Sep 24
2013
2:10 PM

Link rot in SCOTUS decisions documented; half don’t go to original material

The U.S. Supreme Court has cited Internet materials 555 times since 1996, but tracking down the information isn’t always easy.

According to a new study by co-authored by Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, half of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the information originally cited. The New York Times covers the results. “Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot,” the Times says.

Click for full screenshot.

According to the study, many of the links did turn up Web pages, but
they didn’t go to the original information cited or the information had
materially changed. Sometimes when the information changed, there was no
note indicating the update.

The Times notes one hyperlink in an opinion about violent video games
by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Users who click on the link are taken to
an error message
that reads: “Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this Web page? … If you
had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since
disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the
domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked
information in the Internet age.”

The Supreme Court clerk does keep a hard copy of hyperlinked
materials, but Zittrain suggest another solution: a platform that would
allow authors to generate, store, and reference archived data. He is
working on such a platform, called Perma.cc, which is supported by a
group of law libraries and nonprofits. Though the project would
initially focus on legal scholarship, it would also work for the Supreme
Court, Zittrain told the Times.

Source: Debra Cassens Weiss, Link Rot in SCOTUS Decisions Documented; Half Don't Go to Original Material, ABA Journal (Sep. 24, 2013).

ABA task force report proposes scrutiny of law school funding, pricing and accreditation standards

The ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education has released its draft report and recommendations
(PDF).

An ABA task force is recommending wholesale changes in the financing
of legal education, the elimination of some law school accreditation
standards, and it is pushing for more innovation and practical skills
training in law school educational programs.

The task force is also calling on courts, state bar associations and
bar admitting authorities to come up with new or improved frameworks for
the licensing of limited legal service providers.

…

[T]ask force member Nancy Hardin Rogers, a professor emeritus
at Ohio State University, wrote separately to seek public comment on a
different approach to some of the law school pricing and funding
problems identified by her colleagues.

Rogers noted a recent proposal by the Obama administration (and cited this New York Times
article that covered it) that would base federal financial aid to
students on such factors as a school’s tuition, graduation rates, debt
loads, earnings potential and the percentage of lower-income students
who attend.

…

The task force recommends, among other things, that the ABA undertake
a fuller examination of law school funding and pricing issues than the
task force has been able to do. It also suggests that the ABA Section of
Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar revise accreditation
standards that increase the costs but not necessarily the quality of a
legal education. And it calls on state supreme courts, state bar
associations and lawyer regulatory agencies to look for ways to reduce
the educational requirements for admission and authorize people without
JDs to provide limited legal services.

…

The task force will use the public comments it receives on the draft
report to help prepare its final report and recommendations, which it
plans to issue by Nov. 20, the filing deadline for consideration by the
House of Delegates at the ABA’s Midyear Meeting in February in Chicago.

Source: ABA Journal article, ABA task force report proposes scrutiny of law school funding, pricing and accreditation standards.
[JML]

Sep 20
2013
9:35 AM

Talent Wants to Be Free

Prof. Orly Lobel's new book, TALENT WANTS TO BE FREE: Why We Should Learn to Love
Leaks, Raids, and Free-Riding (Yale University Press;
September 30, 2013), looks at how we fight over talent
in every industry, profession, and region. Through insights from law,
business, psychology and economics, it shows how everyone
benefits when talent is set free. It is about intellectual property regimes,
innovaton policy, employment law, trade secrets, non-competes, corporate
governance, antitrust and smart market competitiveness.

The book will be released on September 30. It is available on Kindle and on Amazon, B&N, Indie Bound, 800-CEO-READ . It has general as well as academic appeal, and in the words of Prof. Frank Partnoy, offers "a provocative and compelling argument that we should abandon our obsession with controlling ideas and expertise."

[RL]

Sep 17
2013
4:32 PM

U.S. Constitution Day – September 17th

Celebrating the signing of the United States Constitution, Sept. 17th, 1787.

Take the Washington Post's Constitution Day Quiz!
Want a free copy of the Constitution on your mobile device? Download LawStack (for iOS devices) or dLaw (for Android devices)
Want to learn about the constitutions of other countries? Check out World Constitutions Illustrated, available through HeinOnline.

[MF]

Sep 11
2013
5:59 PM

LRC Tech Talk Series – Episode 1 Recap

Here's what you missed from today's Legal Tech Talk Series Episode 1: Legal Apps for Law Students

General apps for creating and storing documents: Evernote, Notability, Adobe Reader, DropBox, and Google Drive
Apps for law school: WestlawNext, Lexis Advance, FastCase, 2013 California Law, LawStack, dLaw, The Law Guide, The Rulebook, Law in a Flash, CaseBriefs, Lexis Q&A.
Free pizza from zpizza!
Download Episode1handout

Don't miss Episode 2: Legal Blawgs coming up on Wednesday, September 25th at 12:00 in LRC room 113

[MF]

Sep 10
2013
8:54 PM

Nobel-winning law prof who wrote most-cited law review article dies at 102

Nobel-winning law prof who wrote most-cited law review article dies at 102.

Ronald Coase

A University of Chicago law professor and economist who wrote the
most-cited law review article of all time has died at the age of 102.

Ronald Coase died on Monday, report the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog (sub. req.) and the New Yorker blog Rational Irrationality.
He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1991 and published “The Problem
of Social Cost” in 1960, which was ranked last year as the most-cited
law review article of all time, the Law Blog says.

In the paper, Coase argued that government intervention wasn’t needed
to stop companies or parties from harming others, the Times explains.
He argued that the affected parties could negotiate their own
satisfactory resolutions if they had all the relevant information, and
that such resolutions might make more economic sense.

According to Rational Irrationality, Coase “was transformed into an
icon of the political right. His famous ‘Coase theorem’ was used to
justify a hands-off approach to big business on the part of politicians,
regulatory agencies, and judges, leaving pollution and other economic
problems to the corrective powers of the free market.” In reality, the
blog says, Coase admitted that his theorem didn’t necessarily apply to
industrial pollution, where those affected are numerous, and he didn’t
believe in laissez-faire.

Source: ABA Journal
[JML]

Sep 3
2013
8:32 PM

LRC – orbit

the USD legal research satellite

Monthly Archives: September 2013