Confirmation Hearings Podcast

Here's the Supreme Court Watch Podcast from Alliance for Justice, featuring (per its press release) "live blogging [of the Roberts confirmation hearings] to provide response and commentary in real time, as well as daily wrap-up podcasts to provide further in-depth discussion and analysis available to listeners at any time, anywhere."

First Internet Era Nominee And Those Infernal Bloggers

For those who missed it, Nico Pitney of Think Progress captured Senator Grassley's comments about the nefarious blogosphere and its, in his mind, unfortunate but now unavoidable role in the judicial confirmation process. Good for a laugh. Sez Nico: "Bloggers, always characterizing documents and opining! Why won’t they just stop paying attention and let Senators hold the trite 15-minute hearings they really want?"

Cross Posted Because This Is Too. Darned. Cool.

As I just posted at B&B, you can now

Search the published opinions of Judge John G. Roberts, courtesy of the folks at askSam:

Search and analyze the published opinions of Supreme Court nominee, Judge John G Roberts. On July 19, 2005, Judge John G. Roberts was nominated by President George W. Bush to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court left by the retirement of Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In two years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Roberts has helped decide about 120 cases and written 49 published opinions.

Via ResourceShelf, via Genie Tyburski.

I'm all a-tingle about this one because it's a brilliant marketing move if, like askSam, you offer information management tools, and because it fills a gap in access to and searchability of these opinions. To the extent judicial opinions are freely available online, they're generally PDFs or Word documents. As far as I know this is the first time someone has aggregated all the published Roberts opinions and made them freely and easily searchable.

Talk Talk

Thanks, Mary Hodder and Ross Mayfield, for bringing us the Speaker's Wiki. Add yourself, add your event. This is a great resource, put it to good use.

Discussing The Supreme Court Vacancy, Take 2

With all due respect (and copious amounts of respect are due) to Doc and Dennis, I am about the last person who can or should be sounding off about the monumentally important issue of who should succeed Justice O'Connor, as I am about as woefully underinformed about our options as a legal professional can be. Off the top of my head, I'll wholeheartedly agree with Dennis that the country would be well served by Judge Posner. The biggest knock I hear on Judge Posner is his age, 66 — a milestone I've considered most youthful and invigorated ever since my dad hit it earlier this year. As Slate says, Posner is "brilliant, unpredictable, and generally viewed as one of the country's leading legal minds." Anyone who has seen fit to embrace blogging within the last eight months is plenty young enough to be appointed in my book. I'll also disagree with Dennis that Dennis himself would not make an excellent candidate. I can think of no one better suited to maximize (or perhaps max out) the Court's technology budget and, in trickle-down manner, RSS-ify the entire textual, audio, and visual output of the country's judicial system — something I think we would all find most welcome. And the present and future Justices Kennedy could work out the whole name multiplicity thing in in short order.

But as I said, I'm not the person to whom you should be listening about the identity and qualifications of the next member of the Court. So maybe the biggest contribution I can make (as is often the case) is to point you to who and what I'm reading in an effort to become better informed on the subject:

• Slate, The Supreme Court Shortlist
• Slate, A Different Shortlist
• Kos, (Poll) Who will Bush nominate to be the next Supreme Court justice?
• (out of date but still informative) Jurist: Honorable Mentions
• Writing two years ago, Professor Jack Balkin had more reasons why Judge Posner should be Chief Justice (but he harbored no illusions)
• Red Herring, Tech Loses Ally in O’Connor (via Copyfight)
• Article III Groupie, Potential Replacements for Justice O'Connor (I see no reason why, in addition to his or her myriad other qualifications, the next Justice could not be a Judicial Superhottie)

There are also a great many blogs that are consumed with the nomination and confirmation process. I'm probably just scratching the surface here:

• Goldstein & Howe, The Supreme Court Nomination Blog
• The National Women's Law Center's Nomination Watch
• The Republican National Lawyers Association's Judicial Confirmation Blog
• Redstate.org's Confirm Them (and see this Reuters story pointed to from there, titled Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight)
• I'm a big fan of Nomination Nation
• The Hedgehog recommends Real Clear Politics for its "good commentary and informed speculation"

Numbers

Blawg.org: "There are 944 Links and 167 Categories in our database."

