INTERNET LEGAL
RESEARCH WEEKLY
September 30, 2007
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #281 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!
News Update -- from the Inter Alia Weblog
No news this week -- my free time has been taken up writing the draft of our book! Instead, let's talk about the:
Blawgs of the Week
Here are a few of the great law-related weblogs featured on Inter Alia this past week:
- The National Eminent Domain Blog is brought to you by the Michigan (and D.C.) firm of Ackerman, Ackerman & Dynkowski. The firm exclusively represents owners in eminent domain disputes, and they're discussing condemnation issues in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and across the country.
- Michael Erdman is a partner at the Chicago firm of Teeple Leonard and Erdman. His practice is concentrated on commercial litigation, with an interest in online liability. His Online Liability Blog covers "(i) websites, ISPs, and other online services, laws that may limit or immunize online conduct, (ii) lawsuits that allege online liability, (ii) hosts related discussions among technologists, lawyers and others, and (iii) serves as a portal to resources pertaining to online liability."
- The Gray Blog is dedicated to news, laws, and trends involving the "parallel market." What's the parallel market, you ask? According to Jorge Espinosa, a Miami lawyer and author of the blog, it's the name given to the market that develops in goods sold outside of their authorized channels of trade. Great niche blog.
- Leora Herrmann is an attorney with the Miami firm of Kluger, Peretz, Kaplan, & Berlin. Her niche blog is The Counterfeit Blog, which is not to say that her blog is a fake. To the contrary, it's a great place to get information on anti-counterfeiting law and policing. Leora discusses both civil and criminal enforcement of counterfeiting laws, as well as news, legislation, and legal developments.
- All Consuming is a blog you don't see often enough -- it's maintained by the Washington State Office of the Attorney General. It's directly mostly at consumers, with advice on knowing your legal rights, get the heads-up on new scams, and discover emerging marketplace trends. It's hoped that the blog will also help businesses better understand laws that affect how they sell and market their products.
- Another great niche blog for you today: The RFID Law Blog discusses how the RFID sector impacts public policy, law and the growing government usage of RFID technology. For those of you who don't know what RFID technology is, it stands for Radio Frequency Identification -- the easiest example is the plastic tag on that Gap shirt you want to buy, that keeps you from leaving the store without paying for it. The blog is authored by McKenna, Long and Aldridge, a nationwide firm.
Caught in the 'Net
Jing-ling
The Jing Project is something I have been meaning to talk about for awhile. It's from the folks at TechSmith, who make the fantastic SnagIt and Camtasia products for screen saving and making online movies and such. Jing does the same thing, but is a lot easier to use. Here's how it works.
Once you install it on your computer, a little yellow sphere sits at the top of your screen (or the other four sides, wherever you want to put it). Let's say you're visiting a website and want to quickly capture something you see there -- or you're chatting with someone by IM, and want to show them something on your computer. Just click the Jing button, then the Capture button, and you can easily highlight whatever's on your screen. Jing then gives you the option of creating an image or video out of it. If you just want a screen shot, click Image, and you can add annotations to it if you want -- arrows, boxes, text, etc.
Next comes the cool part. Once you're done with your image or movie, you can either Save the file to your computer, or Share it. If you choose to share it, the file is uploaded to a website, and you get a special URL that you can send to others. Here's an example: I created a short videocast demonstrating how easy it is to customize your Excel 2007 button bar -- it's nothing special, but the videocast took about 40 seconds, and uploading it took about another 30 seconds. So in just over a minute I created and shared a video with anyone on the Internet. Cool, huh?
Help Desk
A PowerPoint tip for you this week: if you place images or other objects into your PowerPoint slides, you might find that sometimes the objects don't go exactly where you want. But just two buttons can change that. If you hold down the ALT key while you are dragging the image with your mouse, it will move exactly where you want it. If you're like me and you use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move objects around, hold down the CTRL key instead -- it will move objects 1/12 of an inch for each press.
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!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court of Massachusetts
This site is solely devoted to finding publicly-available case information from the appellate courts of Massachusetts. You can search for cases by docket number, party, attorney, and lower court/judge. Unfortunately, you can't view any of the actual court documents -- just the docket information. The court also maintains a calendar here, so you can look at the oral arguments that are scheduled over the next month.Military Legal Resources
This page is hosted by the Library of Congress, but the information here is from the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School Library in Charlottesville, Virginia. Selection from the collections are being made available in full-text PDF, and include manuals for courts-martial, the ethics handbook for army leaders, military law texts and treatises, war crimes trials materials, army field manuals and regulations, and much more.National Library for Health
This is a British site, and is dedicated to helping patients and professionals in medical decision-making. Most of you won't be eligible to get to the "extra" resources, but you can still search the large collection of resources. Even better, there's a News and RSS page where you can read the latest news and subscribe to the topics so you're notified when new stories or articles are available.National Criminal Justice Reference Service
This federal agency offers justice and substance abuse information to support research, policy, and program development. There's a LOT of stuff here. You've got a full A-Z list of all the topics, or you can browse for information by topic. Each page offers Q&A, Publications and related links on each topic. With information on subjects from abduction to youth gangs, I'll say it again -- there's a LOT of stuff here.United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Here's a good site to bookmark in your Human Rights folder. Like many of the U.N. human rights pages, you'll find news and reports on various issues arising around the world. You can search by country to learn their stance on human rights and related stories. The issues page is also useful, with an A-Z listing of dozens of sub-topics on human rights.
Finally, some fun and useful sites to start off your week:
Looks like I'm visiting toys from my youth -- a few weeks ago it was Etch-a-Sketch, now it's Lite-Brite. If you ever played with the make-a-design-with-light toy, this will take you back.
National Geographic Traveler is a travel magazine, and their online presence has some great stuff.
Well, that’s it for Issue #281 – 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.