ZiefBrief

A Flood of Free Federal Appellate Case Law

Suddenly, after years of doing without any decent free source of federal appellate decisions, legal researchers now have least two excellent options:

• The Public Library of Law (from Fastcase)
• US Court of Appeals Cases and Opinions (from Justia)

Both the Public Library of Law and Justia have federal circuit court cases going back to 1950. Their search engines are user-friendly, and each allows you to limit your search to a particular circuit.

(The Public Library of Law and Justia (via its Supreme Court Center) also have all Supreme Court decisions. In addition, Justia has federal district court opinions from 2004 to the present, and the Public Library of Law has state appellate and high court cases from 1997 to the present.)

Why so much new federal case law all of a sudden? As Robert Ambrogi explains it, in mid-February public.resource.org and the Creative Commons jointly released 18 million pages of public domain federal case law. After that, it was just a matter of days before Justia and the Public Library of Law took this raw data and rolled out search engines for the decisions.

[Thanks to Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites  for the tip about the Public Library of Law, and thanks to Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg for the tip about Justia!]

Successful Statute Searching on Lexis and Westlaw

ZiefBrief has noticed that researchers skilled in other aspects of Lexis and Westlaw struggle at times with statute searching.

Diane Murley of Arizona State's Ross-Blakley Law Library must have observed these struggles too, because she's been blogging succinct, invaluable tips for getting the most out of statutes on Lexis and Westlaw.

So far, there are four tips in the series:

• Finding Statutes on LexisNexis
• Finding Statutes on Westlaw
• Printing Statutes on LexisNexis
• Printing Statutes on Westlaw

Presidential Signing Statements Back In the News

The controversy over presidential signing statements is heating up again, as evidenced by Charlie Savage's Boston Globe story Bush Signings Called Effort to Expand Power (free; registration required). Savage's story turns on a recent Congressional Research Service report, Presidential Signing Statements: Constitutional and Institutional Implications (PDF; 30 pages), that concludes, in part:

...it appears that recent administrations, as made apparent by the voluminous challenges lodged by President George W. Bush, have employed these instruments  in an attempt to leverage power and control away from Congress by establishing these broad assertions of authority as a constitutional norm. It can be argued that the appropriate focus of congressional concern should center not on the issuance of signing statements themselves, but on the broad assertions of presidential authority forwarded by Presidents and the substantive actions taken to establish that authority. Accordingly, a robust oversight regime focusing on substantive executive action, as opposed to the vague and generalized assertions of authority typical of signing statements, might allow Congress in turn to more effectively assert its constitutional prerogatives and ensure compliance with its enactments.

For more on signing statements, including advice on finding them, see our post Presidential Signing Statements - Get 'em While They're Hot.

[Thanks to BeSpacific for the link to the CRS report.]

Westlaw's 50 State Regulatory Surveys - Relieving (Some of) the Pain of Multi-State Regulatory Research

Here in St. Louis, ZiefBrief got a first look at a brand new Westlaw database, "50 State Regulatory Surveys" (REG-SURVEYS).

Government executive agency regulations (the third leg of the primary law triad of cases, statutes and regulations) don't seem to get much exposure in the law school curriculum, yet out in law practice most clients' affairs will be subject to any number of federal and state regulations. And clients doing business across the country will be subject to regulations from all 50 states.

Yet searching state by state to identify rules and regulations affecting a client (or relating to an issue in an academic paper or article) used to be, well, beyond awful doesn't even begin to describe it.

Westlaw's REG-SURVEYS database alleviates much of the pain. The West editors have already searched out and listed the regulations from each state that bear on each topic. All you have to do is use the "table of contents" to browse the topics for the issue at hand, or enter a regular Westlaw search.

West launched REG-SURVEYS last Friday with about 60 surveys in 4 broad categories (blue sky laws, employment, health care, and insurance), and more surveys are in the works.

