Category Archives: Government

U.S. District Court Opinions Coming for Free

Posted on by
Posted in Case Law, Content, Government, U.S. | Tagged , ,

The successor to the United States Government Printing Office GPO Access, the Federal Digital System, has announced a pilot project to bring Federal district court opinions to the free Web. The district courts are the trial courts in the U.S. Federal system and are frequently only available in print or in fee-based databases.  The initial pilot will include one district court, two bankruptcy courts (same level), and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals (self-indulgent note:  I used to play my bagpipes just outside the 39th story window of Judge Morris Arnold of the 8th in the Little Rock TCBY tower).

While some district courts publish a selection of opinions on their Web sites, there is no easy way to search across multiple courts and all opinions. If this project is successful, it will be a great resource for legal researchers to be able to access this information in aggregate, through a site as powerful as FDSys. They already make available the primary legislative and executive regulatory documents for the U.S. Federal government.

You can already search and browse the 4 courts on the FDSys Web site and feedback is encouraged.  The site says opinions go back to 2004, but the 8th Circuit lists back to 2001, and the Florida bankruptcy court starts in 2006.

Share

Related Posts:

Findlaw UK Debuts, Mostly Free Government Info

Posted on by
Reply
Posted in Business Information, Government, U.K., Westlaw | Tagged ,

I had a short post last week about some of the strange content discrepancies you can find on the regional sites powered by LexisNexis and Westlaw.  In the meantime, the Findlaw UK site has debuted so I decided to take a look and see how it was different from its US and Australian brethren.

I won’t pretend to have spent much time on it but all the content I did look at (particularly in the real estate (conveyancing) area) was either sourced to freely available government content or was unsourced.  At least with the other sites, you had identifiable content owners so you could get a sense of the reliability of the information.  Compare this Advice for First Time Buyers with its original at Direct.gov.uk.  The former is really just a cut and paste of text, while the latter, original, has additional cross-linking so that a reader who gets there might be able to click through to other Directgov content.  Even in the Ask a Question forums, you find that Findlaw staff are asking AND answering the questions.  I appreciate that new Web sites, particularly those developed primarily as marketing resources, need content, but this seems to take it a bit far.  When you click on contributor names, there is no information about what their qualifications are to answer the questions.  Legal researchers interested in UK legal issues would be better off going directly the Direct.gov.uk site, where there appears to be far more content and you are not one step removed from the publisher.

These sorts of sites can make Internet legal research much more difficult, since they are likely to be optimized to appear higher in search engines or else why would they be marketing sites?  But if their content is dated, or sourced from reliable sites and then not kept current with the original site, it means that you start to have unnecessary noise in legal research, particularly for non-lawyers researching on their own.  Legal research is enough of a bramble without adding confusing, duplicated and potentially dated content.

Share

Related Posts:

Mobile Access to Medical Info with Medline

Posted on by
2
Posted in Canada, Device, Government, iPhone, Medical, Mobile, U.S. | Tagged , ,

Mobile users have an increasing number of options for doing research, beyond whatever limited Web browsers they may have available.  The United States government has created a number of Web apps, using the term loosely to include both dedicated apps for the Apple iPhone as well as mobile Web sites.  This is a site to keep an eye on, since the resources and the apps that enable them are free.  In particular, the mobile Medline Plus site may be a quick way to get drug and health information on your mobile device.  Since it is a standard Web page, it can also be a faster way to browse and use Medline Plus since it is stripped down to the absolute basics.  Sites like Health Canada’s Drug Product Search could benefit from similar simplifying of their sites or providing mobile alternatives.

[via Twitter @emily_rushing ]

Share

Related Posts:

  • No Related Posts

New Free United Kingdom Primary Law Legal Research Tool

Posted on by
1
Posted in Case Law, Government, Legislation, U.K. | Tagged ,

The UK FreeLegalWeb.org is now in beta and is an interesting looking alternative to BAILII, the current go to source for free UK case law.  As their About page states, the problem is that the law just isn’t practically accessible.

FreeLegalWeb works like a library discovery tool.  It is not hosting the content.  It is aggregating links to the resources, so a single search will retrieve information about content from multiple sources but you will eventually link to the primary document on that source.  This means you still need to know something about the sources and what their scope is.

This resource has a lot of nice features in place already – a retrieved result has links to the full text and supplemental tools, like a citator to note up cases – and the development of subject classification through crowd sourcing will make the content aggregated that much richer.

The case law search on FreeLegalWeb relies on BAILII for case law and LawCite for its citator service.  This is a huge improvement, since you can now view both the BAILII text and run the link through LawCite, something which is not possible if you start your search directly on BAILII.

It will be interesting to watch this site develop and move from beta to a full online product.  It will be a huge time saver for legal researchers looking for UK primary legal information.

[thanks to the Legal Informatics blog ]

Share

Related Posts: