j u s t c r i m

Our Documents | 100 Milestone Documents of American History

To help us think, talk and teach about the rights and responsibilities of citizens in our democracy, we invite you to explore 100 milestone documents of American history. These documents reflect our diversity and our unity, our past and our future, and mostly our commitment as a nation to continue to strive to "form a more perfect union."

Marbury

  

 

via www.ourdocuments.gov

How mobile devices are changing community information environments | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Local news is going mobile. Nearly half of all American adults (47%) report that they get at least some local news and information on their cellphone or tablet computer.

The information they seek out on mobile platforms is practical and real time: 42% of mobile device owners report getting weather updates and 37% get material about restaurants or other local businesses on their phones or tablets. Fewer get news about local traffic and transportation, general news alerts or other local topics.

One of the newest forms of on-the-go local news consumption, mobile applications, are just beginning to take hold among mobile device owners. Just 13% of all mobile device owners report having an app that helps them get local information or news, which represents 11% of the total American adult population. Thus, while almost half of adults get local news on mobile devices, just 1 in 10 use apps to do so. Call it the “app gap.”

via www.pewinternet.org

How the atom bomb helped give birth to the Internet

Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future has just been released and is already drawing rave reviews. Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This first installment is adapted from Chapter 1, "A Concept Born in the Shadow of the Nuke," and it looks at the role that the prospect of nuclear war played in the technical and policy decisions that gave rise to the Internet.

The 1950s were a time of high tension. The US and Soviet Union prepared themselves for a nuclear war in which casualties would be counted not in millions but in the hundreds of millions. As the decade began, President Truman's strategic advisors recommended that the US embark on a massive rearmament to face off the Communist threat. The logic was simple:

The report, NSC-68, also proposed that the US consider pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Soviet targets should a Soviet attack appear imminent. The commander of US Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay, was apparently an eager supporter of a US first strike. Eisenhower's election in 1952 did little to take the heat out of Cold War rhetoric. He threatened the USSR with "massive retaliation" against any attack, irrespective of whether conventional or nuclear forces had been deployed against the US. From 1961, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, adopted a strategy of "flexible response" that dropped the massive retaliation rhetoric and made a point of avoiding the targeting of Soviet cities. Even so, technological change kept tensions high. By the mid 1960s, the Air Force had upgraded its nuclear missiles to use solid-state propellants that reduced their launch time from eight hours to a matter of minutes. The new Minuteman and Polaris missiles were at hair-trigger alert. A nuclear conflagration could begin, literally, in the blink of an eye.

via arstechnica.com

[ ht free government information ]

united states code to lose symmetry- title 51 looms

Like area 51 only different:   TO ENACT CERTAIN LAWS RELATING TO NATIONAL AND COMMERCIAL SPACE PROGRAMS AS TITLE 51, UNITED STATES CODE, ‘‘NATIONAL AND COMMERCIAL SPACE PROGRAMS’’

 New Title 51 United States Code, 'National and Commercial Space Programs' - "The Committee on the Judiciary, to whom was referred the bill (H.R. 3237) to enact certain laws relating to national and commercial space programs as title 51, United States Code, `National and Commercial Space Programs', having considered the same, report favorably thereon and recommend that the bill do pass. H.R. 3237 would enact certain laws relating to national and commercial space programs as title 51, United States Code, `National and Commercial Space Programs'. H.R. 3237 revises and restates certain laws relating to national and commercial space programs and re-enacts those laws as title 51, United States Code. The bill was prepared by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, as part of its responsibility under 2 U.S.C. 285b to submit to the Committee on the Judiciary proposed bills to enact titles of the United States Code into positive law. This bill has undergone extensive review in two previous Congresses. Predecessor bills to H.R. 3237 were introduced in the 109th and 110th Congresses -- H.R. 3039 in the 109th, and H.R. 4780 in the 110th. This bill is substantially identical to H.R. 4780, with a few revisions to respond to comments received."

 [ beSpacific New Title 51 United States Code, 'National and Commercial Space Programs' ]

 

 

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

SCOCAL | Stanford Law School Robert Crown Law Library

SCOCAL is a joint project between Justia and Stanford Law School Library. With annotations written by the Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law School, SCOCAL is where readers can locate free opinions from 1934 to the present, annotations, briefs, documents and news relating to California Supreme Court opinions.

via scocal.stanford.edu

can we create a national digital library?

" ... Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public.  Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex...."  Robert Darnton, " Can We Create a National Digital Library?"  The New York Review of Books (Oct. 28, 2010).  

SCOTUS Resources

U.S. Supreme Court - Helpful Online Resources posted Oct 05, 2010 by Cicely Wilson (Justia's Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog shares core open access SCOTUS resources)

research @ ConSource project

ConSource.org Beta Site:  "The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) was conceived with the purpose of "democratizing" access to source materials of the Constitution—letters, journals, newspaper articles, speeches, and other first-hand records—so that anyone can research and learn from the history that inspired its creation, ratification, and amendment... 

Consource provides access to a "... free online library of more than 19,000 source documents related to the Constitution—letters, journals, newspaper articles, speeches, and other first-hand records from throughout U.S. history. Current collections include James Madison's handwritten notes, the papers of George Washington, records of state ratification debates, and many others. ConSource will eventually contain texts and images of constitutional sources from antiquity to the passage of the 27th Amendment in 1992. Using this library, anyone can now freely research and learn from the detailed history that inspired the Constitution's creation, ratification, and amendment." (via RESOURCESHELF)

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)

@ the essay depot - just 99 cents a day

@ the EssayDepot pay just 99 cents a day -- that's right -- you pay just 99 cents a day!  Need a paper on "Both sides of capital punishment"? And need it, like, tomorrow?  The EssayDepot's got you covered -- Just order your custom written capital punishment essay now from the comfort of your university library wifi."

best free legal research tools online ... but am i missing your fav?

