ZiefBrief

Learn How to Find U.S. Congressional Materials

A pair of librarians at U.C. Berkeley have put together a short series of informative tutorials to help you figure out how to find U.S. Congressional materials both on-line and in print. It is pretty basic stuff but it could help any researcher get up to speed on finding essential government documents. The bottom half of the tutorial screen opens up an active LexisNexis Congressional connection. Luckily, the USF Gleeson/Geschke library subscribes to this service and all USF students and staff should be able to follow along without any trouble.

Thanks to the Librarian's Internet Index for this tip.

One in 100 Americans Behind Bars -- Pew Report Released

The Chronicle of Higher Education points out in this article that a new report on the US prison population and spending has just been released. The report is the work of the Pew Center of the States and is titled One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (click here to link directly to a 37 page .pdf file.)  Why the interest by the Chronicle of Higher Education, you may ask? Well, it turns out that there are now 5 states (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) that spend more on corrections than they do on higher education. California, with an $8.8 Billion budget for corrections is very close to this mark spending 83 cents on correction for every dollar spent on higher education. This report is a treasure trove of statistics and bibliographical information for anyone interested in prisons, policy, or the general population.  

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!]

The US Government Has a Blog

It seems like everybody, but everybody has a blog these days (including Geoffery Chaucer at the ZiefBrief favorite Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.) Not wanting to be left out of the fun, the US Government is blogging up a storm at Govgab. This new effort is the product of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications out of the U.S. General Services Administration. This rather breezy look at the Federal Government has been around since September of '07 so it looks like it is here to stay. The bloggers state:

In our daily jobs, we encounter a staggering amount of U.S. government information and services that can benefit your life. From saving money and visiting National Parks to finding out about government auctions and the latest recalls, we want to bring these resources to you in a new way—through our blog.

This is not the site to go to conduct a legislative history or to track current regulations but it might be fun to add to your collection of blog feeds -- who knows when you might need to know about the Fed's take on Preparing for a Baby on a Budget or Buying a New Car.

Life Without Parole for Juvenile Offenders: A Human Rights Report

Today ZiefBrief celebrates Human Rights Day by featuring Sentencing our Children to Die in Prison: Global Law and Practice [PDF; 51 pages], a newly-released report from the Center for Law and Global Justice here at USF.

The report, co-authored by Professor Connie de la Vega and Michelle Leighton, the Center's Director for Human Rights Programs, deals with the practice of sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole ("LWOP"). It surveys the countries where juvenile LWOP sentences are or may be imposed, argues that international law prohibits such sentences, and explores alternative juvenile justice and rehabilitation models. And for legal researchers, the report's appendix contains a 50-state survey, complete with citations and annotations, on juvenile LWOP laws.

Guantanamo Bay Detainees Cases Heard by the Supreme Court

Intense interest in the Guantanamo detainees' cases of Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196) has led the United States Supreme Court to take the rare step of releasing the audio file of today’s oral argument immediately after the argument.

You’ll find the Boumediene/al-Odah oral argument audio  [RealPlayer required] on C-SPAN's Supreme Court page. Look for the link "Supreme Court Oral Arguments: Boumediene v. Bush & Al Odah v. United States." You can also follow along in the written transcript of the argument [PDF; 92 pages].

For more background on these cases, take a look at the SCOTUSWiki page on Boumediene and al-Odah. This page analyzes the case in detail, and links to key documents, selected news reports, and posts from SCOTUSblog. It will include a recap of the oral argument as soon as the authors pull one together - probably sometime later today.

[Update] SCOTUSblog has posted a round-up of news reports on the Boumediene/al-Odah argument, and Oyez.org now has an MP3 file of the oral argument.

Law Library of Congress Gets a New Look, Maintains Useful Research Tools.

In honor of the 175th anniversary of their creation, the Law Library of Congress unveiled a newly redesigned web page. ZiefBrief would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the LLOC on their anniversary and to remind our readers about what a useful research destination they can be. Two useful resources of special note are:

Guide to Law Online:
This is a very useful list of links maintained by the Law Library of Congress Public Services Division designed to provide a portal of Internet sources of interest to legal researchers. In addition to providing links to the full text of cases, codes, regulations the pages of the Guide provide useful links for lay people interested in the law.

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN)
GLIN is a searchable online database containing laws, judicial decision, legislative records and legal literature for jurisdictions spanning the globe. Contributors are governmental agencies and international organizations that add original-language, officially published, full text documents in electronic format. Unofficial summaries (generally in English) accompany each document. Full texts of materials in the GLIN are available as PDF files.

Historical Supreme Court Briefs by the Thousands - Now Online at the Zief Library

The Zief Library's latest big digital acquisition is Thomson⁄Gale's U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978, part of its Making of Modern Law collection.

Researchers in the USF community can connect to U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs on campus or at home. (For remote access, you'll be asked to give your name and your USF student or staff ID number.)

Once you're connected, you'll have access to something like 350,000 documents from about 150,000 cases — many of them cases the Court declined to hear. All of the documents are available in PDF format, giving the exact image of the original. There are also multiple search features: key word searching; searching or browsing by case name; searching or browsing by author; retrieving documents by case citation.

These few examples give a sense of the treasures in Gale's U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs —

• The Motion to Advance in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
• The Transcript of the Record in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
• The Petitioner’s Brief in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
• The Petition in Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938)
• The Government’s Brief in Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942)

And for the post-1978 period? The Zief Library has Supreme Court records and briefs from 1951 to the present on microfiche, and for the most recent years there are a variety of options on the web and on Lexis and Westlaw. (For more information on finding Supreme Court briefs and other documents, see the Zief Library research guide Supreme Court Research: Getting Started.)

Contempt of Congress - A Dispassionate View of a Hot Topic

At Balkinization yesterday Marty Lederman alerted us to a newly-released Congressional Research Service report on contempt of Congress.

Prof. Lederman describes the report (Congress's Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure [PDF; 68 pages]) as "characteristically comprehensive, careful, balanced and informative."

Today, Prof. Lederman follows up with a link to the House Judiciary Committee draft report on the refusal of Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten to comply with the committee's subpoenas [PDF; 70 pages].

Prof. Freiwald Helps Court of Appeals See Its Way Clear to Protect E-Mail Privacy.

In what is being heralded as an important expansion of privacy protection for e-mail, the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit recently released a decision on the case of Warshak v. US

The court ruled that a citizen does have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email stored on the computers of their Internet Service Provider or other intermediary (such as HotMail or GMail.) As a result, the warrant seizure provisions of the Stored Communications Act need to be applied when prosecutors are seeking such electronic communications and to the extent the SCA permits access without a warrant, the court found those provisions to be unconstitutional.

The local angle in this decision is that University of San Francisco School of Law Professor Susan Freiwald filed an Amicus brief in support of plaintiff Warshak's privacy rights. Check out Prof. Freiwald's publications at her faculty bibliography page for list of more of her work on Cyberlaw and privacy issues.