Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
There is a new Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) in Madison. Although the Center does not represent clients, it does offer the following services: Brief consultations on basic legal immigration issues provided twice a month for three hours on a first come, first serve basis. Case assessment and legal advice provided by our volunteer immigration …
WKOW reports that Dane County is installing software to redact the social security numbers from county records. They are the only county in the state to do so. Register of Deeds, Kristi Chlebowski indicated that all social security numbers should be redacted by the fall. For now, however, it seems that anyone can access mortgage …
The Appleton Post-Crescent reports that “most people requesting records from Gov. Jim Doyle’s office last year did not have to wait long to get them.” In their “fifth annual review of public records requests found that about two-thirds of people seeking records got them within two weeks…. The P-C could discern a response time for …
Thanks to Greg Lambert for passing on this CNet article about open-law activist, Carl Malamud. He’s devoted his life to liberating laws, regulations, court cases, and the other myriad detritus that governments produce daily, but often lock up in proprietary databases or allow for-profit companies to sell for princely sums…. Malamud’s solution typically has been …
“A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction yesterday ordering Vice President Cheney and the National Archives to preserve all of his official records.” Read more at the Washington Post.
“Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by e-mail and post on the Web,” writes Robert Pear of the New York Times. This confusion is causing alarm among historians, archivists, librarians, …
From Bev Butula’s Wisconsin Law Journal blog: Looking for documents from a defunct government agency? You might dig it up at the CyberCemetery. This website is a collaboration of the University of North Texas and the GPO. The site is described as “an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct …
The latest issue of the Wisconsin Law Review features a thought-provoking examination of state public records law in the digital age. “Wisconsin’s Public-Records Law: Preserving the Presumption of Complete Public Access in the Age of Electronic Records,” by Leanne Holcomb and James Isaac, 2008 Wisconsin Law Review 515 (2008). [The article does not yet appear …
Boing Boing reports on Carl Malamud’s investigation of the exclusive deal in which the Government Accountability Office has contracted with Thomson West to provide complete federal legislative histories compiled by GAO law librarians. John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation alerted me to a situation about a month ago that we’ve been pursuing (with EFF’s help) …