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 recently accepted an invitation from MetaEzra–blog on all things related to Cornell University–to participate in a panel discussion of the 08-09 New Student Reading Project selection. Incoming students to Cornell read a selected book over the summer, so what they meet in the fall, deep, intellectual conversations replace heavy-petting and makeout sessions.
This time around, they’re reading Lincoln at Gettysburg, a choice I presume meant to tease out comparisons to the present political moment. The panel consists of twenty-something Cornell graduates involved in national politics. One guy is the national volunteer organizer for Obama; another guy is managing editor for the American Spectator and commentator on Fox News. I rep the federal judiciary and Sonya Labs, ya heard?
Editor-in-Chief Matt Nagowski said something about wanting from me a perspective slightly detached from the prevailing winds of the campaign year. The judiciary is often portrayed as the politically neutral third branch of government. Judges have lifetime appointment. And the application of the law is portrayed as a neutral, scientific process.
Law is often expressed as the accumulated wisdom of civilization; therefore, progress comes slow. This, of course, attempts to justify the process of law. On the other hand, reason provides the foundation for law as an inquiry, therefore reason is expected to prevail in the long run. Often, a new set of facts will show how courts stretched an old legal rule beyond the rationale that justifies it. The new decision will then wipe away the old rule by reasoning from underlying principles.
As you know, faithful reader, sanity has not prevailed in the industry of legal research… but it will, naturally. I’ve read some hand-wringing in the blogosphere concerned with the conservatism of law and lawyers in adopting new tools. Using the established tools lends credibility, authority, and a fall guy. No one ever got fired for using IBM!
However, law is done by judges who stick around forever, doing law the same way. Legal research, on the other hand, is done by young associates and law clerks who cycle in and out quickly. In other words, in law, the judge himself is an entrenched barrier to change. Legal research lacks a comparable wall to climb.
See, in law school, the use of precedent, the understanding of the structure of law, etc, are all learned, but they also jive with some sense of fairness and rational governance that we have in our heads, just walking around. In law school, too, lawyers-to-be learn about how legal research is done, but that process doesn’t cohere with any intuition about how research ought to be done.
The new case of legal research presents a novel set of facts. In the old days, Westlaw and Lexis sat firmly on the notion that research generally was a gigantic pain and a logistical nightmare. Young lawyers today have used Google, so they know what’s possible in terms of the ease with which they can retrieve information. Therefore, we must wipe away the old rule that said Wexis was broken but still acceptable, because that was all we knew. The world has changed; irrationality cannot persist for long.
