Although thought by some to be an impossible task, the forwarded
message below from "The Law Source" shows that the nut on the
availability of US District Court cases on the WEB has been cracked
and, the the court USES A SEQUENCE NUMBER CITATION. The United States
District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi (with the
help of The University of Mississippi School of Law Library) is the
first of 94 US District Courts to make its cases available on the Web
and the second district court to make its cases available
electronically, the other court being the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania which has been running a BBS for a couple of years.
And, importantly, both courts are using a sequence number type of
citation:
For example, the Mississipi Court uses the folloing "ECS Filename"
94d0002p.msn.
ECS stands for Electronic Citation System, as initially proposed by a
Judicial Conference Committee and the Administrative Office of United
States Courts in 1991.
This ECS citation would be readily translated to the following ABA
Style Citation as proposed by the ABA Citation Issues Committee:
1994 NDMS 2
The ND of Mississippi is not using paragraph numbers, but, who knows?
We have a couple of questions:
Will the ND of Mississippi make electronic versions of their opinions
available to other publishers directly?
Will the popular Internet file transfer method, FTP, be implemented
as well?
Does the Clerk of the Court certify that the The University of
Mississippi School of Law Library versions are the same as those
available from the clerk?
If the other 93 district courts follow this court in the next few
weeks, we wonder if Thomson still thinks West is worth $3.4 billion?
On another note, one of the Circuit Court WEB sites appears to have
not posted any cases for April, as best as we can tell, and,
unfortunately, the BBS run by that Circuit is one of the hardest to
access. So, the Law Schools undertaking this activity, before
supplanting the Courts, should make sure that they can sustain the
effort. In addition, this evening, most of the other Circuit WEB
sites were overloaded and not accessible. As bells and whistles are
added, this increases the effort required to sustain the offering,
and, if successful, overwhelm the systems, in the end resulting in
limited access.
Congrats to the U of Mississippi and the ND of Mississippi.
<---- Begin Included Message ---->
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 18:02:39 -0500
From: "The Law Source (D. Robert Wilkins, Esq.)"
<LawSrce@ix.netcom.com>
Reply-To: net-lawyers@lawlib.wuacc.edu
Sender: net-lawyers@lawlib.wuacc.edu
To: lewrose@arentfox.com
The first web site featuring full-text U.S. District Court opinions
has
appeared on the Internet, at the following site:
http://sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu/~llibcoll/ndms/
The announcement at the site is as follows: "The opinions of the
District
Court for the Northern District of Mississippi since October 1994 are
brought to you by The University of Mississippi School of Law
Library, in
cooperation with the United States District Court for the Northern
District
of Mississippi. All cases are in full text on the Web, or can be
downloaded
in RTF or Wordperfect format. The files to download are located at
the
beginning of each case." Key word search capabilities are under
construction.
This site will be included in the next issue of our extensive legal
resource
site catalogue publications, the INTERNET LEGAL GUIDE series and
LEGAL
RESOURCES VIA THE INTERNET newsletter. For more information about
our legal
resource site catalogues, see our web site at:
http://thelawsource.com.
*********************************************************************
***
D. Robert Wilkins, Esq.
THE LAW SOURCE
157 Flying Cloud Isle
Foster City, California 94404
1-800-KEY-LAWS (voice)
1-415-345-1083 (fax)
LawSrce@ix.netcom.com
LawSource@aol.com
Publishers of: LEGAL RESOURCES VIA THE INTERNET monthly
newsletter
INTERNET LEGAL GUIDE series of publications
FREE Sample copies available
*********************************************************************
***
---------------------------------------------------------------
List owners: Lewis Rose, lewrose@arentfox.com
Message Archives: http://ftplaw.wuacc.edu/listproc
Washburn's WashLawWEB, a comprehensive legal research site:
http://lawlib.wuacc.edu/washlaw/washlaw.html
<---- End Included Message ---->
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Alan D. Sugarman Federal Appeals on Disc tm CD-ROM ::
:: President Opinions of US Courts of Appeals ::
:: 1993 to Date - All Circuits ::
:: HyperLaw, Inc. Registered Trademark ::
:: P.O. Box 1176 DO NOT SHORT CIRCUIT YOUR CLIENTS ::
:: New York, NY 10023 ::
:: sugarman@hyperlaw.com 212-787-2812 212-496-4138(fax) ::
:: ::
:: http://www.hyperlaw.com ::
:: ::
:: /// /// /// [R] ::
:: /// /// /// ::
:: /// /// /// ::
:: //////////////// /// ::
:: //////////////// /// ::
:: /// /// /// ::
:: /// /// /////////// ::
:: /// /// /////////// ::
:: ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:49:12 PST