FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Free Access to Legal Documents

Two Million pages of Legal Documents have been made available for free.

Creative Commons announced tonight that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.

Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information.

Read more about it here.

Try it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

PreCYdent

PreCYdent is a new legal research search engine.  Try it out here. 
Read an in depth interview with PreCYdent's Tom Smith on Law Librarian Blog here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority

An interesting article, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jensen, is in the June 15th, 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The article discusses the impact of the Web 3.0 standard on academic publishing.

It's available here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Legal Digital Audio Content

AudioCaseFiles describes itself as the leader in AudioCaseFiles.  From their website:

AudioCaseFiles provides law school students with digital audio recordings of the legal opinions they read to learn the law (patent pending). The company was founded on the principle that auditory delivery will enhance and supplement the law school learning process. We currently have hundreds of popular cases and are in the process of continuing to record the most frequently requested cases. Please check the site frequently.

The Company distinguishes itself from other study guides which detract from the law school learning process by spoon feeding students black letter law by offering content that challenges students to thoughtfully engage in the same analysis that reading requires. However, the key advantage that ACF affords is portability, as students can listen to the cases they are required to read for class while in the car, at the gym, or at home.

The Company also believes that it can save students money by allowing them to selectively download the cases they want and need for only .99 cents. Students are no longer deluged with the useless, irrelevant, and sometimes harmful information coming from study guides and can focus on learning and knowing the important cases emphasized by their professors.

Try it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

What makes a great reference librarian?

What makes a reference librarian great?  Two things are crucial:  the will, which is almost an obsession, to find the right answer, and a love of helping others find the materials they need.  For insight into the minds of five superb reference librarians, listen to a discussion with Mary McCormick, Margaret Clark, Marin Dell, Pat Bingham-Harper and Jon Lutz of the Florida State University Law Library.  The discussion was prepared for students of Professor Lorri Mon, Florida State University, College of Information in fall 2006.

Posted by Faye Jones  

Search Engine for Legal Research Guides

Cornell Law Library has a new search engine which can locate online legal research guides by subject.  Legal Research Engine searches for guides in approximately 20 different authoritative websites, many of them law library sites.  The guides can be a great way to get started on a research project or to find resources for a student paper.

Posted by Anne Bardolph

Citing to Wikipedia

I was recently asked whether law students should cite to Wikipedia in academic papers. The answer is No. Wikipedia itself says: “Because Wikipedia is an on-going work to which in principle anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in some very important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism.”  In other words, Wikipedia has hot spots and backwaters – and while information in a hot spot is likely to be more correct than that from a backwater, how can one tell?

Your law librarians use Wikipedia as a jumping off point and that’s how you should use it, too. Wikipedia will frequently give you useful terms and concepts, which you can then take elsewhere in your search for reliable information. Having said that, you should be aware that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Bourgeois v. Peters, 387 F.3d 1303 (11th Cir. 2004), cited to Wikipedia for the point that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level “has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times." Perhaps the Court had no clerk able to find this information at the DHS website. In 2006, courts have cited to Wikipedia 46 times so far, according to a search of the ALLCASES database in Westlaw, rather than take the time to source the information cited.

If, in spite of this blog entry, you decide you really do want to cite to an article in Wikipedia, look here for citation formats and tips.

Posted by Mary McCormick

Early Supreme Court Decision Dates

Sometimes it's hard to determine the exact date of early Supreme Court decisions, because the date of the decision doesn't appear below the case name in the first 107 volumes of the U.S. Reports.  But now there is a list online titled: Dates of Supreme Court Decisions and Arguments, United States Reports Volumes 2-107 (1791 - 1882).  The list was prepared by Anne Ashmore.

See it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Digging Into the Roots of Research Ethics

There have been examples of researchers violating ethical standards to enhance their own careers.  However Kelly P. Bannister, an ethnobotanist at the University of Victoria went our of her way to protect the indigenous group she researched on their use of plants for food and medicine. 

she withheld extracts of the plants from her graduate supervisor, who wanted to sell them to a pharmaceutical company. Then, when she finished her dissertation, she had it sealed for five years. She didn't want companies to profit from her published work, perhaps at the expense — or at least at the displeasure — of the Indian groups that had collaborated with her.

Ms. Bannister, 41, an adjunct professor of environmental studies, directs a research-and-policy center dedicated to environmental projects at Victoria. She is in demand for publishing on the ethics of research involving aboriginal peoples, and she sits on several university, national, and international committees working to reform research policies.

Her studies focus on making academic research, writ large, more equitable to the indigenous groups it often studies. She concentrates on intellectual property — the stories, songs, and traditions of aboriginal peoples, which have in the past often been exploited or published without the agreement of those who shared them with the researchers.

Read the entire article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 1, 2006 issue):  Digging into the Roots of Research Ethics: How a Canadian ethnobotanist became a champion of research that advances the lot of indigenous peoples

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

How Many Law Blogs?

How many law blogs are there?  According to the blogs Inter alia well over 1500 and Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites maybe around 2000. 

Posted by Jon Lutz