The Supreme Court hears 5 cases this week; topics range from class-action suits to FOIA. As usual, our talented crew of LII Supreme Court Bulletin editors has analyzed the cases — just click on the casenames for a careful exploration of what they’re about:

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

• 09-1205    SMITH, KEITH, ET AL. v. BAYER CORP.
• 09-1298    GENERAL DYNAMICS CORP. v. UNITED STATES
• 09-1302    BOEING COMPANY v. UNITED STATES
• 10-179    STERN, HOWARD K. v. MARSHALL, ELAINE T.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

• 09-1273    ASTRA USA, INC., ET AL. v. SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA
• 09-1279    FCC, ET AL. v. AT&T INC., ET AL.

This week, the Court hears cases on topics ranging from search and seizure to a water-rights dispute between three states.  Click on the case names for our analyses of the issues in each case.

Monday, January 10, 2011

• 09-1156    MATRIXX INITIATIVES, ET AL. v. SIRACUSANO, JAMES, ET AL.
• 137, ORIG.    MONTANA v. WYOMING, ET AL.

 Tuesday, January 11, 2011

• 09-1343    J. McINTYRE MACHINERY, LTD. v. NICASTRO, ROBERT, ET UX.
• 10-76    GOODYEAR LUXEMBOURG TIRES v. BROWN, EDGAR D., ET AL.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

• 09-11311    SYKES, MARCUS v. UNITED STATES
• 09-1272    KENTUCKY v. KING, HOLLIS D.

This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments in a wide variety of cases: veteran’s affairs,  Federal sentencing guidelines, employment discrimination, market timing, and consumer credit.  LII Supreme Court Bulletin analyses of the cases can be found by clicking on the  casename.

Monday, December 6, 2010

• 09-1036    HENDERSON, DAVID L. v. SHINSEKI, SEC. OF VA
• 09-6822    PEPPER, JASON v. UNITED STATES

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

• 09-291    THOMPSON, ERIC L. v. NORTH AMERICAN STAINLESS, LP
• 09-525    JANUS CAPITAL GROUP, ET AL. v. FIRST DERIVATIVE TRADERS

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

• 09-115    CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, ET AL. v. CRISS CANDELARIA, ET AL.
• 09-329    CHASE BANK USA, N.A. v. McCOY, JAMES A.

This week, SCOTUS hears cases on first sale doctrine, medical residents, and railroads among others.  You can read the LII Supreme Court Bulletin analyses of each by clicking on the links:

Monday, November 8, 2010

• 08-1423    COSTCO WHOLESALE CORPORATION v. OMEGA, S.A.
• 09-837    MAYO FOUNDATION, ET AL. v. UNITED STATES

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

• 09-1088    CULLEN, ACTING WARDEN v. PINHOLSTER, SCOTT L.
• 09-893    AT&T MOBILITY LLC v. CONCEPCION, VINCENT, ET UX.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

• 09-520    CSX TRANSPORTATION, INC. v. AL DEPT. OF REVENUE, ET AL.
• 09-5801    FLORES-VILLAR, RUBEN v. UNITED STATES

This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments in a wide range of cases.  As always, the LII’s Supreme Court Bulletin provides thoughtful analysis of the upcoming cases. Just click on the links below to read all about them:

Monday, November 1, 2010

• 09-737    ORTIZ, MICHELLE v. JORDAN, PAULA, ET AL.
• 09-846    UNITED STATES v. TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

• 08-1438    SOSSAMON, HARVEY L. v. TEXAS, ET AL. 
• 08-1448    SCHWARZENEGGER, GOV. OF CA v. ENTERTAINMENT MERCHANTS, ET AL.
• 09-400    STAUB, VINCENT E. v. PROCTOR HOSPITAL

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

• 08-1314    WILLIAMSON, DELBERT, ET AL. v. MAZDA MOTOR OF AMERICA, ET AL.
• 09-987    AZ CHRISTIAN SCH. TUITION ORG. v. WINN, KATHLEEN M., ET AL.

Last Thursday, LII Director Tom Bruce gave the inaugural talk in a series of workshops on legal information hosted by the University of Montreal’s CRDP.  Invited (and on occasion provoked) by old LII friend Daniel Poulin (pictured here), the founder of the LexUM legal-informatics research group and of CanLII,  Bruce spoke about the initial vision for open access to legal information, its flaws, and the realities of the present day. The general challenge now, he said, is similar to that posed by behavioral economics.  Our formal notions about how legal information is generated, structured, and searched are useful so far as they go, but in some respects fail to take note of what it is that people actually do.  This poses important challenges for our thinking about legal research in general,  and document modelling in particular.

The LII’s guest-blog for the legal informatics community, VoxPopuLII, has an interesting piece by Joao Lima.  Lima heads the team that has built LexML Brazil, an integrated portal for legislation and law from many Brazilian jurisdictions.  An ambitious project aimed at achieving semantic interoperability across numerous federated collections of law, LexML Brazil is a state-of-the-art illustration of what can be done when the legal-information community takes advantage of the latest techniques from the digital-library and information science communities.  We recommend it highly.  The article also contains a list of related systems-building articles published in VoxPop over the last year, a virtual Who’s Who of legal-information systems builders.

LII Director Tom Bruce is giving a talk about law.gov today at the National Association of Bar Executives Communications Workshop in Portland, Maine.  Tom’s appearing with LII BFF Ed Walters, CEO of FastCase.  We think it’s important that those who communicate and market on behalf of lawyers understand what law.gov is, and what it’s going to mean to the legal profession.  One hint:  it’s more than just “free legal information stuff”… think WebMD, and what an informed clientele might mean to lawyers generally.  Time will tell, of course, but we think that mass availability of law is going to change interaction between the public and the profession for their mutual benefit.

How did we make Wex – our free, community-built legal dictionary/encyclopedia – even more comprehensive and easy to understand? By teaming with the smart folks over at Nolo and building their Plain English Legal Dictionary definitions right into each Wex entry. Have a look at the Wex entry for the term “common law” for a live example of the photo above, and here’s an alphabetical list of Wex entries if you want more.

We think adding Nolo’s definitions to Wex will help you understand the entries in Wex better; sometimes it’s nice to hear things explained in different ways, isn’t it? Plus it makes it easier for you to compare the community-built, editable Wex entry with a static definition.

Thanks again to the people at Nolo for partnering up with us on this one. Here’s the official press release announcement.  This is the first of what we hope will be a number of collaborative projects with Nolo.  They’re long-time leaders at making law accessible to the public, and it’s a privilege to work with them.

A few years back, we heard Frank Wagner — the Reporter of Decisions for the US Supreme Court — describe the job of a reporter of decisions as that of a “serial peripatetic nitpicker”.  We love serial peripatetic nitpickers. They teach us how to do our job better.

We’d like to salute three of them today.  These folks kept after us to add section-number ranges after each table of contents entry in the US Code, so that someone attempting to find a particular section by drilling down through the tables of contents could do so more easily.  They aren’t the only ones to have suggested it, but we think they were the earliest.  It’s a huge improvement in navigation and we feel smarter for having thought of it all by ourselves.

Seriously, we get a lot of help from people who ask for features and improvements or who give us feedback in other ways.  So our thanks go out today to Kami Bedard , Matt Manahan, and Steven Lauer for their suggestion. Good work, folks!

Maybe we should have a Nitpicker of the Month Award.  Who’s in?