PORTALS

• American Law Sources On-line
• CrimLaw LibGuide
• FindLaw
• HG.org
• JD Supra
• Jurist
• Justia
• Law Library of Congress
• LexisOne
• LII / Legal Information Institute
• Open Jurist
• Oyez Project
• Public Library of Law
• Public.Resource.Org
• vLex
• WashLaw

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/

google scholar | finding the law that governs us

Google Blog: Finding the laws that governs us (Anurag Acharya, Google, 11/17/2009):  "[W]e're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar." 

Searching Google Scholar for legal content:   you can find opinions by searching for cases like In Re Guardianship of Schiavo, 780 So. 2d 176, 177 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2001), aff'd without opinion, 789 So. 2d 348 (Fla. 2001) or by searching for topics like bioethics. 

Be sure to click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button when you use Google Scholar.  Now try  the search query "bioethics organ transplant." Your search result includes links to cases like  Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health, 497 US 261, 110 S. Ct. 2841, 111 L. Ed. 2d 224 (1990) as well as articles published in scholarly law journals and reviews. Cruzan, 497 US 261 (1990) appears within the top five results.

To understand how an opinion like Cruzan has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the "How Cited" link next to the case title.  Take a look at the "How Cited" pages for both the Cruzan and Schiavo decisions. 

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..."

texting | research | libraries

Text Generation [By Steve Kolowich, January 8, 2010. INSIDE HIGHER ED] - "Since some professors began suggesting that Twitter could be used not just as a recreational lark but as a potentially revolutionary teaching tool, purists and futurists have debated whether academe should swim against the cultural current toward limited, text-based communication, or adapt to it.

Academic libraries increasingly seem to be choosing the latter option. As students raised on text-messaging begin to populate the halls of academe, a number of libraries have begun making their reference librarians reachable not just via e-mail and live chat, but text messages sent from students' mobile devices.

Mosio, a mobile software company based in San Francisco, claims to be the largest provider to libraries trying to meet students on their own turf with its straightforwardly named Text a Librarian program, which is says is used by 250 libraries nationwide, including many colleges libraries. Mosio is hardly alone in the market; LibraryH3lp, Upside Wireless, and the Australian company Altarama Information Systems think their client bases will continue to expand as texting becomes even more pervasive and sophisticated. These services are generally cheap, running at a few hundred dollars per year.

College libraries have offered channels for text-based queries for some time through their Web sites or instant-messenger clients. But with more students using mobile devices rather than personal computers as their gateway to the world of networked communications, some libraries have been compelled to go along.

“Given the typical age of our student population, and everybody walking in the door with a cell phone, it seemed like something we should look into,” says Elizabeth Bagley, library director at Agnes Scott College, in Georgia. Noticing that the number of questions sent to the library’s instant-messaging service had increased by 300 percent between 2006 and 2009, Bagley polled 104 students, faculty, and staff in November asking whether they’d favor the option of submitting such queries via text message; 72 percent said they would, and the library sprung for the Mosio service.

Pamela Sessoms, electronic reference services librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Davis Library, also noticed the shift in students’ communication habits, and recently persuaded her institution to spring for a text-messaging integration service from LibraryH3lp, a company owned by her husband that has been deployed at about 60 libraries.

These companies and others offer what they call a “gateway” service, which reroutes texts from students to the library’s instant-message queue or to designated e-mail inboxes. When a librarian responds, the message gets sent to the student’s mobile device. This concept is not terribly new, Sessoms says; for years students have been able to send text messages to their librarians’ instant-messenger accounts. But those solutions required students to start each message with a keyword, which was easily omitted or misspelled, she says. “Gateway” text integrations such as LibraryH3lp have emerged more recently.

Some college libraries have skipped the middleman and simply bought a cell phone dedicated to text queries from students. But that strategy also comes with potential pitfalls. The staff at New York University’s Bobst Library used to monitor a dedicated cell phone, but switched to LibraryH3lp’s gateway service when it became clear that handling queries through a single portal made more sense. “Logistically, it is much easier to coordinate,” says Alexa Pearce, a reference associate at Bobst. A recent article in the journal Library Hi Tech News noted also that some librarians might prefer to type their responses on a computer keyboard, and that, unlike a Web interface, a mobile device can be lost or stolen.

No matter the method, these various experiments suggest that texting, like Twitter, is creeping into academic communication, a prospect some in academe’s old guard might find troubling. How might the quality of students’ research — and research skills — be affected if glib text exchanges supplanted sit-down discussions with research librarians? Between the digitization of collections and the movement toward remote communications with library staff, could it be that students will stop visiting libraries altogether?

Yes, says Joe Murphy, general science librarian and instruction coordinator at Yale University, but this doesn't necessarily portend an apocalypse for learning. The notion that texting implies a less rich exchange between a student and a librarian is false, Murphy says. As people communicate via text more regularly, they learn to do so with more efficiency, he says.

In other words, the way we communicate is not deteriorating so much as it is changing, and academe would do well to change with it. “Any time something changes,” Murphy says, “…we’re gaining and losing with that change. Hopefully what we’re gaining — the ability to stay relevant — is worth what we’re losing. And hopefully what we’re losing is actually just being transformed and not erased.”

And with professors worrying about their students’ research habits in the age of the simple Web searches, college libraries should not be picky about how they are willing to communicate with students, says Sessoms. “I’m just so thrilled that students are using the libraries and the librarians and their expertise,” she says, “instead of just using Google or something like that.”

— Steve Kolowich