INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
August 25, 2002
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #79 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!
Thanks to those of you who have visited my new website, Inter Alia. And to those of you who haven’t, what are you waiting for? In the past week, I’ve already posted 19 items, many of which will NOT appear in the newsletter. In fact, I’m considering taking the news and fun stuff out of the newsletter and offering it exclusively on the website. So get on over there and see for yourself. Also, when you get there, don’t be afraid to comment – there’s a place to comment next to each entry, so if you see something you need to speak your mind about, Comment!
I have two presentations and a book chapter due next week, so this week you’ll just get a grab bag full of new sites.
And away we go…..
News Update
You Mean it’s Good for Business Development Research, Too?
Law.com reports on what should already be common knowledge – that the Internet is useful for business development research. Duh.Test Your Search Skills AND Win a Cool Prize!
Google has posted a fun quiz for you to take using the Google search engine. Just answer the questions right and you might win a Google T-shirt.
The Slow, Slow Move Towards Online Court Records
The Center for Democracy and Technology posted a report this week on the status of the various states to move their court records online. This is a great report, with links to each state and everything.I’ll Link To Anyone I Like….
There’s been a lot in Internet legal news lately about “linking policies” – many sites forbid other sites to link to pages deep within their websites. To demonstrate the absurdity of these policies, law Professor David Sorkin has started Don’t Link to Us!, where he links to as many of these sites as he can.Help Desk
You know, I just realized that I don’t get many jokes sent to me by e-mail anymore. Do you? Sometimes the jokes are pretty good, but they usually get forwarded so many times the brackets (>>>), line breaks, and spaces make my eyes hurt. Want to clean up your e-mail before you forward it on to the next vict-er, person? One obvious way to do this is to cut and paste the e-mail into your word processor and then use the find and replace utility to remove the extra punctuation. Or you can download a free program that will do the work for you. Try EFilter or StripEm, and let me know what you think. Two online solutions that can also help you out are The Stripper and Format-It.
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 InternetBloomsbury Magazine Research Centre
Bloomsbury Magazine is the “one-stop-shop for book lovers, readers, and writers.” Its Research Centre gives you access to over 17,000 entries from its reference books. You can search by keyword or browse the titles, which include Biographical Quotations, Bloomsbury Thematic Quotations, Dictionary of English Literature, Good Word Guide, Guide to Art, Guide to Human Thought, Myth, and Thesaurus. Perhaps not as comprehensive as Bartleby, but still a fine resource.
Country Commercial Guides (Current)
Link to 1996-2001 Guides HereAnother great government resource, the Country Commercial Guides are compiled by United States Embassy staff around the world once a year. They contain information on the business and economic situation of foreign countries and the political climate as it affects U.S. business. For each country, you can review Economic Trends, Political Environment, Leading Sectors for U.S. Investment, Trade Regulations, Customs and Standards, Investment Climate, Business Travel, and many other topics. They are available for separate browsing, or you can review the whole report in PDF format. The Department of Commerce is responsible for hosting the current year’s Guide, but prior Guides are stored and hosted by the Department of State.
“Encyclopedia” is a somewhat misleading word when applied to this website, but it’s still a pretty interesting resource. Hosted by Jacksonville State University’s Psychology Department, the Encyclopedia contains over 2,000 links to psychology websites all over the Internet, grouped by category. Those categories include Careers, History, Publications, Resources, Organizations, Paradigms and Theories, and two more topics I just don’t know how to describe – you’ll have to go look for yourself. The links appear to be well-chosen, and even though most of them were added 2 or 3 years ago they still seem to be pretty fresh. The website is regularly updated, so that’s a good sign.
Last week, I talked about weblogs, and more particular “blawgs,” which are weblogs of a legal bent. Every now and then I plan to mention a weblog I particularly like, and GrepLaw is one of them. First of all, what is a GREP? According to the site, it comes from the editorial idiom g/re/p, which stands for Global search for a Regular Expression and Print lines containing matches to it. Still confused? In plain English, GREP means to look for something by pattern. The folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society took the term for their site, which searches for patterns and themes in computer law and policy. Every day, you’ll get two or three new entries on recent items of interest in computer law, mostly relating to copyright and privacy issues. This is a great weblog to visit daily if you’re interested in this area of law.
LawTopic is not a very friendly site – once you click on a link, you’ll never get back to the home page unless you click the Back button. But the content of this “Clearinghouse for Legal Paper Topics” is unquestionably valuable, with currently 92 paper topics in the database. The topics have been submitted mostly by law school professors, along with a brief description of the questions the paper should address. If you’re interested in writing a paper but hung up on the topic, this is a great place to start.
This program is part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Services, its mission to coordinate toxicology testing programs, strengthen the science base, develop better testing procedures, and provide information to health agencies and the public. From any page you have access to Fact Sheets, Announcements, Publications, and information on Meetings, but the valuable part of this website is the search feature that allows you to look for information on specific chemicals or toxicity/tumor type. I did a search for Chlordane, and got 13 reports on the insecticide, most of which I couldn’t even begin to understand.
NETROnline ($$)
This terrific public records site should be a permanent part of your investigative Favorites folder. From this page you can get access to the Property Data Store, which provides document images, parcel maps, comparables, histories, and more. The link to Public Documents will take you to a page with links to all fifty states, which in turn have links to appraisal districts or county recorders all across the country. If you want to obtain records, you’ll have to pay an initial fee of $125 per user, then a smaller fee depending upon the type of record requested.
For those of you who don’t follow Internet Law, UDRP stands for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, and it governs most disputes between website owners over domain names. The content here is quite substantial – the home page provides lots of news on recent domain name decisions. You can search for opinions through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN), or look through the impressive archive collection. There’s also a Features area that breaks down the UDRP decisions into different categories. Especially interesting is the Exclusive Content area, which includes Cases of the Week, UDRP Court Challenge Database, and an upcoming link to the UDRP PracticeCenter. Worth a look if domain names are your thing.
WorldBox ($$)
WorldBox specializes in providing you with information on world businesses, and the documents that contain that information. Find reports on Swiss Companies for only $40 each, or on Hong Kong Companies for prices between $15 and $30. You can also get access to European Credit Reports, European Company Financial Statements and Profiles, Marketing Information, and Legal Records Research for selected European countries.
Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney
Now this is what the Internet should be all about. This is an online version of the five-volume Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney, edited by a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. The chapter of each volume is available to you in PDF format. I don’t know how the online version differs from the print version, but this is a pretty terrific resource nonetheless.
Now, for some fun stuff. First, if you’re looking for a new way to cook that pork loin, why not try it with lava? You have to make sure it’s the 2,000 degree Fahrenheit lava first.
And finally, a site not so much fun as kinda sick. LifeGems is a company that will take the carbon remains of your loved one and turn it into a blue, yellow, or red diamond gemstone that you can treasure forever. If you want to make sure the dearly departed is always near to your heart or close at hand, give it a look.
Well, that’s it for Issue #79– 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.