Shecter on the Absence of Headings in California Statutes

Robb Shecter, Esq., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has posted If Only California Statutes had Names, at the Weblaws.org Blog.

In this post, Robb comments on the absence of leadlines — also called section headings or section rubrics — from the official versions of California statutes and the implications in terms of cost and usability.

Shecter on Making the California Laws Easy to Read

Robb Shecter, Esq., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has posted Making the California Laws Easy to Read, at the Weblaws.org Blog.

In this post, Robb shows a screenshot of the new version of the California Codes that he is developing on the Weblaws.org platform. He says recent development of the Weblaws.org version of the California Codes is aimed at improving readability and navigation.

Robb also writes that the next steps of the the Weblaws.org California Codes development process will include adding many of the features of OregonLaws.org, including:

• Print feature
• Citations to sources
• Legal news
• Interlinked & related statutes
• Smart search

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information on Robb’s approach to online legal publishing and free access to law, please see Robb’s VoxPopuLII post entitled The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services, and my post entitled WebLaws.org: What’s Next for This New Resource from Robb Shecter?

New from Robb Shecter: Quisitive App for U.S. Trademark Search

Robb Shecter, J.D., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has released Quisitive, a new iPhone/iPad app that enables searches for U.S. trademarks, as well as research into trade names, branding, and U.S. trademark and copyright law.

According to the Quisitive press materials, Quisitive searches current “data from the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) TESS & TARR databases.”

Future plans for the app include adding commentary “from branding & intellectual property experts,” as well as “name screening against several common law data sources.”

For more information, please see the Quisitive Web site.

Shecter Wins CivicApps for Greater Portland Best Idea Award

Robb Shecter, creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has won the 2010 CivicApps for Greater Portland Best Idea Award.

Robb won for his proposal called Community-Contributed Datasets, of which his OregonLaws.org legal glossary is an example.

Click here for Robb’s discussion of his proposal.

Please join me in congratulating Robb!

HT @lawlib.

WebLaws.org: What’s Next for This New Resource from Robb Shecter?

WebLaws.org is a new, free legal information resource — with added functions available for a fee — providing access to the statutes of multiple U.S. states, and created by Robb Shecter.

Robb is well known as the developer of OregonLaws.org, the free access to law site for Oregon statutes, legal news, and Web services that improve access to those sources, including research trails, a corpus search, a legal glossary, and a “Law Robot” that automatically retrieves full text of statutes in response to a citation number.

Robb accepts suggestions for developing the site here, and discusses his development approach in his post The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services, at the VoxPopuLII blog, published by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

Currently, WebLaws.org features the following content and services:

• All of the content and services of OregonLaws.org;
• New York statutes and legal news, with a research trail;
• An archive/public repository, that currently contains five editions of the Oregon Revised Statutes; and
• An API.

Last week, Robb kindly shared with me his plans for further development of WebLaws.org. In the coming months, he hopes to add the following content and functions to the site:

• Cross-jurisdiction searching via an LCSH [Library of Congress Subject Heading]-based ontology. Each jd [jurisdiction] will have a mapping or adapter between its terms and the LCSH allowing meaningful semantic searches across many states. There’ll also be an optional LCSH-centric view of the site for people browising jd’s that they’re not familiar with.
• Adding LCSH’s to the legal glossary to allow subject-based filtering, and context for the result.
• Finishing the NY site ["New York laws, statutes, and news"] to the same level of quality as Oregon [OregonLaws.org].
• Figuring out a way to adequately present CA [California] laws even though the legislature doesn’t provide “leadlines” (titles) of the actual sections.
• Creating a feed for NY listing upcoming changes to the statutes.
• Creating an archive of older NY statute revisions.
• Creating 3–4 iPhone apps: legal glossary, Oregon statutes, NY statutes, etc. I’ll post a couple screen shots to my blog.
• Developing more web APIs to give access to the content. (I currently have one available, which I’ve listed at Programmable Web: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/weblaws.
• Creating subject-area micro-sites (e.g., Oregon bicycle law) which would be edited by attorneys and cull together references to legal resources.
• Better automate the inclusion of relevant secondary sources.
• Visualization of the structure of laws — this is something I got started with, but it hasn’t been a necessity. I’ve got the ontologies fully OO modeled; I just need to find some good vis. libraries.

Many thanks to Robb for sharing these exciting plans, with which we wish him much success.