INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
December 16, 2001
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #51 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is send an e-mail to ilrw-subscribe@topica.com. It’s free!
Things are pretty busy here for the holidays, so I’m going with “just the sites” for the next three weeks. Regular articles will resume after the New Year. Enjoy!
And away we go…..
News Update
Watch What You Say in that Online Message
A California jury found two disgruntled employees liable for online defamation, awarding $425,000 for posting more than 14,000 libelous messages on the Internet.Another Week, Tons More Google Features
As if my bias towards Google weren’t obvious enough – they just keep
coming out with new stuff! Included this week:Google announces its database now includes 3 billion documents, including 2 billion web pages, 700 million Usenet newsgroup posts, and 300 million images.
And in the Huh? Department, Google unveils its “Mail-Order Catalog” Directory:
FirstGov Getting a Facelift
First it’s announced that FirstGov is getting a makeover to make the site more “eye-catching and customer friendly” – then FirstGov asks everyone for their suggestions on how to do it.
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
Stanford Web Credibility Research
Presented by something called the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab (whatever that means), the Web Credibility team wants to understand what leads people to believe what they read on the Internet. Toward that end, they perform research on web credibility and publish it here. There are several good links to articles and presentations on what makes web sites credible. For those of you who still have trouble telling the difference (like me, with my Burger King debacle of several weeks ago), this is a great learning site.Where To Do Research
Sites with names like this generally make me nervous. Attempting to determine what sites are best for research, and then putting them all on one site, is an ambitious task. Nevertheless, this site seems to have a large number of sites that may prove useful to your research needs. There are 54 categories, from Academia to (interestingly enough) Universities and Colleges. In between you can find such topics as Demographics, U.S. Government, Medical and Health, News Media, and Stocks, Business and Finance. Under each topic there are a good number of sites to peruse. Worth a look.AmeriStat
AmeriStat claims to be your one-stop source for population data, and it does a pretty good job of living up to its promise. You can find lots of statistics here – the topics are grouped by categories such as Children, Education, Fertility, Income/Poverty, Marriage, Migration, Mortality, and others. There’s a nice glossary with census-related terms, and a nice selection of publications available for purchase. Sign up for the free e-mail service to receive regular updates to the Population Reference Bureau site.Contracting and Organizations Research Institute
The University of Missouri presents this site, the mission of which is to improve our understanding of how the economic system works by facilitating and enabling interdisciplinary empirical research on contracting and organizational structure. There are many different types of contracts you can review here: financial, employment, merger and acquisition, leases and licenses, and more. You can also review several working paper on contracts and financial agreements here.EmplawyerNet ($$)
Okay, so it’s not a legal research site, but it’s still a potentially valuable site for lawyers. The byline of EmplawyerNet is that it is the “preeminent job opportunity and career development site for the legal community.” There are so many resources here I’m not sure where to start; I guess I should start by saying that the best resources are found if you subscribe to the sites services. The basic membership is free, but for the bells and whistles you’ll have to pay $14.95 a month or $59.95 for the whole year. If you subscribe to the Premier membership, you’ll get new job listings mailed to you on a daily basis. A good place to look if you’re interested in finding new job opportunities.SearchTools Glossary
This probably should have gone under the Help Desk section – if you ever wonder about some of the terms I use in the newsletter, or others you see in your surfing, you might want to keep this site bookmarked. It provides a great glossary of search terms, like “fuzzy matching,” “proximity searching,” and more. A good basic course on search terms.JurisNotes.com ($$)
JurisNotes wants to keep you informed of the latest in intellectual property law. Unfortunately, they also want to charge a fee for it. You can receive the newsletter free for two months; after that, individuals pay $200/year, up to $4,000/year for 100 or more lawyers. If you subscribe, you will be listed on the site as a firm/lawyer practicing intellectual property law. There are also a few free articles for you to browse. Based on some of the sponsor firms, I would think the quality of the newsletter is pretty good – but since I didn’t pony up the $200, I can’t say for sure.Medical Encyclopedia
A service of the National Library of Medicine, this Medical Encyclopedia is just that – a fairly long listing of medical entries with definitions, diagrams, and lots of information. A good bookmark for your reference folder.QuickLaw America ($$)
QuickLaw provides court decisions, topical databases, and allegedly the most up-to-date collection of statutes and regulations on the Internet. There are flat-rate options available, but single searches are $5 each. The front end of this site is not all that informative or interesting, so I don’t know if the guts accessible to subscribers is any good. If you’re looking for an alternative research source, give it a try. LLRX reviewed this site last month – here’s the link.Centre for European Policy Studies
This site, based in Belgium, aims to produce sound policy research leading to constructive solutions to the problems facing Europe. There are links to a number of publications and research programs, as well as commentaries on various European Union issues. This site appears to be more policy than law-related, but it might still be of use to those of you with European clients or interests.
Now for some fun…
What do you do when you get really bad service at a hotel? Create a PowerPoint presentation complaint and post it on the Internet!
Well, that’s it for Issue #51– I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.
Tom Mighell
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