Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

Host and Attorney Alan S. Pierce welcomes Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, Executive Director of the Mass. Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) and Stacie A. Sobosik, Esq. from the Law Offices of Martin Kantrovitz in Boston, to discuss access to workers’ compensation in the immigrant community and the overwhelming challenges immigrant communities face in the workers’ comp system.

Ashlee Vance, Jan. 24, 2010: NY Times Legal Sites Plan Revamps at Rivals Undercut Price Sees the new Westlaw Next as part of the longtime rivalry with Lexis and a new reaction against competition from Google and Microsoft.

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Last week in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled under the First Amendment, the government may not ban political spending by corporations and unions in candidate elections, radically changing campaign finance law. Co-host and Attorney J. Craig Williams welcomes Professor Ned Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and Professor Adam Winkler, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, to discuss this Supreme Court ruling and the impact this ruling will have on state, judicial and legislative elections.

We have blogged recently about the decision by The New York Times and other newspapers to put their content behind pay walls. The justification for this move is to generate revenue that will pay for high-quality news operations; the newspaper management states that they cannot afford to give away their content. They might want to take a look at Newsday, the Long Island daily that put its website behind a pay wall in late October. The New York Observer ran a trenchant article about the website today. “So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?” The answer is thirty-five, which represents gross revenues of about $9,000. As web traffic declines, it is likely that advertisers will flee and take their business elsewhere. One of the reasons people might not want to pay to read Newsday online is that the paper is not what it used to be. It once was a respected publication, but now it has no national correspondents or foreign bureaus. Would higher-quality content lead to more subscribers? All eyes will be on the Times when its pay wall goes live next year. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our Intellectual Property podcast series, Professor Jessica Silbey discusses career choices available to law school graduates interested in working in IP.

The New York Law Journal ran a first-page story today (unfortunately, I cannot link to it because it requires a subscription) about an experiment unfolding in New York’s appellate courts. The Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, Second Judicial Department, Gail Prudenti, purchased two Kindle DXs to be tested by the court’s judges. Other digital reading devices are being tested as well. Justice Prudenti said that “The objective [of the pilot project] is to see if we can enhance the productivity of our judges and decrease printing.” She is looking to the future, when there will be a “non-residential bench and the prospect of a paperless court.”
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Oh Boy, word lovers! Erin McKean, in today’s Boston Globe’s Ideas “Word” column writes about a new word trick, “Sweet-Tooth-Fairies.” Like Mondegreens (a mis-heard word, like “Lady Mondegreen” for “laid him on the green,” which is what gave the term its name), or palindromes (which spell the same back and forth, like RACECAR) or Spoonerisms (named for Dr. Spooner, an Oxford don who had the unfortunate tendency to frequently switch the first sounds of his words in a sentence, so he might chide a student, “You have hissed my mystery lectures!”), Sweet-Tooth-Fairies are a kind of English language word play.

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Following up on a previous column in which she introduced FDsys and explained the site’s simple search and navigation, this month Peggy Garvin provides an update and introduces more advanced search techniques for the congressional information available on FDsys.

Curious to know what e-discovery developments occurred in 2009? In this edition of the ESI Report, host Gina Jytyla, Managing Staff Attorney in the Legal Technologies division at Kroll Ontrack, welcomes Andrea Marshall, Legal Consultant with Kroll Ontrack and Tracey Stretton, Legal Consultant for Kroll Ontrack in the UK office, to discuss hot topics and themes that emerged from 2009 case law and upcoming trends for 2010. In the Bits & Bytes Legal Analysis segment, Kroll Ontrack Legal Correspondent, Kelly Kubacki will take a look at the discovery order issued in TR Investors v. Genger.

Tip of the OOTJ hat to BeSpacific:

UK Guardian Launches World Government Data Gateway
“Search the worlds government data here

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