Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
According to PC Magazine, more than 26 million people have taken DNA tests. Genetic testing kits from sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe help individuals and their families dig into their ancestry and heritage – but they may not be the only ones looking at the results. The Department of Justice has issued guidelines on the …
HeinOnline, a database of laws, law journals, and other legal texts, recently added a new feature called “Explore this Author” to author profiles. It allows readers to visualize how an author’s scholarship connects with the scholarly community. Look for the “Explore this Author” link at the top left of the author’s profile. Users will be redirected to an …
Congratulations to the Wisconsin Historical Society for receiving a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize citizen petitions submitted to the Wisconsin Legislature between 1836 and 1890. Here’s more information about the project from WHS: The project will arrange, describe, preserve and make the petitions digitally available to the public. When the grant …
The journal Nature has an interesting piece on public domain advocate, Carl Malamud’s project to “build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles” for data analysis. No one will be allowed to read or download work from the repository, because that would breach publishers’ copyright. Instead, Malamud envisages, researchers could crawl …
Under a provision of the 2018 omnibus appropriations act that was passed by Congress and signed by the President earlier this month, all non-confidential Congressional Research Service reports must be made publicly available online within 90 to 270 days. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the non-partisan public policy research arm of the United States Congress. They …
Earlier this month, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel tweeted that every Wisconsin Attorney General opinion is now available on the DOJ website. The opinions are browsable by year since 1912 and available in PDF. Hat tip to the Government Information Round Table (GIRT) Blog
Here in law library-land, we’re all familiar with the concept of “citation chasing”- i.e., finding one good on-point article and then mining its citations, footnotes, and citing sources for other relevant articles. But what if there were a way to let an algorithm look at the relevant article you’d already found and mine it for …
LLMC Digital is a searchable archive of historical primary legal sources for Wisconsin, the United States, and other jurisdictions. Wisconsin materials included in LLMC’s collections include historical Wisconsin reports, session laws, and statutes. A large number of secondary sources including federal government periodicals and treatises are also searchable via LLMC. The Wisconsin State Law Library …
Established in 1949, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is the United States’ primary source for criminal justice statistics. BJS publishes many reports such as the seminal Crime in the United States as well as several data analysis tools. The Arrest Data Analysis Tool, for example, allows users to generate tables and graphs of national …
Earlier this week, the nonprofit Measures for Justice launched an amazing new data portal “to assess and compare the criminal justice process from arrest to post-conviction on a county-by-county basis. The data set comprises measures that address three broad categories: Fiscal Responsibility, Fair Process, and Public Safety.” According to The Marshall Project: The project, which …