Tag: legal information

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2017 – The Year to Free California’s Case Law “for Publication by Any Person” « Citing Legally

Alone among California’s branches of government, the state’s appellate courts remain stuck in a pattern of legal publication designed around books.  Other states now furnish unrestricted digital access to final, official, citable versions of their judicial precedent.  California does not.  The current “official reports” publication contract with LexisNexis runs until June 2017.  At that point the state’s judicial branch could do the same.  There are compelling reasons why it should.

Source: 2017 – The Year to Free California’s Case Law “for Publication by Any Person” « Citing Legally

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Open Law Library Asks “Why isn’t there a Google for the law?”

It’s the difference between searching Google for “weather right now” or “Chinese restaurants”, and “I’m being evicted, what are my rights?”. The first two queries reliably provide accurate information about current weather conditions and nearby Chinese restaurants for most people. But the top result for someone trying to avoid eviction is a website from the UK, even for searches made from the US. At best, this information from another jurisdiction isn’t very helpful. At worst, it might mislead someone on the edge of eviction into a false sense of security if the UK offers greater protections for tenants than wherever they live.

Source: Open Law Library – Why isn’t there a Google for the law?

A very good question of course and one that many have been trying to answer since before there was a Google. I’ve been a bit out of the loop for a couple of years so I probably missed the launch of the Open Law Library. Looks like an interesting approach. Anyone out there have more info to share?

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Applying Data Science to the Supreme Court: Topic Modeling Over Time with NMF (and a D3.js bonus)

The Supreme Court is arguably the most important branch of government for guiding our future, but it’s incredibly difficult for the average American to get a grasp of what’s happening. I decided that a good start in closing this gap would be to model topics over time and create an interactive visualization for anyone with an interest and an internet connection to utilize to educate themselves.

Source: Applying Data Science to the Supreme Court: Topic Modeling Over Time with NMF (and a D3.js bonus)

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Startup Legalist is scraping state court records to create a unified database for case search

Founded by Eve Shang and Christian Haigh, two current Harvard undergrads, the startup is trying to become a Google for state court records. 

They are doing this by scraping these databases and aggregating the documents into one main searchable database. This takes a while – most counties and states have records going back to 1989. 

Legalist is making it easier for lawyers to find state court records | TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/legalist-is-making-it-easier-for-lawyers-to-find-state-court-records/?ncid=rss

You can check out Legalist at https://www.legalist.us/. As a reformed scraper of legal info I wish them well.