One warning for the folks who aren't lucky enough to qualify for a law school Westlaw account: proceed with fiscal caution. The scope information for the REG-SURVEYS contains the chilling (at least to a law firm librarian) advisory: "'Super Allfiles' billing rate applies to this Premier Advantage database." That's about as much as you can pay for Westlaw searching, so consult with your librarian or a West research attorney for cost-saving tips before wading in to the REG-SURVEYS.

[Update: 12.13.2006. If you are doing 50-state statutory research, see our post 50-State Statute Surveys - Making an Onerous Research Task a Little Easier.]

OMB to Fed. Computer Users: "Clean Up Your Act!"

In light of a number of boneheaded regrettable incidents involving laptop thefts that resulted in egregious security lapses the Executive Branch has sprung into action. Clay Johnson III, the Deputy Director for Management for the Office of Management and Budget has issued a strongly worded memorandum (link to the offical memo in .pdf format) for the edification of all heads of federal departments and agencies (that's Clay's picture to the left).

Clay has given the government 45 days to set up procedures to make sure that workers: "Encrypt all data on mobile computers/devices which carry agency data unless the data is determined to be non-sensitive, in writing, by your Deputy Secretary or an individual he/she may designate in writing; .... Allow remote access only with two-factor authentication where one of the factors is provided by a device separate from the computer gaining access; ... Use a “time-out” function for remote access and mobile devices requiring user reauthentication after 30 minutes inactivity; and ... Log all computer-readable data extracts from databases holding sensitive information and verify each extract including sensitive data has been erased within 90 days or its use is still required."

Thanks to BoingBoing for this timely tip.

Presidential Signing Statements - Get 'em While They're Hot

Articles like the Boston Globe's Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws mark increased interest in and controversy over the presidential practice of appending interpretive statements to laws.

Sara Sampson at Ohio State's Moritz Legal Information Blog has recently offered good advice on where find signing statements.

And now, over at coherentbabble, Joyce Green is building a complete, annotated compendium of President George W. Bush's signing statements. The compendium includes a thorough FAQ about signing statements that explains what they are and why they are controversial, and offers further research advice for anyone who just can't get enough.

[Thanks to Jack Balkin at Balkinization for the tip!]

[Update: 6.28.2006] For more on the debate about signing statements, visit our colleagues at Vox Bibliothecae and read their post Presidential Signing Statements. And its not just we librarians who care. Now the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken notice and has held a hearing on presidential signing statements.

[Update 7.24.2006] The controversy continues with this report of the ABA's Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine (PDF; 34 pages). The Task Force web page reports that "The Task Force will present a report with recommendations to the ABA House of Delegates at the 2006 Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii (August 7-8, 2006)."

FirstGov Search - It's Official. It's Governmental. It Works

Last week, ZiefBrief wrote about the new Google U.S. Government Search page. (Check out the post Google Adds US Gov. Search Page.)

Well, Google is great, but savvy searchers never rely on just one search engine. The same search run on different search engines almost always gives different results, and if one search engine disappoints, another might turn up excellent information.

When you're looking for government information, FirstGov, the U.S. Government Official Search, is the perfect complement to Google.

FirstGov searches both state and federal sites, and, in FirstGov's Advanced Search mode, you can even limit your results to "Federal Only," to "All States," or to a specific state.

FirstGov uses MSN Search for web searching, but it also uses Vivisimo's "clustering" technology. This means that your results are grouped by topic and also by agency or state.

FirstGov Search also links to FirstGov's government information portal, and to FirstGov's FAQ Knowledge Base.

Be sure to bookmark FirstGov together with Google's U.S. Government Search!

Google Adds US Gov. Search Page

Busy, busy, busy are the toiling minions serving the ever-growing Googleplex and now they have come up with some more information goodness to lighten our research loads. The Google U.S. Government Search Page has two parts: front and center you will find a search box that limits your search to "Search Government Sites" below which you will find a customizable feed of news about the US government.

