The Law Pod was founded by Fitz Collings in August 2008 to provide mobile phone reference software to the legal community.
Rather than embracing a traditional business model, after-tax profits from the sale of our software will be used to provide financial aid in the form of grants and scholarships to law students in need.
The Law Pod specializes in legal reference software for smartphones and web devices, including the iPhone®, iPad®, iPod Touch®, and Blackberry®.
The NHPRC [National Historical Publications and Records Commission] and UVA Press will create a new web site which provides access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation’s Founding era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission will provide funding in the amount of up to $2 million for the UVA Press to undertake the work on the published papers.
Through this web resource, users will be able to read, browse, and search tens of thousands of documents from the Founding Era. A prototype web site including the contents of 154 volumes drawn from print editions of the papers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison will be prepared by October 2011. The fully public version will be launched by June 2012 and will also include the 27 volumes of the Papers of Alexander Hamilton. By June 2013, the Founders Online expects to add the 39 published volumes of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. The new resource will include the complete contents of 242 printed volumes, including all of the existing document transcriptions and the editors’ explanatory notes.
The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) released MetaLib (http://metalib.gpo.gov), a federated search tool for retrieving U.S. Government Publications (reports, articles, and citations) by simultaneously searching across approximately 53 Federal Government databases. Basic, Advanced, and Expert searching is available including the ability to restrict by very broad topic areas. Additional databases will be added over time. The public can suggest databases to be added to MetaLib. MetaLib shows promise as a potentially abundant resource for locating government documents.
The Voices of American Law project is designed to provide assistance to scholars in the study of the Supreme Court and its role in America. Created by the Duke University School of Law, the documentary series is hosted at Duke’s website and includes educational materials pertaining to eighteen critical Supreme Court cases that have played an important role in American constitutional law on subjects such as Equal Protection, the First Amendment, Eminent Domain and the Commerce Cause. In addition to court documents, court opinions, articles, interviews, and photographs, each case is accompanied by a twenty-minute documentary featuring interviews with the individual parties, their attorneys, and the judges. By telling the stories of the real people involved in these matters, the videos bring the cases to life for researchers, students, and faculty and ultimately lead to a deeply interested and better informed audience. Teaching and study guides are also available. Most materials, such as the photos, court documents, court opinions and lesson plans are available for free through the website. The videos are available for purchase at a price of $35 each. A PDF order form may be downloaded from the site, and compelling trailers of each video are available for viewing prior to ordering
The Judicial Conference of the United States recently released the findings of a year-long PACER user assessment survey. 86% of participants were satisfied with PACER, 9% were dissatisifed. Areas of system improvement noted by the Report authors, Pacific Consulting Group, included (1) searching across cases, across courts, and getting the desired results; and (2) consistency across courts in terms of information and interface. Read the PACER Service Assessment Findings here.
See North Dakota law prof Eric Johnson’s blog post about his recently released free, downloadable torts casebook. The first volume, now available on SSRN, covers negligence and health care liability. Johnson plans to complete a freely downloadable second volume for Spring 2011. Volume Two will include intentional torts, strict liability, economic torts, dignitary torts and a few other subjects.
In his post, Johnson notes that he was inspired by New Hampshire law prof Thomas Field’s Fundamentals of Intellectual Property: Cases & Materials, which is a free download from SSRN. Field has also made available on SSRN his Introduction to Administrative Process: Cases & Materials. Both titles were once published by Carolina Academic Press but “the author, now holding the copyright, can revise it more frequently.”