On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed a comprehensive health care reform bill into law: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). A number of states and organizations challenged the law in federal court.  Those lawsuits made their way through the courts, leading up to the current Supreme Court review of the law. Perhaps signaling the importance of the health care law to this Court, the Supreme Court has set aside an unprecedented three days, March 26-28, to hear arguments on both sides on the issues.

Monday, March 26, 2012

• 11-398    DEPT. OF H&HS, ET AL. v.FLORIDA, ET AL.

This week the court hears some interesting arguments, one including a woman that used her deceased husbands frozen sperm to conceive and is now having trouble collecting his Social Security benefits for their children. Two cases on whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence teenagers to life without parole even if they aren’t the triggermen. Plus are there really any “harmless-errors” in court if it leads to your conviction?

Monday, March 19, 2012

Most of you will have seen this tweeted by now, but our LIIBULLETIN crew has put together a mini-site on the healthcare cases being argued at the Supreme Court in two weeks.  It’s at http://blog.law.cornell.edu/healthcarecases .   We think it’s informative, and we hope you will too.

We’re looking for a software developer who can help us build out our collections into the world of Linked Data.  We intend to offer both user-facing services that leverage Semantic Web techniques, and back-end services that will allow others to power their applications with LII technology.  We would like you to be familiar with a variety of text-processing techniques including XML and XML tools such as xQuery and the eXist database server, RDF, SPARQL, and native RDF stores such as AllegroGraph and Jena, standards like SKOS. Drupal and Ajax skills are of course useful, as is anything to do with scripting languages (these days we’re using Ruby for most factory work and PHP/Drupal on the server side).

Most of all we’re looking for a developer who’s intellectually curious, ready to learn new stuff, and eager and able to work with legal information as part of a top-flight team.

The formal job description is here: http://liicr.nl/A2n6v3 .