While savvy Google users have long known how limit a google search to government sites by adding the modifier site:gov this new service does more. According to the Google FAQ: "The Google U.S. Government Search index includes U.S. federal, state and local sites with domains such as .gov, .mil as well as select government sites with .com, .us, and .edu domains (eg. .usps.com, .ca.us and ndu.edu"

Being able to customize the U.S. Government search page requires the user to have a Google Account. Customization options includes adding and deleting not just news feeds but any other RSS feed of interest (including the ZiefBrief, if you are so inclined). Just click on the Add Content link in the upper left-hand corner of the search page, scroll down to the search box at the bottom of the column that opens up, and type in the url of the source you want to add (in the case of the ZiefBrief that would be http://ziefbrief.typepad.com/ziefbrief/).

Thanks to digg.com for passing this info. nugget along.

Keeping Track of the Scoundrels in Sacramento Just Got Easier With the Free Online California Code of Regulations

While still a law professor, California Supreme Court Justice Frank C. Newman paraphrased a US Supreme Court Justice to the effect that "...if the average farmer, in order to protect his rights under laws like the Crop Insurance Act, had to read the Federal Register as he reads his daily newspaper, we probably would not need crop insurance acts because there would no longer be any time to plant crops."*
Farmers and other citizens here in California face an additional burden of keeping track of the myriad state regulations that issue out of Sacramento on an almost daily basis. It is the duty of the state Office of Administrative Law to compile all state regulations  and make them available to all interested parties through the California Code of Regulations.
Of special interest to researchers is the electronic version of the California Code of Regulations. Recently upgraded, the site allows paging through the entirety of Code section by section as well as adding the following search options:

Search for Words With the Code   
Search within Specific Title(s) of the Code   
Search for a Specific Regulatory Section of the Code   
Find a Specific California Regulatory Agency (including direct links to the Code sections that discuss the powers and responsibilities of each Agency)   

Best of all, the search engine appears to allow authentic words and connector searching using the same techniques you know and love from Westlaw. Searching by word for:

pr(parole) and gang w/s color or tattoo or insignia

locates the  relevant code sections that have the word parole in the preliminary section of the code and include the word gang in the same sentence as color or tattoo or insignia. This means all the power of Westlaw searching at no cost.

Important Downside: It is worth noting that with all the power of true Westlaw searching comes one major headache: if you search for a phrase of more than one word the search engine for the Code will read the space as an automatic OR connector. For example, if you run the following search:

parole violation

you will get 2810 "hits", many of which only include the word violation but not the word parole. The solution is to put all multiword phrases within quotation marks. So if your search is:

"parole violation"

you find a much more reasonable 55 hits, all of which deal with parole violation.

* see: 63 Harv. L. Rev. 929 at page 953, quoting Justice Jackson's dissenting opinion in  Federal Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 386 (1947)

Tracking Down Treaties - Help Arrives From the Dep't. of State

In Where Have All the Treaties Gone?, Duncan Hollis, one of the law professor authors of  the international law and politics blog Opinio Juris, reports that (after a big nudge from Congress), the Department of State has added almost 1500 bilateral and multilateral treaties and other international agreements to its web site. 

This is good news for legal researchers, since up until this point free government sources of recent U.S. treaties were very thin on the ground.

The collection begins in 1998, which almost takes you back to the most recent issues of TIAS (now current through 1996). The treaties are part of the United States Department of State's FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

You can see all 1480 treaties and agreements by checking the box to left of "International Agreements" and then clicking  the "List All" button under the search box.

Or, more practically, you can run a variety of searches.  You can search by key word or phrase (e.g., lumber or ozone or "mutual defense"); by country name  with or without key words (e.g., Canada, or, e.g., Russia and nuclear); or by a phrase from the title of an agreement (e.g., Surrender of Persons to the International Criminal Court). Adding the term "multilateral" to any search helps limit results to multilateral treaties.

The treaties and agreements are exact page images in PDF format.

[A virtual tip o' the hat to: Terri Gallego O’Rourke, the Reference and International Law Librarian at Boston University.]