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Saturday, February 22, 2003
Three law firms launch topical sites Lawyers in Maryland, New York and Texas each recently launched Web sites that share one trait in common – they focus on specific areas of law. -- LoanLawyer.com is the site of Gaithersburg, Md., solo Jeffrey P. Marston. It focuses on mortgage banking and real estate finance, and includes a periodic newsletter on mortgage banking and real estate. -- The Debt Relief Law Center of New York is from New York City lawyer Jay S. Fleischman. Aimed at debtors, it has information on filing for bankruptcy, alternatives to bankruptcy, facing foreclosure and dealing with creditors. -- Social Security Disability is new from the Dallas, Texas, firm Kraft & Associates. It includes a library of articles on SSD law and links to related resources elsewhere on theWeb. Friday, February 21, 2003
A blogger not to miss on legal technology Way back in 1995, Dennis Kennedy started a Web site called EstatePlanningLinks.com. On that site in 1997, he put a link to an article I wrote surveying estate planning resources on the Internet. Dennis no longer has anything to do with the estate planning site he founded, having moved on to bigger and better things, and my estate planning article is horribly out of date, yet to this day, it remains one of the most visited pages on my Web site, and EstatePlanningLinks remains one of the largest referrers of visitors to my site. I say all this to emphasize that Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and legal technology expert in St. Louis, Mo., has been a significant influence in the ever-evolving relationship between lawyers and the Web. Thus it was with interest and delight that I learned that he has joined the blogger ranks with DennisKennedy.blog, where he will offer his musings on legal technology, technology law, and whatever else strikes him. Knowing Dennis' track record, I am certain this will be a valuable site. Directory lists LL.M. programs worldwide What? Haven't had enough of law school? LLM-Guide.com claims to be the most comprehensive directory on the Internet of master of laws programs, listing more than 370 postgraduate law programs in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia/New Zealand. The guide is published by Benjamin & Johannes Kroymann, Berlin, Germany. Court's archive documents 19th century slavery lawsuits In 1819, a woman slave named Winny filed a lawsuit in St. Louis Circuit Court that would establish an important judicial precedent. Winny sought freedom for herself and her children, charging one Phebe Whitesides with trespass, assault and battery and false imprisonment. On Feb. 13, 1822, a jury agreed and the court declared Winny and her children free. Whitesides appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, which upheld the verdict, establishing as law that slaves who had once resided in a free territory or state were to be freed. Between 1814 and 1860, nearly 300 of these freedom suits were filed in the St. Louis court. Now, thanks to that court's Historical Records Project, the records of these freedom suits are available online. They include Winny v. Whiteside as well as the original Dred Scott case. The files displayed here show the original, tattered, handwritten papers, among them an array of petitions, affidavits, depositions, summonses, motions, jury instructions, and evidentiary documents, all documenting these petitioners' fights for freedom. The freedom cases are the latest addition to the project's Web site, but by no means all it contains. The archive includes all the court's records from 1804 to 1875, most of which involve, as the site itself describes it, "civil suits brought by ordinary men and women pursuing justice in disputes over debts, damages and broken promises." But another collection worthy of note is devoted to Lewis and Clark. It consists of 82 court actions in which Meriwether Lewis, William Clark or other members of their Corps of Discovery were parties or prominent actors. Most of these cases are disputes concerning promissory notes, debts, and the payment and assignment of notes and debts. Monday, February 17, 2003
Census Bureau releases two useful statistical reports While the Web is useful to lawyers for legal research, it is even more so for non-legal research -- for finding the facts a lawyer can use to back up the legal argument. One of the best sources on the Internet for pure facts is the U.S. Census Bureau, which recently added two reports that are brimming with data that help draw a clearer picture of who we are. Most recent is the Statistical Abstract of the United States, published Feb. 11, which is a portrait of the U.S. in numbers. Its 30 sections cover population, vital statistics, health, education, law enforcement and the courts, human services, employment, prices, spending, construction, manufacturing, and much more. Here, for example, you can learn that, between 1980 and 2000, the murder rate in this country dropped by almost half and the number of burglaries dropped by an even greater percentage. The report provides a wealth of practical information. Also here is the 2002 Census of Governments, published Jan. 15. Taken every five years, this census covers three major subjects: government organization, public employment and government finance. This report is the first of the three, covering government organization. It presents an amazingly detailed overview of the 87,576 governmental units in the U.S., which, beside the U.S. and the states, includes counties, municipalities, townships, school districts, and special districts. Sunday, February 16, 2003
Off again, on again: LLRX publishes anew After LLRX.com announced last week that it would no longer publish updates, what did it do? Publish an update, of course. The highlight is Competitive Intelligence (CI) Resources for the Legal Community by LLRX co-founder Sabrina I. Pacifici, author of the beSpacific blog. Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time Silicon Valley.com's Dan Gillmor says today in a special report that Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, the San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, including the popular Blogger. |
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