INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
August 4, 2002
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #76 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!
Wow – I feel like I’ve been gone forever! I’m glad to be back, and I want to thank all of you who responded to my “name change” poll. Look for big changes in the coming weeks….
And away we go…..
News Update – LOTS of news this week!
Ask Jeeves For a Toolbar
Search tool Ask Jeeves launched a toolbar last week that provides quick access to Ask Jeeves from any web page.….And a New Toolbar for Google Fans
Love the Google Toolbar, but want to be able to search other search engines from the same toolbar? Ultrabar can helpToolbars, Toolbars Everywhere
If you want to take a look at all the OTHER search toolbars available out there, Paul Bruemmer has a nice roundup of the available competitors.Meet the Nigerian E-Mail Grifters
Have you ever received an e-mail from the poor son or wife of an assassinated Nigerian political official? I have received 2-3 over the past few weeks, and I just love reading them. What amazes me is that this e-mail hoax actually raises money for the scammers.A Googlish Experience for Amazon Customers
If you like the streamlined convenience of the Google website, check out Amazon “Lite,” a clean way to look for books, records, and other Amazon offerings (Google has requested the site to “cease and desist” from using this format, so I’m not sure how long it’s going to last):Yahoo Needs to Reveiwuate Its E-Mail Policies
To protect users from potentially malicious code, Yahoo! Mail automatically swaps out words in your e-mails and replaces them with other terms. For example, “mocha” (a JavaScript term) becomes “espresso,” and “evaluate” becomes “reviewuate” (eval is also a script term).
Internet Research in the Sunshine StateYes, it’s that time again – time to visit one of our fifty states to learn the basics of Internet legal research there. This week we visit Florida, the Sunshine State.
We start, naturally, with the state’s home page, MyFlorida.com. As state home pages go, it’s not all that interesting, but it gets you where you need to go. There are links for Visitors, Floridians, Business, Government, and a MyFlorida link that allows you to personalize the home page to receive information relevant to you. The Government link leads to a directory of an impressive number of governmental resources. Meet Governor Jeb Bush, at his home page, where you can access nearly every page related to Florida’s executive branch. The official executive branch page includes links to all Florida state agencies. One of the more interesting sites is the Department of Business and Professional Regulation License Search database. It searches licensing records for architects, accountants, real estate appraisers, electrical contractors, and many more licensed professions. The Florida Division of Corporations gives you access to the incorporation records of Florida’s registered companies.
The Florida Legislature’s web presence is known as “Online Sunshine” (I must admit I have never heard the legislative process described as “sunshine”) You can search for bill information back to 1998, but there's another page to see Florida's current statutes. More information on Florida statutes and the Florida Constitution can be found here, and the General/Local/Special Session Laws of Florida are also available. Those more interested in regulations will find the Florida Administrative Code useful, and The Florida Administrative Weekly provides weekly information on rules, meetings, notices, and other administrative news. On the local level, Municodes has a lengthy listing of codes and ordinances for various Florida municipalities.
The Florida State Courts’ page is rather unimpressive. However, from there you have access to the Florida Supreme Court, Appellate, Circuit, and County Courts. Amazingly, most of the courts have their own website, which is refreshing. Each of the appellate websites also has links to full-text opinions, released on a regular basis on their respective website; there's also a one-stop shopping page for all of these opinions.. Florida is part of the Eleventh Circuit, and has three federal district courts: Northern District, Southern District, and Middle District. There are also bankruptcy courts for the Northern, Southern, and Middle Districts. You can also find a full set of Florida’s Rules of Civil Procedure.
Florida also has a number of general legal research pages, but before we get to them, the Florida Bar Association offers a wide range of online services to Florida attorneys. Attorneys visiting the site can get information on certification, CLE, ethics opinions, law office management, and more. There are also areas for consumers and general info on association activities. If you’re looking for a good all-purpose site, Florida Law Online might be a good pick. Miami lawyer James Wyman has put together a set of the links I am discussing in this article, plus more. He’s also got a link to the Florida Bar Directory, where you can search for Florida attorneys. Another good set of links is provided by Florida Legal Research. For Florida legal news, check out the Florida Law Weekly (unfortunately, you have to subscribe to get to any of the online content).
