Justia - Google for the Legal Crowd
Monday, June 30, 2008 at 06:34AM From AppScout:
Legal information can be difficult to find: You have to dig through piles of books, page through thick court decisions, or know a lawyer. Justiais a search engine that can help you find the court decisions and legal rights that matter to you. The service was designed to make digging through complex legal information as easy as a Google search and to open the door to everything from active dockets in front of federal courts to legal blogs and podcasts that might interest you.
Court decisions, position papers, judgments, and precedent cases all sound like stuffy legal paperwork that may not be interesting to many people. But if you're at all interested in hot tech topics like intellectual property rights and fair use, you might find value in Justia. For example, one search will take you to a wealth of information about what your fair use rights really are--and the more you dig into them the more you might be surprised at what's explicitly protected by the law and what's not.
If you want more information, Justia can take you to legal blogs (also called bLAWgs) and podcasts that address the topic directly. Justia links directly to the blog entries discussing your search term, and if there's a podcast that addresses your topic, you can click to listen to it directly from the Justia search results. When I searched podcasts for "fair use," I found podcasts from The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and NOLO that were available either directly in the search page, or just one click away. If you don't find what you're looking for by searching, you can browse the categories listed on Justia's home page, whether you're searching for immigration law, real estate law, criminal law, or business law.
If you're particularly interested in Supreme Court cases and decisions, Justia has a Supreme Court Center with a searchable database of all Supreme Court decisions since the 1790s. The Supreme Court Center also hosts links to blogs that focus on related news, articles about decisions, and even downloadable audio of arguments before the Supreme Court, if they've been released.
Justia also reaches out to lawyers looking to promote their services with its sister site Justia.net, hosts a sub-site that provides RSS feeds of newly announced consumer recalls from various government agencies, and partners with Stanford University to host the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center. Justia has a broad reach and makes a point of extending its services to lawyers, consumers, and amateurs interested in the world of law.
Justia is primarily a search engine, but it also hosts a wealth of other resources that you might find useful. While the service is obviously of value to lawyers and students looking for legal information or legal opinions, there's a lot to gain from the service if you're interested in your civil or legal rights or if you just want to know more about the laws and loopholes discussed on the evening news and in the halls of government.