Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
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 …
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. New opinions will be downloaded every night (!) to keep the collection up-to-date. Currently, the collection contains about 3.4 million …
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 Project. The Court Listener platform is composed of four searchable databases containing judicial opinions, an audio collection of oral arguments, …
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 or sheltered behind a paywall. Movements are afoot to change this, at least in part, and there has been progress …
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 the site includes 8,260 CRS reports, although that number will change regularly. It’s unclear what date range is covered by …
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 at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. In this collaboration, the partners will structure and …
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 prepare myself for what could be a difficult search. That sigh of relief you are hearing is from law librarians …
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 for use in a foreign country. From the release: Businesses and individuals at times need to authenticate the origin of …
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 to follow whether the use of an image or video is allowed or not and under what circumstances something can …
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 changing technologies. In the ink-on-paper era, this meant moving from hand-set to machine typesetting, from slower to high-speed presses, and …