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 …
Public Information
The Free Law Project's CourtListener.com Contains Every Free PACER Opinion
The Free Law Project has recently announced that in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Labor and Georgia State University, they have collected every free written order and opinion that is currently available in PACER. …
CourtListener Frees the Law
The following blog post was written by Eric Taylor, Evening Reference Librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law School Library CourtListener is a powerful new free legal research website sponsored by the non-profit Free Law …
Making case law accessible to all
There have been some very exciting advances in the fight to make court documents more freely accessible to everyone. As many legal researchers and law librarians are aware, many legal materials can be relatively rare …
New Site Aims to Make Every CRS Report Publicly Available Online
If you’ve ever tried looking for a CRS Report, you know that they can be very difficult to track down. A new site called everyCRSreport.com is hoping to make them more publicly accessible online. Currently …
End of Term 2016 U.S. Government Web Archive
A collaborative group of librarians from the Library of Congress, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Internet Archive, and several other archives and universities have teamed up on a project to preserve public United States Government websites …
Dive into Criminal Justice Data and Statistics with "Hall of Justice"
Stats and data about any aspect of the legal world have often been notoriously difficult to track down. I know that when I am asked a question about stats at the reference desk, I always …
DFI to Issue Apostilles & Authentications to Verify WI Docs for Use in Foreign Countries
According to a press release by the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions , the DFI will join the state Secretary of State’s office in issuing apostilles and authentications – certificates needed to verify a document …
Search for Fair Use Cases using the US Copyright office's new index
Copyright and it’s component Fair Use, are two of the stickiest and (at least for me!) most headache-inducing areas of law. There are so many shades of gray and changes that it can be difficult …
GPO turns 154 today and celebrates with a new name and logo
From the FDLP News: The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) marks its 154th anniversary of opening for business today. Since March 4, 1861, GPO has seen many changes as the agency continually adapted to …