From BoingBoing comes the news that the dispute we blogged about last month between Oregon and would-be net publishers (or, as they call themselves, “archivists") Justia and Public.Resource.Org continues.  Oregon insists on its copyright, and has offered the publishers a “public license.” To no avail - BoingBoing quotes Karl Olson of the firm Levy, Ram & Olson LLP, Attorneys, as responding that

My clients respectfully cannot agree to the Public License. First, and most fundamentally, it would require them to acknowledge that portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are protected by copyright, and they respectfully but vigorously disagree that portions of the ORS are protected by copyright.

William Patry, (senior copyright counsel for Google - so perhaps with his own agenda) offers this delightfully-titled analysis “Oregon goes wacka wacka huna kuna" on his blog. 

Hat tip: WisBlawg

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing April 30 on the subject of “secret law.”

“Secret law is an abomination,” wrote Professor Kenneth Davis in his classic treatise on Administrative Law. Chaired by Sen. Russ Feingold, this hearing will explore the extent to which secret law has become more common.

The commercially-published U.S. Code Annotated and U.S. Code Service are more up-to-date, but the government-published U.S. Code is still considered the official version and usually the preferred version if you’re citing federal statutes.

Which is why I’m pleased to say that the House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel, which is responsible for the preparation of the U.S. Code, has posted PDFs of all five cumulative annual Supplements to the official 2000 edition of the code.

They have also begun posting PDFs of the official 2006 edition of the code. At present, Titles 1-9 of this new edition are available, and I’m hopeful that the remaining Titles will be posted in the near future.

On a somewhat-related note, a very useful, long-standing feature of the Law Revision Counsel’s web site is a set of tables that shows where recently enacted statutes are expected to be codified.

The GAO released a report today entitled Presidential Signing Statements: Agency Implementation of Selected Provisions of Law. 

This adds to a research guide on presidential signing statements done in October 2006, as well as a House Judiciary Hearing on the subject, just released.

Five days ‘til Super Tuesday.

There are plenty of guides to the U.S. presidential primaries out there on the interweb. One of the best such guides is provided by CQ (still called Congressional Quarterly by those who remember what life was like b4 evrythng got abbrev’d).

Among the highlights of CQ‘s guide are:
*Comprehensive results of the 2008 primaries that have already happened
*A calendar of all 2008 primaries that can be sorted by party, state, date, or number of delegates
*Links to related local newspaper coverage around the nation
*Historical summaries of the primaries for every presidential election since 1912
*Details on how many delegates are in each state and how those delegates are classified
*Interactive maps
*A primer explaining (among other things) what caucuses are, what “closed primary” means, and what delegates do (and what the difference is between pledged, district-level, at-large, and PLEO delegates)

A new Congressional Research Service report discusses “How Crime in the United States is Measured”. 

Crime data collected through the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National
Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS) are used by Congress to inform policy decisions and allocate federal
criminal justice funding to states. As such, it is important to understand how each
program collects and reports crime data, and the limitations associated with the data.
This report reviews (1) the history of the UCR, the NIBRS, and the NCVS; (2)
the methods each program uses to collect crime data; and (3) the limitations of the
data collected by each program. The report then compares the similarities and
differences of UCR and NCVS data. It concludes by reviewing issues related to the
NIBRS and the NCVS.

Baseball star Roger Clemens has filed a defamation suit against his former trainer Brian McNamee. The complaint can be found here.

According to last month’s “Mitchell Report" on illegal steroid use in baseball, McNamee told investigators that he had injected Clemens with illegal steroids.

Both men, along with some other individuals connected to the report, are scheduled to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"Vital government information appears ‘invisible’” to Americans using popular search engines to try to find it, says a report released Tuesday, December 11 by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch.

