Advocate's Studio

iPhone user? Lawyer? Or simply interested in the law? Remember last week’s Studio post about Google Scholar’s Advanced Search and legal authorities?

Run, don’t walk, to Jeff Richardson’s great post at iPhone J.D. about using Google Scholar on your iPhone to track down free legal resources. Richardson discusses how to access, set up a bookmark to Scholar search for a specific jurisdiction and other tips, with screenshots and examples of how the results will appear. Check out his take on the new Wexis killer and take Scholar out for a legal spin.

You may remember a while back a post here in the Studio about legal reporter and article results in Google Book Search. You can also pull case law results from Google Scholar Advanced Scholar Search. As can be seen from the search page, results cull legal opinions from federal and state courts and legal journals.

Maybe you don’t know what Google Scholar is? From the site:

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research

There are date restrictions on the case law. While the Supreme Court material goes back to the 1700′s, federal and state case law begins in the 20th century.

More free and legal here in the Studio.

Hat tip to BeSpacific.

Carl Malamud at O’Reilly Radar reports on Law.Gov, “America’s Open Source Operating System”. As st forth in the opening paragraph:

Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we’re going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page.

Primary legal materials include case law and statutes.

For years, easy access to these materials has been tied up in paid gateways tended by private publishing houses. This has NEVER made sense to me. Why can’t we have a system offering superior access to this free content? The powers behind Law.Gov apparently agree and are working towards that end.  Let the money makers focus on their secondary materials and expert commentary. Case law and statutory law accessible and on-line are necessary components of an open government, a result we all should embrace.

Merging the ideas of free and open source into both the subject and the product, Andrew Katz has launched a new Free and Open Source Law Review online. Taken from the site:

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

Sections include case law reviews, full-length research articles, book reviews and ‘tech watch’ reports by non-lawyers. Articles are accepted for publication via the Review’s web site, and are subject to anonymous peer review where appropriate.

The Editorial Committee of the Review is drawn from the membership of the European Legal Network, a non-partisan professional network of Free Software legal experts, and its composition rotates regularly among network members. The network is facilitated by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), but the membership extends across a broad spectrum of interests engaging in Free Software across four continents. The Review itself receives financial and administrative support from the NLNet Foundation.

Volume 1, Number 1 (2009) is up and running at the jump above. Oh, and you can follow it on Twitter too – @ifosslr.

Hat tip to BoingBoing blog.

LSNTAP offers up a fantastic slide show of Fifty Tech Tips for Tough Economic Times. The hefty presentation is filled with free and open-source tools and tips on how to make the most of them in your law practice. And these tips are only for the month of July! Download the PowerPoint and sit back and learn a few things you may not have already known about some of your favorites, as well as some new options.