Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
The New York Times reports on the project of “Internet gadfly” Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, to make more than 10 million pages of case law available free online. According to the ReadMe file on Public.Resource.Org, The short-term goal of the project is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of the Federal Reporter, the …
LOUIS is a new mega search engine of U.S. executive and legislative documents. A project of the Sunlight Foundation, LOUIS offers a combined search of Congressional Reports, Congressional Record, Congressional Hearings, Federal Register, Presidential Documents, Federal Register, GAO Reports, and Congressional Bills & Resolutions. The files themselves come from GPO Access. Besides the ability to …
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau has prepared a memorandum comparing 2007-09 budget recommendations of the Governor, Joint Committee on Finance, Senate, and Assembly. Comparisons are shown in the following areas: All funds appropriations General fund appropriations Tax and fee changes Bonding authorizations Structural deficits going into the 2009-11 biennium Source: The Wheeler Report
From the JS Online Capitol Podcast: In the coming weeks, a conference committee of state legislators will sit down at the bargaining table — peace-treaty style — in an attempt to develop a compromise version of the next two-year state budget. What does a conference committee look like and how will it work? Listen to …
Live WisconsinEye cable television coverage of the State Legislature begins at noon today. From the press release posted on WisPolitics.com: The WisconsinEye 24/7 cable channel will be available beginning tomorrow to Time Warner Cable Wisconsin digital subscribers on Channel 163 and to Charter digital customers in southern Wisconsin, including Madison, Janesville and Beloit, on Channel …
JS Online reports that: A Dane County judge ruled Wednesday that drafts of what may become formal bills in the Legislature do not have to be made public under the open records law, even if legislators have shared them with individuals or special-interest groups outside the Capitol. . . . In his ruling, [Circuit Judge …
WI Attorney General Van Hollen has recently issued several new opinions – two formal and one informal. They are available on the Attorney General’s web site. I created a crude RSS feed using Ponyfish. It’s not pretty, but it will send notification when there is a new opinion posted on the web site.
According to today’s Wisconsin State Journal, WisconsinEye could start broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage from the state Capitol to cable-television viewers as early as next Tuesday. WisconsinEye began broadcasting from its web site about a month ago. From the article: [Chris] Long, president and chief executive officer of WisconsinEye, sees the network becoming a state-based C-SPAN by …
More news from the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau: According to Allan Marty, the LRB and LTSB (Legislative Technology Services Bureau) are in the process of putting the 2005 Legislative Drafting Records on the LRB website. Allan also noted that “if everything goes as planned we would probably put all sessions that we have in electronic …
I spoke with LRB Chief Steve Miller this afternoon and he informed me that there has been some changes regarding the Revisor of Statutes move. As I posted earlier, in an amendment to the proposed 2007 state budget (Senate Bill 40), the Wisconsin Revisor of Statutes Bureau is slated to be eliminated as an agency. …