To start a business it takes 19 separate procedures in Belarus
in the United States — 6
in Australia — 2
To enforce a contract it takes 62 separate procedures in Burundi
in the United States — 32
in Austria — 26
Free legal information for anybody.
Of course, it is term-paper season, but it seems as though the biggest reason people look at the LII’s Supreme Court collection is an interest in the Justices themselves. Those coming to the site by way of a search on “supreme court justices” or something similar accounted for around 15,000 of the 367,540 visits to the collection last month. They spend roughly twice the average amount of time on the site, too. Unsurprisingly, the next-largest cluster of searches we can identify involves Roe v. Wade.
As far as individual Justices go, Sandra Day O’Connor is the most-searched-for, with Clarence Thomas a distant second. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in third place. Interestingly, searchers typically type out Justice O’Connor’s name in full (“Sandra Day O’Connor”), but favor a terse, lower-case approach to Scalia (“scalia”). Only one of the 367,540 searched for “nino”.
Google Analytics gives us an awful lot of information about the use of our site (we sometimes wish we were a little better at figuring out what the data actually means, but we’re learning). Here are the top ten search terms that lead people to our WEX legal encyclopedia:
We hesitate to draw any larger conclusions from this…but it’s certainly true that emancipation laws (which specify the age at which children may declare themselves independent of their parents) figure in a lot of the e-mail that we get.
Between 1996 and 1998
15,286 new federal regulations went into effect.
222 of these had an annual effect on the economy of
$100 million — each.
The LII has access to them all.
A surprising number of cases in the LII’s Supreme Court collection are asked for by name — that is, as the end-point of a search for the names of the parties. The top five brand-name cases are:
This ordering probably isn’t strictly accurate — people find an astonishing number of ways to search for a particular case, and there are nearly as many searches for “Gore vs. Bush” as there are for “Bush v. Gore”. No surprises in the rankings, really, though we might have expected Brown v. Board to place higher (it comes in sixth), and Roper v. Simmons ranks higher than we might have predicted — though the juvenile death penalty is probably a fairly compelling topic for school reports.
We now offer notification of changes to the US Code via RSS. It’s a beta service, and we’re eager for your reaction to it. You can access the service by clicking the standard RSS icons next to the listing-by-Title on our main US Code page (we plan to put icons on every US Code page, but haven’t done so yet).
A couple of notes:
First, the RSS feed is tied to the Classification Tables published by the Law Revision Counsel’s Office at the House of Representatives. This means that you’ll be notified of changes as soon as their ultimate location in the Code is known, which is usually significantly after the law is passed by Congress. For up-to-the-minute updating, you’ll still need Thomas. A really good, if dated, guide to US Code updating is here.
Second, the service is offered on a Title-by-Title basis because (based on observation) we don’t think the volume in any Title (even 26) is likely to become overwhelming. We could be wrong about that — and we might also be able to format the information in the feeds in a way that makes it easier for you to find exactly what you want.
That’s the great thing about an experimental service — we can change it, and we’re eager for your suggestions. Let us know.
Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing.
John Arbuthnot: The History of John Bull, ed. Alan Bower & Robert Erickson, chapter 6, p. 10 (1976) (first published in 1712).
On May 1, LII Director Tom Bruce and open-access advocate Carl Malamud of public.resource.org were featured on the popular practitioner’s podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. Also included in the podcast, but recorded separately, was Andy Martens, Senior Vice President of New Product Development for Thomson West. No doubt the discussion was less lively than it might have been had all three been present simultaneously, but it’s still a good run through the issues. Tom also said that “it was good fun trying to talk faster than Carl”. We’re grateful to L2L hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams (pictured) for the opportunity to appear on the show.
You can listen to the podcast here (also available in WMA format)
An interesting topic about which little has been said: information-seeking behavior by lawyers. We all know it’s different, both in its drive for a comprehensiveness (as opposed to simple utility), and in the ways in which it serves advocacy. But there hasn’t been very much research on how, exactly, that works — or on how lawyer information-seeking practices differ from those of information seekers in other fields (actually, we might back away from that claim a little — this area is ripe for a literature review that we have not had time to do).
Much of the little that is out there describes a transition from printed books to online research, something that now looks a bit dated. But there are a exceptions to that, good starting points all:
An advisory opinion is a sort of judicial “dry run” — the court states a non-binding opinion on a legal question submitted by a legislature or government official without the filing of a case. See, e.g., the advisory opinion of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on civil unions.
