Supreme Court Resources

Interested in the Supreme Court? Who isn't?

Today's resource is Justia's Supreme Court resource page. The page lists recent court opinions, recent oral arguments, a listing of authoritative blogs by legal scholars, and a list of additional Supreme Court resources elsewhere on the web.

Semantic search from Cognition

Today's reference site is a search engine. In fact, it's three search engines from Cognition, a natural language processing technology company in Culver City, California. These search engines employ linguistic computation techniques to deliver search results with superior relevance, since the engine is able to determine the context of query.

"Cognition's technology employs a mix of linguistics and mathematical algorithms which has, in effect, taught the computer the meanings of virtually all the words and frequent phrases within the common English language. Semantic Natural Language Processing is superior to common pattern matching that is found in most search engines and text-interaction tools because it focuses on the understanding of word and phrase meanings within context. No other commercially available natural language processing technology comes close to Cognition in its breadth and depth of understanding the English language."

Cognition is not aiming to be a competitor to Google and other www search engines; rather, their goal is to apply semantic indexing to large datasets to deliver better results.

Cognition has made specialized search engines for three major websites:

Cognition's semantic search of Wikipedia
Cognition's semantic search of Medline
Cognition's semantic search of case law available from Public.Resource.org

NETRonline: Real Estate Information and Public Records Research

Resource Shelf just posted about the new historic aerial photography feature of the NETRonline (National Environmental Title Research) site. While the searchable and zoomable aerial photographs are very cool, I was happy to be directed to the NETRonline site, which I had never seen before. NETRonline is an information portal for property information, deeds and titles, and various other public records for counties in all 50 states that make their information available over the web.

The site has four main sections: the Property Data Store, where property information such as property reports, parcel maps and document images from county governments can be found (if available). Prices vary on the reports, but are quite reasonable for most searches ($5 for a parcel report; $60 for an ownership and encumbrance report).

The Public Records Online Directory provides links to county government websites that contain public records in all 50 states. Selecting a state and then a county brings up links to the websites of relevant taxation, assessment, registry and other record-holding offical bodies in that county.

NETR's Environmental Resources Directory lists state, local, commercial and non-profit agencies and groups that monitor for and cleanup environmental pollution that could impact environmental and property value.

Lastly, the historic aerials section of the site houses historic and current aerial photography for a large coverage area of the 50 states.

NETRonline will also do criminal record searches and other background checks on individuals for a fee.

Openjurist.com

Today's resource is a new site that makes public domain legal data searchable: Openjurist.com. Open Jurist is a legal database of U.S. Supreme Court opinions and, more excitingly, United States Courts of Appeals opinions (via the Federal Reporter), which, to my knowledge have never been available online outside of LexisNexis Academic Universe and Westlaw. FindLaw has some Federal Court of Appeals opinions online, but only from 1995 to the present.

Another non-subscription case law resource is AltLaw, a project of Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School. AltLaw also contains searchable and browsable opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, but only has opinions from the second and third series of the Federal Reporter, whereas Open Jurist also includes the Federal Reporter, first series dating back to 1890.

Great new developments in making public domain knowledge truly public and accessible! Hat tip to our government documents librarian Danny Luce for letting me know about Open Jurist.