Re the comments of Mary Brandt Jensen of Univ. Of Mississippi Law
School re USDC of Mississippi cases on Web:
First: I did not put two and two, that is Mary Brandt Jensen and
Mississippi, together. Thanks Mary, for doing this. Also, thanks
for not putting a copyright notice on your HTML files. Whether a
thin copyright or not, it is not appropriate where a publicly
supported law school does this as a quasi-surrogate for the court.
Second: You might monitor other methods to convert Word Perfect files
to HTML files. The method supplied to you is not at all optimal --
one reason being that the footnotes end up in a separate file and one
cannot print case easily with the footnotes.
1. RE source of cases.
>The Northern District of Mississippi has been running a phone
bulletin
>board for a couple of years. The University of Mississippi is
getting
>the opinions from the board.
I was not aware Mississippi was running a BBS. They are or at least
were not listed on the list distributed by the AO. I wonder if there
are other District Court BBB's running out there. If one calls a
court, one does not always get an accurate answer as to whether a BBS
is in operation!
2, FTP
>> Will the popular Internet file transfer method, FTP, be
implemented
>>as well?
>I think we have sort of. Our web assistant who is doing the
transfer
>tells me that what happens when you click on the wordperfect option
for
>a case it causes netscape to ftp the wordperfectfile to you. I'm
not
>enough of a web expert to know exactly how it works.
You have a file transfer mechanism. This requires one to first
download the full HTML file before one can donwload another version.
This creates an extra load on your server. But, one cannot get a
full listing of files in a directory with your method, and, moreover,
cannot use FTP programs to transfer groups of files. Emory hacked the
first problem by not putting an index.html file in the directory
containing the files, but UMiss did not do this hack, and one cannot
get a listing. FTP is an open access method -- and, also, if the
programs creating the HTML pages balk (more overhead on the system),
there is no way to gain direct access to the files. Hopefully, the
opinion servers such as the one you have built will have multiple
constituencies, and should be so designed. For example, to reduce
the load on your server it is in your interest to encourage mirror
sites, and ftp is a great way for someone else to mirror your site
and take the load of your server.
3. Integrity of Opinions
> >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?
>No. They just give us access and we run the Emory program to convert
>to html and do the name indexing.
Hopefully they will at some time. This becomes an issue if someone
other than the court starts to number paragraphs (a bad idea if not
done by the court).
4. Other District Courts.
>> 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?
>I think it will take more than a few weeks. We were able to do the
>ND because of the existence of their bulletin board. We don't think
>it will be so easy to do the SD because they are not already posting
>to a bulletin board.
You are correct, but, how many other "secret" bulletin board are
running out their on District Court computers. We have an AO report
that states that over 100 federal courts are running something called
ORS or opinion retreival systems ... but, no one at the AO will
identify even one of the 100 courts!!
But, we have been told that most opinions are in word perfect or
other electronic form. One reason we are proponents of FTP is that
it can be cumbersome for some court systems to set up a BBS, not
because it is difficult, but because phone lines, modems etc. have to
be set-up, and there are also security concerns (sometime, not valid
concerns), so the BBS's are frequently run on separate computers, and
then there are space issues, and the computers must run all the time
and modems hang etc. etc. For FTP, all the court needs in access to
the Internet, and a ftp site, either commercial (as is done by the
11th Circuit) or non-profit (as is done by U. Texas), and then the
court can very easily using public domain FTP programs copy the
opinion files from the court computers to the FTP site. This is
easier by orders of magnitude than running a BBS ... and cheaper for
users as well. Note that after the 11th Circuit started loading its
opinions on an FTP site, it was able to shut down its BBS system.
Once the opinins are on an FTP site, anyone including can easily
off-load the opinions and set up a WEB or mirror FTP site.
In the model we have in mind for this, the Court Clerk has control of
the FTP site, maintains the directories, and keeps a listing of
opinion files in each directory or sub-directory in a separate
index.txt file or other file. Eventually, the Court Clerk will
digitially "sign" the opinion files. It would be the responsiblity of
someone like the National Archives to periodically access the site
and create permanent archives.
Alan
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