Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
LLRXBu zz Tour of 50 State Web Sites
LLRXBu zz Archives : April 3, 2000 – Present
The Latest on Legal Research
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GrepLaw
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is the organization behind Greplaw, at http://grep.law.harvard.edu/. Who’s that? It is a research program dedicated to the exploration of cyberspace, with a goal of creating an interactive forum for the discussion of legal news affecting information technology.
And that forum appears to be quite active. The center column of GrepLaw’s front page list the latest news posts with links to related information and an option to read the other comments. Most recent subjects include Uncle Sam
stepping into ICANN and the Cato Institute’s digital copy protection forum. (It looks very much like Slashdot. Built on Slash?)
To check out all of the topics categories, click on the Topics link under GrepLaw in the left column. You can also try the Discussions link to check out the current active discussions. One other item on interest in the left column is the Older Stuff link which offers a way to search the archive. You can search the stories, comments or users while narrowing the search by author,
topic or section.
The column on the right is interesting too. It features links to news articles and case docs as well as CyberLawyer Profiles. Venture a little further downstream to the Fresh Catch, RealPlayer files. Timely, lots of community potential, easy to read.
The Buffalo Criminal Law Center sponsors a Web portal of online law resources at http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/resource.htm . The site features criminal law information from around the world as well as in the United States.
Countries are listed in alphabetical order starting with Argentina, Australia and Austria. Some countries, such as Finland, link to Penal Codes in English and others, such as Italy and Peru, provide the information in the country’s primary language. The listings are sparse for some countries, and while the titles of the sites usually say it all annotation would occasionally help.
Information from the United States includes Federal Materials such as the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Federal Rules of Evidence. It also includes Congressional materials as well as links to Federal and State Courts. Each state has a link to its criminal procedure codes and enforcement codes. The University of Oklahoma provides the criminal codes of the American Indian Nations.
The Buffalo Criminal Law Center also has models of criminal codes and code drafts along with International Criminal Law and Criminology links. Lots of stuff here on one easy-to- nav page. Worth a look.
Appellate Litigation Blog
Howard J. Bashman chairs the Appellate Group of a Philadelphia law firm and co-chairs the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Appellate Courts Committee. He also writes a column about appellate developments for a daily newspaper for lawyers. Oh, and he has started a Web blog focusing on appellate litigation at
http://www.appellateblog.blogspot.com/, to discuss decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Pennsylvania’s appellate courts.
Recent subjects on his new blog include career decisions, with pros and cons of being a sole practitioner or law professor. He has also recently written about the Federal Death Penalty, Megan’s Law and rulings on nuclear exposure cases. And he’s got an RSS feed. Woo!
http://appellateblog.blogspot.com/rss/appellateblog.xml
Crash Test Information
Crashtest.com (http://www.crashtest.com/default.htm) is fairly straightforward — it’s a site of information about car crash tests.
The front page provides a subject index of cars, from Acura to Volvo. Beneath that are “subtopics” — car models. The car models (in blue) are not clickable, but the car brands (in black) are. Click on a brand, and you’ll get a chart. The chart shows several different crash tests (from all over the world) and several different models (sometimes models are grouped by year, like HONDA ACCORD 82-85.) Performance of each model is noted by a color code. Not all models are noted for all tests.
You can click on each chart item for an explanation of that particular item. Click on the model name for information about a particular set of test.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of this site. There’s a frame setup where you can compare the crash ratings of three different cars. There’s also a searchable database of recalls, rollover listings, and safety news. Worth a look.
Jeeves Gets a New Look
News.com is reporting (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-936065.html) that AskJeeves has a new look — and they do; check it out at http://www.ask.com/.
The page is much cleaner now, with the focus on the query box and three tabs: Web Results, News Results, and Shopping Results. I did a search for “George Bush.” Unfortunately the search results are not as clear as the front page. The top of the results page provides the questions that Jeeves can
answer. Below that are sponsored links. (Jeeves, to their credit, DOES denote them as sponsored links.) Finally, web page results are presented.
Strangely, Ask Jeeves had no News results for “George Bush.” I thought maybe the quotes confused it so I tried again with the search Pakistan. Plenty of results there, providing title of story and URL, source, and date. The news search does not provide summary, nor does it appear to allow you to sort by date. A search for George Bush, sans quotes, found plenty of results. Hmm… Ask Jeeves appears to be searching the Moreover news headlines. Isn’t AltaVista already doing this?
Jeeves has also launched a “most popular” page like the Google Zeitgeist and the Lycos Top 50; it’s available at http://www.jeevesiq.com/docs/about/jeevesiq.html. Here you’ll find the most popular Web searches, the top news searches, and the top travel related searches for the previous week.
Mozilla Resources
One gallant reader sent me a ton of Mozilla-related links and resources. Check these out if you’re into Mozilla and want to soup it up a bit.
If you don’t mind getting “under the hood” check out
http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html for changing fonts and other preferences that aren’t available from the Preferences menu. The site at http://techaholic.net/ns7.html has information on customizing Netscape 7 (which as you may know is built on Mozilla.)
MozDev, at http://www.mozdev.org/, hosts over 70 projects related to Mozilla. Projects include an alternate user interface, a Mozilla/Blogger component, and a spellchecker. If you’re not looking for really advanced stuff, but just want a couple of hints, check out the page of keyboard shortcuts at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/moz_shortcuts.html.
If you want general Mozilla information, check out Hogarth’s Mozilla Resource at http://mozilla.weebeastie.net/ for a big resource collection, Blogzilla
(http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/) for the latest Mozilla news and information, and http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips, with tips and plugin pointers for Mozilla.