The report, Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines, examines the reasons for the poor retrieval that results when searching for government information using the popular search engines Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and Ask and even the search function provided by USA.gov.  Examples from the report include: 

* A search for “New York radiation” does not find basic FEMA and DHS information about current conditions and monitoring.
* A search to help grandparents with a question about visitation of their grandchildren in any search engine does not turn up an article of the same title located on the Web site of the Administration for Children & Families.
* A search for “small farm loans” turns up the commercial offers for loans, and statistics about government loans, but not most of the major federal government programs designed to help fund small farms.

The report concludes that “many of these searches miss critical information simply because of the manner in which the government agency has published the information.”

The Federal Trade Commission has digitized its decisions from 1969-2005, covering “virtually all administrative documents issued by the Commission, including Opinions, Final Orders, Complaints, and Consent Orders that result from negotiated consent agreements, as well as all Initial Decisions issued by Administrative Law Judges in administrative trial proceedings.”

The decisions are browsable by volume number and by party name, and they are also full-text searchable.

Starting in 2000, decisions include “detailed explanations—analyses to aid public comment—that the Commission issues whenever it accepts an administrative consent agreement for public comment… [published] in immediate proximity to the consent order documents they describe, in order to facilitate public access to all aspects of the Commission decision-making process.”

The FTC also plans to add its earlier decisions (1914-1968) to the site eventually. Coverage of FTC decisions on Lexis and Westlaw currently goes back to 1949.

The Library of Congress and UNESCO recently announced their agreement to move forward with the creation of a World Digital Library. 

The World Digital Library, modeled after the Library of Congress’s American Memory project, “will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.” See the LOC press release for more information. See the New York Times (registration required) for recent news coverage.

At the risk of losing any upcoming popularity contests, I’ll admit to enjoying both children’s drawings and legal research. And when the two are combined, I can’t help but get excited.

So, here’s an enthusiastic “thumbs up” for the Texas Register—the official weekly journal of agency rulemaking for the Lone Star State—which publishes drawings submitted by Texas children on the cover and filler pages of each issue. According to the journal, “the drawings dress up the otherwise gray pages of the Texas Register and introduce students to this obscure but important facet of state government.” Hooray.

If you’re interested in seeing some of the drawings, go here and click on an issue, then click on “all sections.” Or, peruse back issues of the Texas Register in paper on level 3-South of Langdell at call number KFT 1236 .S4

Thanks to Jenn, Nancy, and Mike in the Serials Department for showing me this.

CQ’s Moneyline has launched a new 2008 Presidential Candidates website offering quick access to information on every “major” presidential candidate (yes, that includes Ron Paul).

Information includes links to the candidates’ official campaign websites, their most recent FEC filings, and their CQ Moneyline profiles.  Hat Tip: BeSpacific.com

The State Department launched it’s new blog “Dipnote" yesterday.  According to the welcoming entry, the title is an abbreviation of “diplomatic note,” which is a formal communication between an ambassador and a minister of a foreign government.  (I have to admit that the title initially made me wince, but hopefully I’ll get over that.)

The venture’s stated aims include “start[ing] a dialogue with the public,” “provid[ing] you with a window into the work of the people responsible for our foreign policy,” and “tak[ing you behind the scenes at the State Department.” The first topic should get things rolling nicely:  “Who Should be Allowed To Possess Nuclear Technology?”

Over 1100 pages of newly released documents pertaining to the FBI’s misuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) have been made available by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 

The documents were released July 5, pursuant to court order, after the EFF sued the federal government for failure to respond to its FOIA request seeking the documents.  Other responsive documents are to be released on a 30 day cycle.
According to the EFF’s press release, the documents

show years of chronic problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans’ personal information and that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has long been aware of these problems. The documents were disclosed after EFF sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) earlier this year for records related to a scathing Justice Department critique of FBI NSL activity. The records detail more than 40 instances of improper, unauthorized collection of information about individuals, including unlawful access to phone records and email. The records show that Gonzales himself was sent several of these problem reports, including one less than a week before he told a congressional committee that no civil liberties abuses have resulted from the USA PATRIOT Act. He also voiced surprise when the Justice Department report on NSL misuse was made public earlier this year.