LII Announce

The Supreme Court hears 8 cases this week, and 3 next (the imbalance is owed to the Inauguration next week).  Here’s a quick rundown, with links to our analyses of each:

Monday, 12 January:

• Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (w/ Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council)(Clean Water Act, mining discharge, effluent limitations)
• Ministry of Defense of Iran v. Elahi (Iran-US Claims Tribunal, Terrorism Risk Insurance Act)
• Harbison v. Bell (Terrorist Death Penalty Enhancement Act, counsel, capital punishment)

Tuesday, 13 January:

• Montejo v. Louisiana (insanity, habeas, ineffective assistance of counsel)
• Vermont v. Brillon (indigent, assigned counsel, Wingo test)
• Knowles v. Mirzayance (Sixth Amendment, Miranda)

Wednesday, 14 January:

• Puckett v. United States (sentencing, plain error doctrine)
• Boyle v. United States (RICO, due process, 5th Amendment)

Wednesday, 21 January:

• Corley v. United States (Miranda, FRCP 5a, McNabb-Mallory)
• Kansas v. Ventris (6th Amendment, right to counsel, perjury)
• Nken v. Mukasey

Normally we’re asocial here at the LII — our idea of a social-networking site is isolatr, as befits our somewhat withdrawn and geeky image.   But we recognize that a lot of you do have friends, and you like to send them stuff.  As of today, we’ve made that a lot easier to do with our Wex and LIIBULLETIN collections.  You can e-mail articles, and share them via an assortment of major social-networking sites like del.icio.us and Facebook.

We’ll be adding this feature to more collections as the year goes on.  Right now, our US Code and caselaw collections operate in their own frameworks, which makes this more difficult to do, but we’ll be upgrading them later in the year.  And we are thinking very hard about the relationship between legal information and Web 2.0 applications — particularly around questions of crowdsourcing, authority, and expert participation.

You can expect a lot more from us on this in the coming year.  For now, we hope you’ll take advantage of our first, small step in this direction.  Happy New Year!

Wex has gone bilingual! Thanks to our collaboration with GetLegal, over one hundred new Spanish language content pages covering a range of practice areas have been added to Wex. Employment Law (Derecho Laboral), Family Law (Derecho de Familia), Immigration Law (Derecho de Inmigración), Criminal Law (El Derecho Penal), Commercial Contracts (Contratos Comerciales), Medical Malpractice (Negligencia Medica), Copyright (Derechos de Autor), and Juvenile Justice (Justicia Juvenile) represent a small sample of LII’s collaboratively developed Spanish dictionary and encyclopedia entries.

The LII doesn’t just make law available — we also make it accessible.  Our legal dictionary and encyclopedia make the LII uniquely useful among open source online legal information providers, and its new Spanish content will extend and deepen its reach. Viva lengua legal!

The LII’s Director Tom Bruce attended the Hague Conference on Private International Law to participate in an October 20th discussion about how to provide judges with clear, useful information related to transnational litigation issues.  The Hague Conference is a global inter-governmental organization with 68 member states. Its mission is to build bridges between legal systems — for example, civil law and common law or religious law and secular law. The agenda of the October meeting was to work toward a multinational convention, which, if approved, will become a binding instrument for countries that ratify it.

Tom’s participation is a result of his years of experience — besides directing one of the world’s foremost providers of free legal information, he (with Peter Martin) developed the world’s first web site that provided free access to legal information, and he has written extensively about information policy.  Claire Germain, Cornell’s Law Librarian also attended the meeting, along with representatives from the LII’s sister organizations CanLII and AustLII; legal librarians including the Library of Congress; commercial litigators, academics and judges specializing in transnational commercial litigation; and people who design transnational legal information systems.

The meetings concluded with a draft convention that will be further developed by The Hague Conference. The convention calls for free access to law worldwide, encouraging national governments to provide authoritative versions of their digital law documents, legislation, court decisions, and regulations. Principles of the convention also included providing translation of the materials, adopting internationally consistent and medium-neutral citation methods, and encouraging other parties to reproduce their legal materials for free public access.

Today the Supreme Court begins its November argument session. As it did in October, the high court will hear arguments in fourteen cases. Once again, the LII Supreme Court Bulletin has prepared oral argument previews for all of the month’s cases. A few topics on the Court’s agenda: obscenity on the airwaves, criteria a government may use to select which donated monuments to display, immunity for prosecutorial misconduct, and asylum for refugees who have been compelled to collaborate with their persecutors. (To receive these previews two weeks in advance, please subscribe to the LIIBULLETIN email service.)

Today the Supreme Court begins its new term. Its first month will be busy this year: the Court will be hearing arguments in fourteen cases (more than half again as many as it heard last October). Fortunately, the intrepid LII Supreme Court Bulletin crew has prepared oral argument previews for all of the October cases. Read all about the cases — and don’t forget to subscribe to the LIIBULLETIN email, which will bring you the previews approximately two weeks before the cases are argued. We hope you’ll join us.

Latin for “to stand by things decided.” Stare decisis is essentially the doctrine of precedent. Courts cite to stare decisis when an issue has been previously brought to the court and a ruling already issued. Generally, courts will adhere to the previous ruling, though this is not universally true. See, e.g., Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 US 833 (1992). See also Jurisprudence.

The findings of a new Cornell study challenge the widely held belief that open access academic articles — those published free online — get cited more often in academic literature. The study concluded that open access publishing reaches more readers than subscription publishing, but found no evidence of a citation advantage the first year after publication. The findings are particularly relevant to academic researchers, because the frequency with which a researcher’s work is cited can be a factor in tenure and promotion decisions.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don’t understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), German dramatist, poet. Peachum, in The Threepenny Opera, act 3, sc. 7.

A “per curiam” decision is issued in the name of the Court rather than specific justices. Most decisions on the merits by the Supreme Court (and other appellate courts in the US) take the form of one or more opinions signed by individual justices (and joined in by others). Even when such signed opinions are unanimous, they are not termed “per curiam.” “Per curiam” decisions are given that label by the Court itself and tend to be short. Usually, though not always, they deal with issues the Court views as relatively non-controversial.

For examples, see, e.g., Wood v. Bartholomew, 516 U.S. 1 (1995) and Kimberlin v. Quinlin, 515 U.S. 321(1995). However, they are not necessarily unanimous. Indeed, some per curiam decisions are accompanied by dissenting opinions. See, e.g., Bush v. Gore, 531 US 98 (2000).

The top appellate courts of most states (including, e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina) use the same terminology.