We’ve added all federal appellate decisions since 1950, some half a million cases, to Enfacto. As we all know, the U.S. Court of Appeals is no joke. I seem to recall that Judge Posner pointed out that he and his buddies are the central figures of the common law. We at Sonya Labs pay our respects by including their scribblings on our humble site.
Over at Reason Magazine, the commentators are kvetching at the new DC Metro bag inspection policy. One commentator pointed out the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Frost v. Railroad Commission where the Court waxed poetic about the unconditional nature of constitutional rights. It’s interesting to see novices grapple with the actual text of constitutional decisions in the context of what they know about their rights. For instance, while the Fourth Amendment appears to offer bright line rules proscribing what police offficers can do, in fact the central prohibition of the Fourth Amendment is that against unreasonable searches and seizures, a flexible standard. Frost is completely inapposite here because the case has nothing to do with the Fourth Amendment, even though the Court is speaking abstractly enough for its words to sound applicable. The case deals with a simpler concept, that’s actually much more boring too.
Sonya Labs and Enfacto have been in the news lately.
DailyKos expounds on freedoms in America and the varying approaches we take to them as a nation divided. One day, when Enfacto runs for President, will we have to explain our associations with the radical left? I guess it’s true, DailyKos did use Enfacto to research fighting words and the case that laid down the fighting words exception to the First Amendment, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. But we’re only in the business of supplying the truth–it’s up to our faithful users to distort it as they see fit.
The other night at the debate, when answering a question as to what he would look for in a nominee to the high court, Senator Obama said that the most important qualification for a justice would be his or her “capacity to provide fairness and justice to the American people.” That statement reminded me of the famous “Poor Joshua!” case, DeShaney v. Winnebago County where Justice Blackmun dissented from the majority decision holding that the State had no duty under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect an individual from a private actor. In DeShaney, Joshua, a four-year-old boy, was beaten by his father over a two-year period to the point of irreversible brain damage while the Department of Social Services did nothing despite indications of the ongoing abuse. My 1L Constitutional Law professor said that the case was about substantive due process rights in the age of the administrative state. Though I remember speaking with Professor Catharine MacKinnon, and she said, no, the case was about–what can we do for Joshua? Of course, that same dichotomy ran through Senator Obama and Senator McCain’s debate the other night. We at Sonya Labs do not support one jurisprudential approach in particular. When necessary, we use a hatchet or a scalpel, and sometimes a hatchet and then a scalpel, and at other times a scalpel and then a hatchet, as the situation calls for.
Fearing the imminent collapse of the legal research industry, Congress has promised a multi-billion dollar bailout to Enfacto in the case that the value of our mortgage-backed securities plummet. We at Sonya Labs would like to thank the Government for subsidizing our wanton real estate speculation and for providing the industry upon which we exist.
To show our gratitude, we would like to offer the Government some free legal research. Some have argued that the $700 billion bailout may offend the intelligible principle test laid down in J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States. The law may improperly delegate legislative authority to the Secretary of the Treasury without providing an intelligible principle to direct the Secretary’s actions. A search for “intelligible principle” on Enfacto offers J.W. Hampton as the top result, and shows other relevant cases such as the more recent Whitman v. American Trucking Association (2001) among the top results. Take a quick glance at that, just in case anyone asks.
On a recent 8 hour car ride from Michigan to Ithaca, New York, I happened to end up in a car with a couple of Harry Potter fanatics who subjected me to 16 hours round trip worth of Harry Potter books on tape. It’s appropriate, then, that some Harry Potter weirdos used Enfacto to do some legal research on behalf of their philosopher’s stone JK Rowling. Yes, come to Enfacto to learn about what the courts have said about copyright law. No, you can’t make me care about any of the characters except Hermione.
Does Sarah Palin not know any U.S. Supreme Court cases but Roe v. Wade? The media has put the spotlight on our politicians’ knowledge of the law as of late. When I heard about the purported Palin gaffe, I had to ask myself: Could you name off the top of your head some Supreme Court decisions that you disagree with? I wasn’t too quick to the punch myself.
Obvious members of the anti-canon are Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred Scott, and Korematsu v. United States. Then there are those decisions loved by some and hated by others, such as Roe v. Wade, Lochner v. New York, and Griswold v. Connecticut. If I were a politician, I think I could navigate these trecherous waters, but you’d have to give me a second to think about it.
It’s great to see the myriad ways people use Enfacto to educate themselves and their friends on the law. On policywank, we’ve got someone using Enfacto to educate their friends and Sarah Palin about their own personal take on the most shameful Supreme Court decision. A student is researching the development of the law surrounding housing segregation for a college history paper. And a high school history teacher makes the full-text of Marbury v. Madison to his students so they can read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions from the primary source.
Hello, friends, Enfacto.com Alpha has launched with our alpha search and U.S. Supreme Court cases. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
I just spent most of the last two days at the IGOTF non-conference. The meeting was both interesting and not too productive. On the other hand, it seems that it may have resulted in enough organization to yield tangible fruit in the not-to-distant future. We’ll have to see what happens in the next few months. My most liberal estimate is that we are at the very least a year away from a free, comprehensive, open, uniform, standards-compliant, well-documented repository of law. But hey, if a bunch of geeks could collaborate to make things like the linux kernel, I’m sure that a different bunch of geeks can make this happen. Of course, this one will involve a lot more talking to non-geeks than creating an free operating system, but Carl is the best person to lead the effort and given his previous accomplishments he just might be able to turn this into reality. Viva la open-source revolucion!
Rhymes, echoes and variations of the idea that it is hard to believe that the US with all its resources and infrastructure does not have a publicly accessible repository of its laws at all levels of government came up in several conversations. Of course, this idea is precisely what drives the existence of IGOTF and public.resource.org, but it is still one worth considering. When we were first considering starting Sonya Labs I was myself ideologically appalled by the fact that the only reliable way to access case law data is by paying for a subscription service. On the other hand, from several conversations I had, it seems that the “common wisdom” of DC is that the niche is so specific and within the confines of a big industry that the best way is to have it implemented is privately.
I can see how one could draw this conclusion. It is mostly lawyers and other members of the legal industry would be the ones to make use of such a resource and it is true that it being done privately could have benefits. Especially if it is costly and difficult to run the repository. This was likely the case in the 80s and maybe even the 90s, but with the current status of technology it certainly is not so. The main difficulty is just policy: courts and legislatures have to agree on formats and systems and if they do then the problem would become fairly trivial and cheap.
Of course, all this says nothing of the ethical elephant in the room. The law should be publicly available to everyone. Some may even argue that the law is publicly available to everyone, just not in electronic form. Bollocks. The ubiquity of the internet in our lives demands that publicly available resources are also electronically available. May the seal beat the elephant!
My perception of the state of affairs is that the best way to convince the powers that be that this sort of goal is feasible and has an audience is to start doing it. To this end there are four main problems that need to be addressed:
1. data availability and uniformity
2. effectively distribution of efforts
3. document identification
4. privacy issues
We’ll just have to live with 1. The best we can do is whenever a new set of data becomes available through some source (e.g. a court’s website starts publishing opinions) we need to be there ready to incorporate that into the repository. The better solutions we have to 2. the easier this becomes.
In the interest of brevity, I will save my thoughts about the other 3 for my next post.
Us. We at Sonya is and will be happy to contribute programming hands to this effort.
You. Join the IGOTF mailing list if you’d like to help.
Oh yeah… and I got us a giant seal of approval fridge magnet, which we had been needing. And you thought that the linux logo was the cutest possible. Ha. This one is cuter and a pun. Thanks, Carl!
