INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
May 12, 2002
Tom Mighell

Welcome to Issue #69 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!

For those of you not from Dallas, I’m involved in a show here in town called Bar None – lawyers and judges singing and dancing for charity. It’s a hilarious evening of fun – check it out at the Bar None Website. Anyway, because of rehearsals over the next few weeks, my weekends will not belong to me. So until June 23, I’ll be writing “ILRW-Lite” – see you back with a full edition in June!

And away we go…..

News Update

Federal Courts to Allow Access to Criminal Records
The federal judiciary’s policymaking body announced a pilot program to allow limited Internet public access to criminal court records.

Some Federal Records Have Always Been Available.
For those of you who don’t use the service, this Law.com article on “Tracking Federal Cases with Pacer” is useful.

BBB Weighs in on Web Site Reliability
The Better Business Bureau released some guidelines last week to help determine the trustworthiness of consumer websites.

Help Desk

Some engines ignore certain words – these are called “stop words,” and search engines generally ignore them because they are extremely common and would return millions of irrelevant results. For example, a search query like “beauty and the beast” will only search for pages containing “beauty” and “beast,” even when you use the quotes to search for a phrase. Google has largely eliminated many common stop words, and will include them now in a search. If there is a stop word Google still ignores, it will tell you at the top of your results page.

How to get around this? Add a + sign before the stop word; this forces the search engine to include the term in the search, whether or not it’s a stop word.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me a line at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

Ingenta ($$)

Dubbed “Your Gateway to Research,” Ingenta boasts 12,708,318 articles in 26,953 publications. The site has a large number of categories, ranging from agriculture to Economics and Business, Mathematics and Statistics to Psychology and Psychiatry, and much more. But there’s more available here than just articles; when you click on a topic area, you get a list of links not only to publications, but also references, conferences, associations, and institutes, and e-communities. There are lots of great links here that are of course free to use. While registration on the site is free, you’ll have to pay a fee to purchase copies of any articles you find.

Interactive Health Tutorials

A service of the National Library of Medicine, this page offers terrific information on all sorts of health issues. You can choose from Diseases and Conditions, Tests and Diagnostic Procedures, Surgery and Treatment Procedures, and Prevention and Wellness. Just click on one of the topics (osteoarthritis or thyroid surgery, for example), and you’ll be presented with a “module” of information, including statistics, symptoms, risks and complications of surgery, and tons of other great data.

Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Review

This law review’s goal is to examine the tensions created by advances in computing, telecommunications, biotechnology, multimedia, networking, information and other technologies. The review is apparently only published once a year, but there are some pretty good articles here.

Web Cites for Federal Defenders

Maintained by Florida lawyer Paul Rashkind, this website is a great resource for anyone engaged in criminal defense in federal court. There are links to Supreme Court, Circuit, and District Court information, links to the sentencing guidelines, and websites for public defenders in certain districts.

All About Forms ($$)

Well, I don’t have to tell you what this site’s about – forms! This site is geared more towards non-lawyers who want to do it themselves, but it’s always good to keep a site like this on hand just in case you find yourself in need of a form you’ve never used before. There are 2,000 free forms, with access to 3,000 “premium” forms available for just $4.95.

Finally, a useful site – can’t remember how many BTUs in a Joule? How many teaspoons in a dash? Megaconverter can help you – it can convert almost anything!

Well, that’s it for Issue #69– 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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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.