Better Access to Court Opinions: GPO Announces Pilot

Today, the Government Printing Office (GPO), through its digital printing arm, FDSys announced a pilot project in twelve Federal Courts to publish electronic court opinions.  Read the announcement here (pdf) [update: here's the announcement from the U.S. Courts website, with links].Court opinions are already available from the courts' websites, and -- for those... [Read More]

Losing Data in PDF: All the King's Sources

A quick exercise:Find the Supreme Court opinion in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, (hint: look here), the recent case on contracts that block class action suits,Find all of the (nearly 30) briefs that were submitted to the Court (hint: look here), andDetermine which arguments from the briefs were discussed in the... [Read More]

Congress Commits to E-Data Formats

One of the core technological improvements needed in our legal system is better organization of legislation (see #6).  Legislation forms the foundation of most of our legal rights and remedies, and yet Congress (not to mention the states) continues to publish our laws in inconsistent formats, with at least four different... [Read More]

Legal Technologies that Scream for Improvement

When anyone with a technical background-- in my case computational neuroscience --enters the legal profession, it's like Dorothy going back to Kansas.  There is no more Technicolor: everything becomes gray and somewhat dated.  It's like a time-warp.Now, some of this is natural and a result of the position that law... [Read More]