Just in the interests of accuracy:
1. Case Western Reserve has, to my best knowledge, no specific
agreement with the Supreme Court, other than having signed a
standard Hermes agreement that other Hermes subscribers sign.
2. The Court "relies" upon Case Western to provide this valuable
FTP service, but does so in a way that it has no accountability when
things go wrong as you just described. The Court could quite easily
take responsibility for its own FTP site, as the Federal Circuit has
just done.
3. The Court no longer uses ATEX for slip opinions and has not done
so for many years, and, no longer uses ATEX for the final US Reports
(which are not on the Internet). So, I wonder which "recent" opinion
you tried to obtain. Also, I suspect the "script font" comes from
your particular word-processing setup. The WordPerfect 5.1 files when
imported into Word For Windows is fine.
4. Footnotes and WordPerfect have a well documented problem when
converting to ASCII ... but, I thought that more "recent" ASCII
files had resolved this problem. Of course, ASCII files also strip
out emphasis and italicization, which may be important in some
opinions.
5. Is it fair to criticize Cornell's LII (or CWR) which provides
this for "free"? ... In a sense, it is, since they wish to take the
credit. The accountability goes with the credit. When a major law
school's name is on the credit line, the expectation of quality is
higher. Cornell LII could use more disclaimers, if they do not wish
to check each opinion. Cornell LII could also become a direct Hermes
subscriber and run its own FTP site, and exercise quality control
over the opinions on the FTP site.
6. If you downloaded a 1991-1993 opinion, then you downloaded a slip
opinion that has since been superseded by the United States Reports.
Cornell LII does not clearly inform its users of this not so
insignificant fact and has declined to make the disclaimer clearer or
to notify users of LII that the Supreme Court could, but does not,
also release electronic versions of the US Reports versions.
Alan
<---- Begin Included Message ---->
Cc: HALL-L@ALBERTUS.LAWLIB.UH.EDU
Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 09:43:40 -0500 (CDT)
From: dina@neosoft.com (Dina Dreifuerst)
Reply-To: dina@neosoft.com
Sender: owner-law-lib@ucdavis.edu
Subject: U.S. Supreme Court decisions - ALERT!
To: dina@neosoft.com
FYI -
I downloaded a recent opinion from the LII/Cornell site and found,
much
to my dismay, that the file did not include the footnotes from the
original
text. The attorney I pulled the case for found out about the
footnotes
when he read the LEXIS version of the decision.
LII downloads their material from Case Western Reserve University,
who
makes the opinions available under an agreement with the Supreme
Court.
Apparently, in the process of converting the original ATEX files to
ASCII
and cleaning them up, the footnotes are being stripped from the text.
So, download at your own risk. You can get a complete decision from
Case
Western's ftp site <ftp.cwru.edu>, but you must choose between
ASCII-ORIG
(footnotes & garbled formatting) or WordPerfect (footnotes & script
font).
The ASCII directory contains "filtered" versions of the decisions
which
cleans up the formatting and strips the footnotes from the text.
HTH,
Dina Dreifuerst, Law Librarian
Clements, O'Neill, Pierce & Nickens (713) 654-7600
1000 Lousiana, Suite 1800 (fax) 654-7690
Houston TX 77002-5009 dina@neosoft.com
<---- End Included Message ---->
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