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legal citation command
I am a lawyer and one of the things that is frustrating about the internet is that there is a good deal of laws, regulations, codes, and government publications that are on the web but that are not easily pulled up by a simple citation search. So I was hoping someone could add a command to ubiquity so that when you enter in the actual legal citation it takes you to the relevant document.
For instance, if you enter 21 CFR 316.10 (that's the code of federal regulations for those who don't know) it should take you to the actual document - (either this page http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/wa..., this page http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_200..., or this page http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_200...).
This could also be accomplished for the federal register (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/) , the United States code (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/), Public Law numbers (http://thomas.loc.gov/bss/d110/d110la...), Supreme Court Cases (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/) etc. The legal community would greatly appreciate this move and I think it would generate a lot of buzz in that community for ubiquity. Plus, I would think that the coding would be pretty easy (but I'm not a coder).
To give you an idea of what sorts of things it could do check out - http://gsulaw2.gsu.edu/metaindex/ to see how various citation searches in different legal databases will direct you to certain documents.
Also, since I know that people that code this information may not be very knowledgeable about legal citations, I would be happy to work with anyone to get this implemented.
What are other peoples thoughts?
For instance, if you enter 21 CFR 316.10 (that's the code of federal regulations for those who don't know) it should take you to the actual document - (either this page http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/wa..., this page http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_200..., or this page http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_200...).
This could also be accomplished for the federal register (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/) , the United States code (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/), Public Law numbers (http://thomas.loc.gov/bss/d110/d110la...), Supreme Court Cases (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/) etc. The legal community would greatly appreciate this move and I think it would generate a lot of buzz in that community for ubiquity. Plus, I would think that the coding would be pretty easy (but I'm not a coder).
To give you an idea of what sorts of things it could do check out - http://gsulaw2.gsu.edu/metaindex/ to see how various citation searches in different legal databases will direct you to certain documents.
Also, since I know that people that code this information may not be very knowledgeable about legal citations, I would be happy to work with anyone to get this implemented.
What are other peoples thoughts?
I’m excited
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This is one of the best points
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So, wait, give me some infoz on US law: The CFR is ALL federal laws? Or do I need to include additional lookups? -
Inappropriate?Blipo, there are several different "laws" in the U.S. First, there is federal law as written by the U.S. Congress. These acts that are passed are published as Public Laws. The listing of public laws can be found here (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/plaws/index....)
As well as being organized as public laws, the passed acts are organized into a larger publication called the United States Code that lists all current laws. You could find the U.S. Code laws as published by the government printing office here - http://www.gpoaccess.gov/USCODE/index... and cornell has a website that also tries to give a more updated version of the code here - http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/.
Besides the laws that the U.S. Congress passes, there are also regulations as passed by the various administrative agencies of the United States. All of these regulations are first published as proposed rules with commentary in the Federal Register (the recent federal register publications all can be found here - http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/) and then once they are finalized are published in the Code of Federal Regulations (which can be found here http://www.gpoaccess.gov/CFR/INDEX.HTML).
Ideally, the extension in ubiquity would allow all you to enter a legal citation (such as 21 CFR 310.401) and it would take you to the relevant document (oh it would also be nice if the ubiquity command could take you to the relevant supreme court cases when you enter those citations as well. Supreme Court cases can be found here - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/).
Let me know if you have any other questions or need further information.1 Comment Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Okay, legal citations. So they can refer to public laws, codes, and federal regulations? If federal regulations are CFRs, what acronyms are the other two?
Supreme Court cases are going to take a bit more work. -
Inappropriate?So they can refer to public laws, codes, and federal regulations?
- yes depending what the citation is
If federal regulations are CFRs, what acronyms are the other two?
-The citations for the others are as follows:
Public Laws: Public laws citations usually appear as either "Pub.L. 107-006" or Pub. L. No. 107-6. The first number is the number of the Congressional Session (107), and the second number is the number of the law (6).
U.S. Code - the citation for the U.S. Code is 42 U.S.C. ยง 405 where 42 is the title of the part and 405 is the section within the part.
Federal Register - This is cited as either 52 Fed. Reg. 28843 or 52 FR 28843 where 52 is the volume of the Federal Register and 28843 is the page number.
Let me know if you need any further information.2 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Aww, I was just getting into this... ._.
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Sorry Blipo, I am a lawyer and a bit of a programmer so I did have a slight advantage. Knowing about AltLaw also made it easy.
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Inappropriate?Hey, hold off guys. You are going about this the hard way.
I already created a simple command called "legal-cite" that does what you are looking for. You should be prompted for a command subscription at:
http://www.keysquaremedia.com/
This command uses Altlaw to look up any cite in the U.S. Code, Supreme Court Cases, and West citations for federal appeals court cases. It doesn't include the CFR but I plan on expanding it to include regulations later.
Give it a try.
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this is one of the best points
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This is one of the best points
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Hello, I work on AltLaw.org, and I'm excited to see it integrated into Ubiquity. We would like to include additional legal references like the CFR, but need developers to help collect and reformat material that's available on the web. If you're interested, check out http://lawcommons.org/
Thanks, Stuart Sierra -
Inappropriate?Awesome! Any interested in expanding your legal cite command to include other functions?
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Inappropriate?Sure.
The obvious expansion is to add more source material (e.g., F.Supp. citations, CFR, etc.) but obviously this is highly dependent on the availability of websites that provide this kind of open data (and that they provide a search API or urls based on the citation.
Do you have any ideas for expanding the command other than widening the source documents it can access?1 Comment Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Probably not.
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Inappropriate?"Do you have any ideas for expanding the command other than widening the source documents it can access?"
- Do you mean other than adding other citations that would pull up other documents (like CFR and Fed. Reg.)? Well, it would be useful if a page cite could take you to the actual page cited within a decision. Also, what about this idea, if you highlighted a section in a case on Altlaw, it would put that highlighted section in correct citation format: Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 959, ("The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.") But I don't think Altlaw has page cites, but the general formatting would be useful.
I would love to brainstorm any other ideas since this is an area I am pretty interested in.
