosecutor Misconduct in Capital Cases
Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier, Stephen R. Greenwald, Harold Reynolds, Jonathan Sussman,
CUNY School of Law, Fordham University - School of Law, Private Practice, New York County Defender Services,
Date posted to database: April 5, 2010 [6th last week]

Is the Prohibition of Homicide Universal? Evidence from Comparative Criminal Law
John Mikhail,
Georgetown University - Law Center,
Date posted to database: March 23, 2010 [7th last week]

Recognizing Constitutional Rights at Sentencing
F. Andrew Hessick, Carissa Byrne Hessick,
Arizona State University - Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law,
Date posted to database: March 3, 2010 [9th last week]

Making the Punishment Fit the (Computer) Crime: Rebooting Notions of Possession for the Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography Offenses
Jelani Jefferson Exum,
University of Kansas School of Law,
Date posted to database: March 12, 2010 [new to top ten]

OpenJurist

The OpenJurist FREE and OPEN portal to legal information is easily among the top five most interesting and promising legal information portals available online.  Their mantra says it all:  "[M]aking the laws of the land accessible to the people of the land" and the mission statement is totally in keeping with that mantra ...

"OpenJurist's mission is to provide access to published court opinions and the United States Code without charge. Our collection includes approximately 647,000 opinions from the United States Supreme Court United States Reports, and from the lower federal courts, particularly the United States Courts of Appeals, as published in the Federal Reporter series"

First Series

Second Series

Third Series

So when you say to yourself ... "I want that Mattel v. MCA Records decision ... You know the one  where Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski says "The parties are advised to chill"?  ... Think OpenJurist -- Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc.  296 F.3d 894, 908 (C.A.9 (Cal.),2002).  OpenJurist is @ http://openjurist.org/

"eliminating counties' role"

Gershowitz, A. M. (2010). Statewide Capital Punishment: The Case for Eliminating Counties' Role in the DeathPenalty. Vanderbilt Law Review, 63(2), 307+.

"In almost every state that authorizes capital punishment, local county prosecutors are responsible for handling capital trials and for deciding when to seek the death penalty. This approach has proven to be arbitrary and inefficient. Because death penalty cases are extremely expensive and complicated, counties with large budgets and experienced prosecutors are able to seek the death penalty often. By contrast, smaller counties with limited budgets frequently lack the funds and institutional knowledge to seek the death penalty in even the most truly heinous cases. The result is geographic arbitrariness within a state. The difference between life and death may depend on the side of the county line where the offense was committed..."

government sunshine

Government Online.  The internet gives citizens new paths to government services and information
Aaron Smith, Research Specialist
April 27, 2010

"Government agencies have begun to open up their data to the public, and a surprisingly large number of citizens are showing interest. Some 40% of adult internet users have gone online for raw data about government spending and activities..."

"combover culture" | ssrn

Davies, Ross E., Law Review Circulation 2009: The Combover (January 15, 2010). Green Bag Almanac and Reader 2010, pp. 419-426. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1537401

"For our second annual study of the law review business, we added circulation data for four flagship law reviews (UCLA, Texas, USC, and Washington University) and two specialty journals (NYU’s Tax Law Review and Duke’s Law and Contemporary Problems). We also corrected a few errors in the tables in our first study and filled-in a few blanks. And, finally, we noticed something that might be worth thinking about: the possibility that the law school combover culture has infected law reviews."  [emphasis added]

"europe's roe v. wode" | ssrn

Calt, Shannon K., A., B. & C. v. Ireland: 'Europe's Roe v. Wade'? (January 22, 2010). Lewis & Clark Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1540344

Lewis & Clark Law Review, Forthcoming.  Abstract:  In Ireland, abortion is illegal. In 2005, three Irish women who had previously traveled to England for abortions brought suit in the European Court of Human Rights asserting that restrictive and unclear Irish laws violate several provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case was heard before the Grand Chamber of the Court on 12/09/2009 and a decision is forthcoming some time in 2010.

The European Court of Human Rights has never determined whether the Convention protects a right to life of the unborn or conversely any right to an abortion.The case at hand squarely presents an opportunity for the Court to take a position.

This comment focuses on Irish and European Court of Human Rights abortion law and the impending decision in A., B. & C. v. Ireland. I conclude that - based upon the Court's own jurisprudence - the European Court of Human Rights is very likely to declare that Ireland's nearly absolute abortion ban and the resultant effects of Irish law did and continue to violate rights the Court has already deemed protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court will likely embrace one of two possible holdings. First, the Court could find that Ireland's abortion ban causes undesirable secondary effects such as inadequate post-abortion care, that these effects implicate rights under the Convention, and that Ireland has an unfulfilled positive obligation to mitigate these effects. Alternatively, I suggest that the Court may hold that Ireland's abortion ban itself violates the personal and family rights of applicants A., B. and C. and women like them. Commentators have referred to this case as “Europe's Roe v. Wade,” and I believe this to be an accurate if oversimplified statement."