Denise re: fair use and the future

I've enjoyed reading the discussion here and elsewhere this week about the uncertain and unpredictable nature of copyright law today and whether and why it matters. (Some links aggregated here.) To answer Marty's earlier question to Dennis, the reason I worry about this stuff is to me it's another example of a problem we've historically created and relatively recently identified, but haven't solved and now threaten to foist upon our kids and grandkids.

Copyright law is like an aging house. Though it may still serve its central purpose of providing a roof overhead for its owners, its infrastructure and plumbing have reached the end of their useful lives, and need to be updated if the whole structure is to remain sound for decades to come. The areas most desperately in need of renovation are:

1. The scope of copyright. What does and does not need to be protected in today's day and age, and when should protection attach?
2. The definition of infringement. Where should the focus be, e.g., on copying, or as Ernie Miller suggests, distribution? Certain forms of copying and distribution deserve to be treated differently than others from a policy standpoint, and they should be definitively carved out of the definition.
3. The requirement of harm. In cases where an activity is technically infringing but actually confers economic benefits on the rights holder and cultural benefits on society, there should be more roadblocks to a legal recovery than are in place today.

How do we know the current copyright structure really needs this remodel? Dennis' post is illustrative, and one could devote many hours (indeed, many already have and regularly do) to chronicling similar examples. The cornerstones of "thievery" and "piracy" have been eroded by technology and utility, and by the old fair use standbys of news, commentary, art, education, and science. When your child takes something from a store, you explain why that was wrong and take her back to apologize and return it. When she mods her Xbox so she can back up her games to its hard drive and improve its performance, a similar trip to Redmond is the last thing on your mind. You're too busy considering her prospects and potential.

Who are the general and sub-contractors of this remodel? We all are. Participatory journalism gets a good deal of attention, but with the kind of unprecedented, unmediated, and distributed influence on the lawmaking process becoming possible today, "participatory law" is just as important, if not more so. Conversations like this one can become part of the analysis, and so can ideas generated around Creative Commons, collective licensing, and collaborative editing of scholarly texts. Keep hacking and hammering folks, and just maybe our children will inherit fewer constraints and uncertainties, and a better world.

Dear Congressman _______: Blog With Us

I'm thinking of sending my Congressman an open letter (to be posted here) suggesting that they engage in a dialog with legal blogs about pending legislation in general and the 'Simon Barsinister' weather bill in particular. Maybe you would consider sending a similar letter to your representatives (and posting the letter on your blog).

Dear Congressman ____:

I am a registered voter. My home and business (a law firm) are located in your District. I also write for two blogs, The Trademark Blog and Between Lawyers.

You may be prepared to agree that the US Congress sometimes passes bad laws. There are of course many explanations, but one is the role of special interests, who are able to both hide in smoke-filled rooms and hide in plain sight. They count on the fact that opponents will not be able to mobilize against them, in time or perhaps ever, simply because information about the pending legislation was not disseminated effectively to the right group (I think, for better or worse, the recent Bankruptcy Bill may possibly be an example of legislation that snuck through in broad daylight).

A problem is that only groups that seem to be motivated to effectively track pending legislation are the special interest groups themselves.

However besides the special interests and the uninterested is a 'general interest' group of unknown size and influence. They would understand nuances and implications and would be prepared to communicate their views to their elected representatives. For want of a better term, they are 'concerned citizens.'

I think that this is a group that mainstream media has failed.

I encourage you, in your special role as 'expert federal legislator,' to consider participating in a somewhat novel communications network for creating a conversation about legislation with concerned citizens: legal blogs.

While you cannot avoid stories about the 'blogosphere' these days, there is less general coverage of blogs written by legal professionals (practitioners, academics, students, paralegals) (I learned what little detail I could about the bankruptcy bill not from the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times, but from lawyer-bloggers).

