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
(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)
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)
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]
Heavily edited best of SSRN crim content uploads by downloads this past week (thx SSRN Top Downloads)
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]
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]
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"
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/
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 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..."
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]
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... "
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)
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
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]
"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]
MIT Faculty to Make Articles Freely Available to Public, CAUT Bulletin, April 2009: