May 18, 2003

Welcome to Issue #112 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 visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

Another issue of "ILRW-Lite" this week. I'm still in rehearsals for Bar None, a charity show we do here in Dallas. This year's show is called "My Big Fat Geek Lawyer," and it promises to be a lot of fun. If you're interested, head over to the Bar None website and take a look. You can buy tickets there, too.

More on Internet stalking case
Back in March I wrote about a New Hampshire court declining to dismiss claims against an Internet background search service, when a customer used information from that site to stalk and kill someone. The Duke Law and Technology Review follows up with "Can The Internet Kill? Holding Web Investigators Liable for their Criminal Customers." Interestingly, the article states that the New Hampshire Supreme Court has already found the website liable for its customer's criminal acts. Hmmm.

Google News goes local
News search tool Google News has launched several regional versions of its terrific service. Included are beta versions for Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The pages all contain many of the same stories, but they are supposedly tailored to the particular country, offering a separate section on news from that country.

The world of Google at your fingertips
Often, I feel there are so many features offered by Google that it's hard to keep up. Now you don't have to -- you've got Google World, a directory of links on all things Google. Lots to explore here, and it's a good reference to boot.

Martindale's got articles
Martindale has a new service featuring legal articles from lawyers around the country. You can search the most recent articles, or browse by practice area or industry. Very cool!

RSS for ABA Litigators
The ABA Litigation Section now features an RSS Feed with its latest news and articles.

New goodies at AllTheWeb
Since its purchase of AllTheWeb, Overture has apparently been busy making improvements to the search engine. Here are just a few of them:

Blawgs of the Week
Finally, a helping of the law-related weblogs to come across my radar screen this week: B. Janell Greiner, an attorney in Pennsylvania, writes Benefitsblog, a commentary and news filter on benefits and ERISA law. The brand-new Bernsteinblog comes to us from David E. Bernstein, associate professor at George Mason University School of Law. Margaret Marks presents Transblawg, a German-English legal translation weblog. Ambulance Chaser is a former engineer and just-completed 1L law student. Timothy Sandefur, a Fellow in the Center for Public Interest Law at the Pacific Legal Foundation, writes ::Freespace::. The Limit of its Logic is a brand-new blog presenting cogent (and sometimes rambling) analysis of legal decisions, commentary, and issues, from Bart. And when he's not working as a law clerk for a judge in Austin, Texas, Daniel publishes Trivial Pursuits.

Editorial

Actually, this is one of my posts to Inter Alia this week:

Advice I wouldn't follow

An article from Penn State advises that for best results in searching, Internet users should stick to one search engine. The reason for this, says the author of the paper, is that the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, BUT NOT, etc.) from search engine to search engine do not provide noticeably better results than a query not using those operators. Further, different operators yielded different results at each search engine.

I agree with Genie Tyburski at the Virtual Chase that this is not good research strategy. First, if only 10 percent of Web users search using Boolean operators (as the study indicates), what difference does this study make? Second, and more importantly, using only one search engine turns us into passive "searchers" who are led to believe that one search engine will find everything we're looking for. Although there is some overlap between the indexes of the major search engines, you will still find different (and sometimes better) results by trying the same query at multiple sites.

My advice: find two or three search engines (or more if you're brave, including meta-search tools) whose results you trust. Read the Help page of each search engine you use, and become familiar with the syntax used by each to search its index. You'll be better equipped to formulate appropriate queries at each engine, and your searches should improve as a result.

Help Desk

When you install new software on your computer, you're often asked to close all currently running programs prior to installation. Why? Mainly because of files known as Dynamic Link Library (dll) files. These files contain certain code or instructions that can be shared by any program or process on your computer. When you install a new program, it may attempt to overwrite an existing DLL file that's used by one or more programs on your computer. That's why you need to have your programs closed, so that the installation program has an opportunity to install newer versions of DLLs already present on your computer.

How to do this? First, look on your taskbar, which will display all of your currently open programs. Right click on them and select Close -- make sure you have saved any important information before doing this. Then move over to your system tray (also on your taskbar, where the clock resides). Right click on any icons you see there, and close or disable the services. Be sure to disable your anti-virus software, because many programs cannot be safely installed while an anti-virus monitor is running.

If you've just got too many programs running and you want some help closing them all, check out EndItAll2. This nifty utility will take care of closing all your non-essential programs, all at once.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail 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!

Work-Related Injury Statistics Query System
The Department of Labor's RISQ system provides web-based public access query forms for obtaining national estimates and rates for nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments. This is a pretty simple site, with search functions for injury rates (number of injuries per 100 workers)and estimates of numbers of employees injured, in general or by type of injury. The site currently only contains data for 1998 and 1999.

InsiderScoop ($$)
This site will help you more with investment than legal research, unless of course you're doing legal research on insider trading. A membership to this site provides you with real-time updates to insider trading filings with the SEC, e-mail alerts for up to 20 companies, and loads of information on each day's top 10 insider trades. For the basic plan you'll pay $120/year; for a premium subscription, $600/year.

Capital Defense Network
The CDN is a community of lawyers, a team of consulting experts, and an online resource dedicated to assisting counsel representing clients in federal capital proceedings. Their goal is to provide the collective knowledge of the national capital defense bar to defense lawyers in federal capital proceedings and to post conviction counsel representing state death-sentenced prisoners. The site is divided into two primary areas: habeas assistance and training, and federal capital defense counsel support. Each guide contains some very helpful links, including an overview of the process, selected cases, online litigation guides,
appellate briefs, information on seminars, and much more.

Chilling Effects
A joint project of a number of law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chilling Effects "aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities." The topic areas offered include Copyright and the DMCA, Fan Fiction, John Doe Anonymity, Linking, Patent, Protest, Parody and Criticism, and Trademark. This is also a place to post or review cease and desist letters sent to website owners or other Internet users, for potential violations of applicable intellectual property law, with an analysis of those letters.

Disaster Links
Talk about a lot of links. This site is maintained by CBS news, and contains hundreds of links to disaster-related websites. The categories of links run the gamut, with topics such as anthrax, avalanche, drought, aviation, earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, volcanoes, and I'm just getting started. Although the site's editor says the resources are "not always comprehensive," they are still pretty darn impressive.

If you can't get enough of those wonderful, desperate pleas from Nigerians who trust you to help smuggle their cash out of their country, My Favorite Nigerians has published a few of the better messages received. Who knew Nigeria had so much money just lying around?

For those of you who can't afford the pricey Oxford English Dictionary but still want to learn about the etymology of words, check out the Online Etmology Dictionary.

Well, that’s it for Issue #112 – 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.

Subscription Information: If you want to keep on receiving issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net, or visit Inter Alia and sign up there! If you no longer want to receive the newsletter, just click on the link at the bottom of this newsletter. Or, send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net and I'll remove you from the list.

Archives: Miss an issue? You can read previous issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly in the Archives.

Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net..