Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Possible Futures For The Legal Treatise In An Environment Of Wikis, Blogs, And Myriad Online Primary Law Sources, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Major law publishers have begun producing ebook versions of some of the legal treatises they own. Despite asserted advantages over both print and online versions of the same content, these represent a step back from what treatises have become within the major online services and even further from what they might become now that numerous sources of primary law are directly accessible via the Internet.

The article traces the corporate and technological developments that have placed existing treatises in their present posture. Drawing upon the author’s own work preparing a legal treatise designed for digital rather print delivery, it reviews …

Digitizing The World's Laws, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Where does one find the foreign investment laws of Botswana? What about the copyright law of the Netherlands, the corporation laws of Japan, or the English translation of the Egyptian Civil Code? Already back in 1991, just before the internet, Wallace Baker remarked that “foreign law has become the daily bread of lawyers everywhere who formally had totally domestic practices.” Since then, the need to access the content of foreign law has increased exponentially. The importance of global access to foreign laws on the internet and how to improve it was recently highlighted at an international Meeting of Experts on …

Law Library 2.0: New Roles For Law Librarians In The Information Overload Era, Sasha Skenderija

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

WWW has rapidly evolved from a technological into a social medium. Web 2.0 has become a metaphor for the distributed and decentralized collaboration networks on a global scale. With the recent trends of new media development, the sources available have reached a critical mass resulting in an unprecedented information overload. The urgent challenge to all information professionals, in this case law librarians, is no longer availability and direct provision of resources, but rather the filtering and highlighting the ubiquitous Infosphere. The recent transformation of legal information has had more drastic consequences than in many other cases. The Cornell Law Library …

Miroslav Petricek And The Quest For A New Ontology Of Information, Sasha Skenderija

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Research and academic libraries, as well as academic publishers, belong to the sub-category of the infosphere known as “Institutions of Knowledge.” Libraries, however, have made few contributions to the development and utilization of the Internet, and now face a situation in which Google is replacing libraries as the primary research destination of scholars and students. The theories of leading Czech contemporary philosopher, Miroslav Petricek, may provide a construct for better understanding such developments and providing pathways for situating and developing library products and services within these new infosphere realities.

Where Web 2.0 And Legal Information Intersect: Adjusting Course Without Getting Lost, Matthew M. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

For more than a century, the process of legal research remained unchanged. This process was rooted in an established legal information structure. The law was published in standard texts, such as the West reporters, annotated codes, treatises, and the West Key Number Digest. While the advent of computer-assisted legal research was a departure from the print-based model, it did not fundamentally change the structure of legal information or the nature of authority. In fact, in its conservative beginnings, computer-assisted legal research provided a mere format shift as case texts were transcribed to simple online databases. More recently, Web 2.0 technologies …

Victim Impact Statements In Capital Trials: A Selected Bibliography, Jean M. Callihan

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This bibliography collects and organizes citations to dissertations, chapters in books, journal articles, legislative materials, books, and book reviews from 1980 forward that analyze the effect of victim impact statements in capital cases. The main purpose of the bibliography is to present citations to empirical studies and quantitative evaluations of victim impact statements in the United States and other countries. Because there are few reported empirical studies, the bibliography also contains references to articles that provide qualitative analyses of victim impact statements in criminal trials and of participatory rights of victims in the justice process in general.

Digital Legal Information: Ensuring Access To The "Official" Word Of The Law, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state entities are widely available on publicly accessible Internet Web sites. Worldwide, official legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. Most of that digital information provides only a right of access, and no ownership, or control over the data, unless it is …

Contents Of Legal Information On The Internet: U.S. Perspectives, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This article examines the contents of legal data and information on the Internet, with a special focus on the United States. It then evaluates the quality of the data, its impact on legal research and access to legal information, and addresses some issues raised by the digital medium, such as its reliability and permanent access concerns.