Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
Two of the biggest names in the legal database and publishing world recently announced that they would be partnering up to expand the scope of services that they offer to their customers. Hein Online and Fastcase will allow each other to integrate services that will enhance the experience that users will receive. The integrated libraries …
Congress.gov is a beta site by the Library of Congress that contains U.S. legislative information. It will eventually replace THOMAS.gov. At this point, the beta Congress.gov contains legislation from the 107th Congress (2001) to the present, member profiles from the 93rd Congress (1973) to the present, and some member profiles from the 80th through the …
bepress recently launched a new product called The Digital Commons Network. It indexes and makes available scholarship contained in the broad network of open access institutional repositories that use the Digital Commons platform. Digital Common Network is available to researchers at no cost. According to the about page, “the Digital Commons Network brings together scholarship …
From the journal, Government Technology: On Jan. 8, city officials announced the launch of its open data ordinance and a more accessible open data platform. Thus far, only one other city in the country, New York City, has implemented an ordinance mandating widespread government release of data, according to officials. The city, officials said, is …
Internet for Lawyers recently posted a whitepaper in which authors, Carole A. Levitt and Mark Rosch, compare the results generated by the following caselaw citators: Google Scholar, Fastcase, Casemaker, LexisNexis, WestlawNext, and Bloomberg. Registration is required. The study is somewhat limited in that it only compares the results from one case, but it is still …
SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, has recently launched a iPhone/iPad app. SSRN is a repository of scholarly research for social sciences and humanities scholarship, including law. Many of our UW Law School professors have contributed scholarship to SSRN. The SSRN app allows users to search over 260,000 research papers in the SSRN electronic library. …
GPO has recently released a new series of training video modules on its Federal Digital System (FDsys). The first video introduces the basic search in FDsys and I must say that I was quite impressed. The basic search is actually very powerful. It allows you to use Boolean operators (and, or, not) as well as …
Emily Marcum of Lightfoot of Franklin & White, LLC recently conducted a study comparing the pricing models of WestlawNext v Westlaw Classic. Although the full study is not available, the abstract from SSRN appears below: WestlawNext and Classic were each used exclusively in transactional mode for eight days. Cost to the client was assessed using …
I suspect that most of you know that Google Scholar offers full text federal and state court opinions. But did you know that it also offers a citator similar to (although not as extensive as) Shepards or KeyCite? This feature allows you to find significant citing decisions for a case. Google has recently announced that …
Hack College has created a useful infographic on how to use Google more effectively. It’s targeted toward students, but is helpful to anyone who uses Google – which is just about everyone, right? I found the section on the operators to be the most useful. I’ve long used quotes to search for exact phases and …