Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded, Elmer Masters of CALI, and Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation yesterday had an interesting conversation on Twitter about appropriate syntax and formats for online legal resources, focusing on Markdown, AsciiDoc, and EPUB.
They kindly agreed to let me to make a storify of their discussion, which is now available here.
Thanks to Waldo, Elmer, and Eric.
Fastcase, the online legal research service, has begun publishing e-books in EPUB and .mobi formats, and the first set of Fastcase e-books consists of advance sheets of U.S. state and federal court decisions, according to Sean Doherty’s post, Fastcase’s Free E-Books May Disrupt Legal Book Publishing at Law Technology News, and the post, Fastcase eBooks: Advance Sheets are a Glimpse Into the Future, on Fastcase’s Legal Research Blog.
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”
According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.
Fastcase’s adaptation of e-Book technology developed by CALI represents a notable example of knowledge-sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the legal informatics community.
For more information, please see the Fastcase blog post, Sean Doherty’s post, Bob Ambrogi’s post, and Greg Lambert’s post.
For more information about Free Law Reporter, please see John Mayer’s post, The Free Law Reporter: Open Access to the Law and Beyond, at VoxPopuLII.
Elmer Masters, Esq., of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has posted The Future of the (Case)Book Is the Web, at the CALI Spotlight Blog.
In this post, Elmer advocates the publication of free and open legal casebooks on the free Web, using the open EPUB format. He describes CALI’s eLangdell legal open educational resource service as an example of this approach.
For more information, please see the complete post.
Scott Cromar of the University of Illinois College of Law has created free-of-charge versions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in ePUB and Kindle e-book formats.
These e-books are published on the site of the Credit Slips blog.
These publications are the latest in a series of free e-book publications of U.S. primary legal materials in the open ePUB format. These publications include CALI’s Free Law Reporter and the joint Legal Information Institute-CALI Federal Rules E-Books.
John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.
In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.
Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.
The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.
Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”
In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.
Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.
CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has launched The Free Law Reporter (FLR), a new, free, online source of full text U.S. federal and state court decisions, published from January 2011 to the present.
Click here for a list of the content.
FLR contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. FLR appears to be the second service to use RECOP data. The first appears to have been John Joergensen’s State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project, at Rutgers-Camden Law.
The developers of FLR appear to be John Mayer and Elmer Masters of CALI.
FLR offers access to individual court decisions and to ebooks, in the open EPUB format, containing weekly compilations of court decisions from particular U.S. jurisdictions. Click here for 1FLRAlaska.epub, the first FLR ebook compilation from Alaska state courts. According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks are available from the FLR Website and from CALI’s Legal Education Commons.
John Mayer also says: “you can do a search for cases [in FLR] and then download all of the results as an epub file.”
According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks:
can be read on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Amazon Kindle support is possible through third party conversion programs like Calibre while we research more direct paths to Kindle support.
FLR uses the Solr open source search engine. Click here for more details on the technology behind FLR.
Click here for Courtney Minick’s informative post about FLR at Justia’s Onward blog.
Click here for Bob Ambrogi’s informative post about FLR at his LawSites blog.
