Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
Frederick Douglass, “West Indian Emancipation” (August 4, 1857)
April 14th: Plains Commerce Bank v. Long Family Land & Cattle will test the degree to which tribal courts have jurisdiction over non-tribal parties.
Phoenix Bond & Indemnity Co. v. Bridge: The Court’s decision in this case will determine whether reliance on a fraudulent mailing is necessary in a civil claim under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) and, if so, whether it must be by the plaintiff.
April 15th: In Irizarry v. United States the Supreme Court will decide whether a district court is required to provide a defendant with notice of its intent to depart from the sentence range established by the US Sentencing Guidelines under certain circumstances.
Greenlaw v. United States: The decision in this case will reflect the Justices’ view of the appropriate balance between the interest of the courts in consistently interpreting and applying sentencing statutes, and defendants’ right to appeal without subjecting themselves to a sentence increase.
April 16th: In Kennedy v. Louisiana the Supreme Court will clarify the Eighth Amendment constitutionality of capital child rape statutes.
Taylor v. Sturgell: The decision in this case will clarify the circumstances under which courts’ denial of one person’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) claim prevents a second person from asserting a very similar claim in a later lawsuit.
Back when the Internet was struggling from the primordial ooze of the ARPAnet and shedding its gill flaps on the way to becoming something known as the NREN, Hank Perritt started to think about what that might mean for publishers and other information providers — particularly legal publishers. The “value chain” he posited twenty years ago is obvious stuff now — but remember that in those days we were still arguing about whether there should even be commercial use of the Internet (yeah, I know, I’m dating myself here).
So take a look at “Market Structures for Electronic Publishing and Electronic Contracting”, in Building Information Infrastructure: Issues in the Development of the National Research and Education Network (Harvard University and McGraw-Hill 1992) . The publication date on the book is 1992, but I remember seeing a draft of this article as early as 1989. Seems like it’s out of print and hard to get now (I can’t find it in Amazon), but any good academic library will have it, and you can find it on e-Bay.
Hank has done a lot of good stuff since, but this one (also something of an oldie) is a personal favorite of ours — it says a lot of things about legal information by talking about GIS data. See “Should Local Governments Sell Local Spatial Databases Through State Monopolies?“, 35 Jurimetrics Journal 449 (1995).
According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people using the internet is steadily increasing. Indeed, more adults are online than ever before. Pew’s latest survey (April 2006) shows that about 147 million adults — fully 73% of respondents — are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in their January 2005 survey. And, 42% of Americans now have broadband connections at home (about 84 million people), up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005.
An act which is immoral because it is illegal; not necessarily illegal because it is immoral. See, e.g. United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998).
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet or they remain sterile abstractions. The hands and feet we need are efficient means and methods to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America. Warren E. Burger (1907-1995) US Supreme Court Justice, Address to the American Bar Association, 12 Feb 1978
Malum in se is a Latin phrase meaning wrong in itself. It is an innately immoral act, regardless of whether it is forbidden by law. Examples include adultery, theft, and murder. See, e.g. United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998).
Readings about legal information — especially electronic legal information — are oddly scattered across a bunch of different literatures. There’s some material in law reviews, some in the communications literature, some in sociology, library science, computer science, auto repair…. Maybe not auto repair, so much. Though there are some things about running a large legal web site that remind us of doing body work on a 1967 Impala .
One of these days, we tell ourselves, we’ll put together a Scuttle site that will act as a place to collect these resources, all in one spot. But we thought it might be good to put some attention on legal-information classics. No doubt the first one we encountered was Ethan Katsh‘s Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law — published a few years before anybody came up with this thing called the Web, probably the first thing we ever read that considered the subject, and still a very fresh look at how mass media change law. Like everything else mentioned here, we recommend it highly.
Our collections are popular with public-school teachers; around 554 public schools have links to the LII (there are surely more; we searched for linkers with “k12” in the domain name). The most prolific is the Kentridge High School Library in Kent, WA (a Seattle suburb), whose site for commercial law is better than some graduate law libraries we’ve seen. Most popular things to link to? Supreme Court decisions, and the WEX legal encyclopedia. Surprisingly, not many are yet teaching from the LIIBULLETIN writeups of upcoming Supreme Court cases, but give ’em time….
Law that is derived from judicial decisions instead of from statutes. Early American common law was taken from English common law. See, e.g. Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996).
