Saturday 30 May 2020

Opening America Up Again cdc.gov

The CDC had created a 60 page + document on reopening, titled "CDC Activities and Initiatives Supporting the COVID-19 Response and the President’s Plan for Opening America Up Again" for public distribution (62 page pdf). According to the document: "This document briefly summarizes CDC’s initiatives, activities, and tools in support of the Whole-of-Government." response to COVID-19.


Hat tip: the GovDocs listserv and Ben Amata, govdocs librarian at Cal State Sacramento

Thursday 28 May 2020

Cambridge Legal Studies freely available

Cambridge University Press has announced that in honor of the 40th volume of their publication Legal Studies, they are offering free access to the most recent issue until June 15.
Highlights from this issue include:
 Contextual review: the instinctive impulse and unstructured normativism in judicial review by Dean R Knight *Winner of the SLS Annual Conference Best Paper Prize 2019
 Anti-money laundering regulation and the art market by Saskia Hufnagel and Colin King
 A vindicatory approach to tortious liability for mistakes in assisted human reproduction by Andrea Mulligan.

Wednesday 27 May 2020

GPO Webinar Offerings

SUMMER LEARNIN’- HAD ME A BLAST: FREE WEBINARS FROM GPO

Check out these free, upcoming educational webinars from the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO). There's something for everyone. 

Wednesday 13 May 2020

2020 Law Graduates: access to Lexis, Westlaw and BloombergLaw

Law school graduates have extended use of Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg. Here's the specific info for each database:
  • Lexis Advance: Graduates have continuing access to their law school accounts until Dec. 31, 2020. Graduates who log on after July 5, 2020 will receive an offer for extended access to selected Lexis products (e.g., Law360, Lexis Practice Advisor). 
  •  Westlaw Edge: Graduating students may extend access through TR’s Grad Elite program. Registered students will get 60 hours per month full access for 6 months post-graduation through Nov. 30, 2020.
  • Bloomberg Law: 2020 graduating law students will have unrestricted access to Bloomberg Law® through June 1, 2021.

Monday 4 May 2020

US Supreme Court to livestream oral arguments

Today, Monday May 4 at 10 a.m., the justices of the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com and for the first time will livestream the oral arguments. Click to tune in to the live audio stream from CSpan.

Friday 1 May 2020

US Supreme Court rules in favor of PublicResource.org

The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Carl malamud's Public.Resource.Org in its case against the state of Georgia. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the state of Georgia can't claim copyright over its annotated code. State publications are now unambiguously in the public domain. The opinion is available here.
The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. There were two dissenting opinions: one authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Breyer, and the other authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and joined by Justice Breyer.
At issue in the case was the Official Code of Georgia, Annotated, published exclusively by LexisNexis. The sate contracts with LexisNexis to publish the Georgia state code as well as to write and publish the annotations under the supervision of Georgia’s Code Revision Commission. The state of Georgia argued that the annotations are copyrightable.
The majority of the court found that the involvement of the state commission in overseeing the annotation process means that annotations can be considered a product of the legislative process and, in a sense, to be authored by legislators. “Although Lexis expends considerable effort preparing the annotations, for purposes of copyright that labor redounds to the Commission as the statutory author,” Roberts wrote. He concluded that “whatever work [a] judge or legislator produces in the course of his judicial or legislative duties is not copyrightable.”
The decision is an important win for PublicResource.org and for the open government movement. But, a Law360 article on the decision adds, "What is guaranteed is that publishers who work with governmental representatives will be looking closely at their contracts and relationships, with the court's new ruling in hand, to assess the structure and incentives that surround the creation of annotations, summaries and other analysis of the law."