Florida sites specializing in particular areas of law include a brief review of Florida Commercial Real Estate Law and Florida Divorce Law. If you’re a litigator, the Trial Lawyers Section of the Florida Bar provides its Handbook on Discovery; it’s a terrific free resource. Finally, Florida State University offers a smallish guide to Florida Legal Research -- give it a try.
Do any of you Florida readers know of a great legal research site I didn’t mention here? Drop me a line at tmighell@swbell.net and tell me about it!
Help Desk
This week, a question from J.P. about my favorite search engine, Google:
“They did a short piece on the Today Show last week about the guys who started Google. It was very interesting but failed to answer the one question I had: how do they make money?”
For a company that doesn’t want to go public, Google has sure been making a lot of money. And it does this in ways that are not too intrusive on our searching, which is refreshing. Google probably makes considerable income from selling ads for prominent placement in search results. These ads are easy to distinguish from the regular search results: there are two ads at the very top, shaded in different colors, and several ads down the right side of the screen, in shaded boxes.
Google also makes money in several other ways – it licenses its search engine to other sites (like Yahoo!, Palm, Nextel, Netscape, and others), provides a “search appliance” that corporations can install on their own network, and recently concluded a strategic alliance with America Online. What’s cool about all of this is regular users like you and me don’t get repeatedly slapped in the face with money-making opportunities for Google – we just see the search engine.
Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me a line at tmighell@swbell.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 InternetPsychCrawler
Talk about a clean user interface. PsychCrawler is a product of the American Psychological Association, indexing web pages from the APA site and eight other psychology-related websites including the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A search for “bipolar disorder” returned 1167 results, most of which appear to be directly relevant to the search term. The only problem I had with this site is that many of the pages indexed have been removed or relocated; it seemed that every time I clicked a link I either got a “File Not Found” or “This Document Has Moved to a New Location.” PsychCrawler really needs to update its index, but the resources are undeniably useful.This is my kind of site. Ryan & Company claims to be one of the most respected state and local tax consulting firms in the country, and as one of its services it provides a nifty set of links to tax sites from across the United States. Just click on a state, and you’ll get a list of tax-related links, including legislation, court opinions, and state taxation websites. Ryan & Company also provides a nice set of resource topics in tax law, including Payroll Tax, Sampling for Audits, Severance Tax, Excise and Fuels Tax, Unclaimed Property, and more. If tax is your bag, keep this collection handy.
Those interested in Internet law will find this newsletter from Harvard Law School a lot of fun. Issues come out about once a month, which you can read on the site or via a free e-mail edition. Each issue contains recent news, links to webcasts on Internet law issues, and new and interesting bookmarks on copyright and other Internet issues.
No, this is not a website for finding the graves of long-lost relatives. The University of North Texas, along with the U.S. Government Printing Office, established this site to provide permanent public access to websites and publications of defunct U.S. agencies and committees. There are currently only 16 sites listed, including the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, Census Monitoring Board, Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Office of Consumer Affairs, and others. Each site is reproduced exactly as it existed at the time the agency or commission ceased doing business. This site is similar to the Wayback Archive – it preserves the Internet presence of defunct websites so you can conduct research that may no longer be current.
Yahoo! Premium Document Search
I wouldn’t expect a service like Yahoo! to offer a service like this, but here it is – 70 million + full-text documents online, in various categories, such as business, health, science, and news, compiled from over 7,000 sources. A search for WorldCom retrieved over 50,000 documents, most of them articles from various news services. You’ll get a brief summary of the document and the number of words contained in the article. The prices for these articles are pretty cheap, ranging from $1.00 to $4.00.
Finally, here are some fun and useful sites for you this week:
Does anyone else here love sushi? If so, or if you like any type of food requiring chopsticks, then you should see this page of “Forbidden Behavior with Chopsticks.”
And if you suspect the government may owe you money, check out FirstGov’s “Money Owed” page for links to sites nationwide that may be holding your money.
Well, that’s it for Issue #76 – 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 tmighell@swbell.net.