Legal blogs represent a new type of forum for discussing proposed legislation. It is not a gathering of extremist constituencies, nor is it a 'town hall' meeting of the uninformed. It is a good place to get good feedback from an articulate, broad spectrum of voters.

There is now an opportunity for you as an elected representative to reach out and participate in a conversation about a new odd piece of proposed legislation.

I refer to Senate Bill 786 titled “A bill to clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, and for other purposes.” In short, it prohibits the National Weather Service from disseminating weather information.

A collection of introductory links about the bill can be found here.

It is easy to come to the conclusion that this is a destructive bill intended solely to benefit a for-profit weather information provider that has contributed money to its sponsor. In other words, Washington at its worst.

If the bill is as bad as it seems, and it passes, then that represents one more bit of proof that 'the game is rigged.'

If the bill is not as bad as it seems, then we're interested in learning why it isn't.

But we and our readership can't make an informed opinion yet. May we look to you to 'set us straight'? May we look to your office for commentary, advice and analysis (for the purposes of posting on our website)?

We would also happily advise on setting up your office's RSS feed for legislative information ;-)

###

Directory of Congressional email addresses here.

Hacking The Law

Today brings news that a group of bloggers has submitted an amicus brief in the writ proceedings concerning Apple's efforts to discover the sources of certain rumor site stories. As far as I know this is the first time bloggers have banded together to use the legal process to weigh in on a pending legal issue — in addition to blogging about it, of course.
[Update] Thanks to xrlq for pointing out this may be the first case, but (by a few days) not the first time: Bloggers speak up in Apple case

Experiment: Request for Comments On Capital Records v. Naxos

Guest post regarding our Group Annotation thread. Kevin Heller of TechLawAdvisor responds:

You asked whether group annotation of legal cases would be useful. I say let's find out. I've created a wiki at legal.jot.com . where blawgers and others can help annotate legal decisions. I think this would be much more useful than linking to a pdf file of the decision.

It's also pretty easy to do. First, go to any case page and click the drop down menu title "more actions..." and select Edit Page in WYSIWYG (I assume most everyone is familiar with this). From there you will have access to the text to edit and annotate using the MS word like toolbar.

I've just uploaded, so let's get to work: Capital Records v. Naxos .

TechLawAdvisor.

U.S. Code Annotated -- Your Wish Is Granted

All right Marty, so maybe no one is annotating circuit court decisions, but you can get your U.S. Code, annotated at GovTrack.us -- just sign up to follow a particular piece of legislation pending in Congress, and you'll receive updates whenever the House or Senate takes action, or when anybody in the blogosphere mentions the legislation by name. Can court opinions be far behind?

By the way, I happen to agree with the Scobleizer that while the NYT Annotated site is pretty cool, Memeorandum is a better annotated news site -- it pulls comments from more than one news source, and it's a heckuva lot easier to read.

New Meaning To U.S. Code Annotated

Check out this 'annotated' version of the NY Times. Would this form of group annotation be a useful manner of presenting, for example, circuit court decisions? Hat tip, Micropersuasion.

Whole More Than Sum Of Parts

Aldo Castañeda writes the DistributedOpenSourceFinancing blog, maintains the law node at iPodder.org, and is a JD/MBA candidate at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts. He's also writing his legal thesis — on the very important topic of open standards in identity management systems — online:

This blog is the home of my legal thesis.

Consistent with "Open Principles"[1] I anticipate that by putting my work online and inviting public comment the finished product will be superior to the result from a "closed" drafting process.

[1] Open Source Licensing, Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law by Lawrence Rosen.

Aldo told me he initially decided to work on his thesis online because he and his mentor "had a heck of a time coordinating contact by phone." I think it's a fantastic idea, and if the topic intrigues you (here's some context), I'd encourage you to participate. It's great too to see more of this kind of collaborative, distributed approach being tried by those in the legal field.