open access | LexOpus

LexOpus - from law working papers to published works -- "To assist authors and law journals with the submissions process. There is no fee for authors or journals. The system allows an author to submit a work to a number of author-selected law journals. An author may also, or instead, invite offers from any journal by choosing to indicate the work as open to offers. Works may be hidden from public view if the author wishes that. Please note that LexOpus only accepts English language works... Here is the current list of participating journals (i.e. journals that accept author submissions via LexOpus), and here is the list of non-participating journals. The list of journals that receive open to offers notifications is much longer than the participating journals list and can be found here... "

new wexis? believe it when u see it

Legal Sites Plan Revamps as Rivals Undercut Price [By ASHLEE VANCE. Published: January 24, 2010. New York Times, Technology]

"Westlaw and LexisNexis, the dominant services in the market for computerized legal research, will undergo sweeping changes in a bid to make it easier and faster for lawyers to find the documents they need.

Lawyers and researchers paying to go online to find court cases and other legal documents should find better-looking interfaces, more relevant search results and new tools for document-sharing and other collaboration.

The changes to the research services are a reaction by Westlaw and LexisNexis to lower-priced — sometimes free — rivals and arrive at a time when law firms are working to cut overhead. The two companies also want to cater to a younger generation of lawyers accustomed to slick Web services and the search interfaces presented by companies like Google..."

top five 5 papers by download | SSRN

"The top 5 papers downloaded from the SSRN eLibrary for the week ending January 22, 2010:

1. Conspiracy Theories
by Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) and Adrian Vermeule (Harvard University - Harvard Law School)

2. Constraining Dominant Shareholders’ Self-Dealing: The Legal Framework in France, Germany, and Italy
by Pierre-Henri Conac (University of Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance) and Luca Enriques (University of Bologna - Faculty of Law) and Martin Gelter (Fordham University School of Law)

3. In Vino Veritas: The Economics of Drinking
by Jan Heufer (TU Dortmund University)

4. A True Story About Civil Courts and Company Valuation
by Pablo Fernandez (University of Navarra - IESE Business School)

5. A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation
by Mebane T. Faber (Cambria Investment Management)

Slouching Toward Abolition: the American Capital Punishment Debate and the Economic Crisis

open access week ... a new look and feel @ the CDL's eScholarship site ... eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

And a link to this open access article

Simon, Jonathan S. (2009). Slouching Toward Abolition: the American Capital Punishment Debate and the Economic Crisis. UC Berkeley: Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gc6x8p1

google book settlement

Volokh Conspiracy's David Post on the google book settlement:

"I suspect that we're going to be hearing a lot more about the Google Books settlement over the next several months. There will be several hearings about the fairness of the settlement terms in the Fall; the Supreme Court will be hearing the case of Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, which raises many of the thorny jurisdictional issues that are embedded in the G.B. settlement; and a number of challenges to the settlement are already being prepared and will likely be filed over the next few months (see below).

It's a very complex set of issues, and I don't have a simple or straightforward position on it myself. To begin with, it is, technically, very complicated; to my eye, the best summaries/discussions of the details come from Fred von Lohmann over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and James Grimmelmann at NY Law School; well worth a visit if you're interested in learning more about what's going on... [MORE]

congressional research service | openup

Effort Is Renewed for Public Release of C.R.S. Reports - NYTimes.com

Source: www.nytimes.com

 "American taxpayers spend more than $100 million a year supporting the work of the Congressional Research Service, a little-known but highly regarded division of the Library of Congress.

But unlike the library itself, the research service is by law exclusively for the use of members of Congress. Only they and their staffs have access to the reports and memorandums it generates, and only they can decide to make its work public.

A nonprofit group, the Center for Democracy and Technology, is leading a fight to change that."

[See OPENCRS at http://opencrs.com/ for examples online]

open access @ mit

MIT Faculty to Make Articles Freely Available to Public, CAUT Bulletin, April 2009:

"Articles published in academic journals are one of the major ways faculty authors share their research results. Under the traditional private sector publishing model, authors transfer their copyright to publishers who in turn sell the work back to universities for a subscription fee. The amalgamation of private publishers into a few large corporations has facilitated rapid increases in these fees — increases that have far outpaced the rate of inflation.  [T]his model is highly profitable for publishers but conflicts with core academic values, including the commitment to the widest possible dissemination of knowledge.

“The high cost of journal subscriptions has meant that libraries have had to cut back on the number of subscriptions and limit purchases elsewhere in their collections,” said Morrison. “In response, librarians and faculty began to explore other means of scholarly publishing.”

Aided by new forms of digital information technology, an open access movement gained momentum with the creation of free online journals and institutional digital repositories making research openly available to anyone.

“Public tolerance for the traditional private sector model of publishing is waning,” she said. “The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and all the granting agencies in the UK are declaring top-down open access mandates. MIT’s policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the U.S. By seizing the initiative MIT faculty are making their own rules about the dissemination of their work, not having them imposed.” 

The policy also means articles by MIT faculty are likely to have a higher citation factor than the works of faculty at other institutions that are locked down by private publishers.  [MORE]