Legislative History Without Research?

Occasionally an attorney may find herself with a unique problem. She is litigating a matter which involves the interpretation of an ambiguous statute and there is not a case on point which has resolved this issue. This may be the time to engage in legislative history research. This type of research attempts to resolve statutory ambiguities by investigating the documents produced during the legislative process such as bill versions, committee reports, floor debates, and others. The Law Library has prepared a guide about how to do legislative history research.

But what if you didn’t have to do the research? If you find yourself in a situation where legislative history research might be beneficial and you could just have the results of such a search without having to go through the process? Well, that might be a possibility.

Precompiled legislative histories are exactly what they sound like. Someone has gone through the legislative history process with certain laws and recorded the results. The Law Library has a few sources which have precompiled legislative histories so checking these should be your first steps in doing this kind of research. Note, both resources discussed below cover federal legislative histories.

HeinOnline

To navigate to these resources, from the School of Law front page go to Law Library, then Databases, then HeinOnline Databases, then the U.S. Federal Legislative History Library.
From this page, one can search through the alphabetical title list, public law numbers, or popular names. One could also click on “Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories.  This will give you a search function as well as the Browse by Congress option.
HeinOnline’s legislative history of the USA PATRIOT Act contains 106 documents which are compiled in five volumes as PDFs. By selecting one of the volumes one can navigate the document through the table of contents on the left of this screen. One can also search within the documents contained in the title by clicking on the search icon. For instance, searching “Osama” in “this title” results in 33 hits.

ProQuest Legislative Insight

ProQuest is different than HeinOnline for legislative histories.  This is because ProQuest Legislative Insight is a dedicated place to find legislative histories. Also, ProQuest produces the legislative histories itself rather than republishing the work of others as HeinOnline does. Thus, ProQuest is probably the best source for precompiled legislative histories. To navigate to ProQuest Legislative Insight from the School of Law front page go to Law Library, then Databases, then P, then ProQuest Legislative Insight.

Legislative Insight provides several access points to help you find a legislative history. First, you can search popular names or alternatively select a popular name from a drop down menu. Using the citation checker allows you to enter a Public Law number, Statutes at Large Citation, or a Bill Number and it will return the other two items and tell you whether the item you entered has a precompiled legislative history. You can also browse by Congress or search by subject.

By searching for “USA PATRIOT Act” in the popular names list I was able to get a list of seventeen possible legislative histories. I further limited this list to the 107th Congress because I knew the PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001.  Here we see the legislative history we seek, for Pub. Law 107-56.
This legislative history contains 184 documents. One can use the search box pictured to search for terms in all of the documents in the legislative history. Searching for “Osama” results in 26 hits. Like HeinOnline, ProQuest provides its content through downloadable pdfs.

Conclusion

Should you find yourself in need of the legislative history related to a federal statute, do yourself a favor and see if there is a precompiled legislative history either on HeinOnline or ProQuest Legislative Insight. You could save yourself a lot of effort.

Evaluating Online Legal Information

As legal researchers, we know we need to validate our research to make sure we are relying upon good law. We update and validate authorities online using Shepard’s Citations or Westlaw’s KeyCite. But how do we know other legal information we find online is reliable and current? Is it fabricated or fake news?

Before even thinking about citing or relying upon legal information found online, ask yourself what you know about the website. Do you always evaluate the website before relying on the information you found?

Librarians at the University of Maryland created a comprehensive, easy to use checklist for evaluating websites. By taking just a few minutes to complete the checklist, you will have considered important factors in determining: the quality and accuracy of a site, authorship, qualifications of the author or group that created the site, the purpose and content, bias or objectivity, and information currency.

Think that your information is accurate or current because you found it on a .gov or .org site? That’s not always correct. Take a moment to see when the information was updated and look for a disclaimer that the information on the site is not official.

The American Association of Law Libraries created a Guide to Evaluating Legal Information Online that gives a great overview of how to evaluate legal information online. The Guide covers the three main factors to consider when evaluating legal information found in online sources: content coverage, currency, and reliability. Take a look at the Guide and bookmark it so you review it often.

Get in the habit of evaluating your sources, and it will be something you automatically do before repeating something, even casually, only to find out it was fake news or invalid legal information..

Hi-Tech Research Tools for Facts

When I was in law school I generally didn’t think of facts beyond whatever was included in the fact pattern for an exam. This isn’t the way things work in the real world. Litigants and their attorneys often employ investigators, interns, and newer associates look for facts in the real world. When I was an intern for attorneys, my tasks often included looking for as much information as I could find about witnesses using social media. I recently attended the ABA Techshow and found several companies offering hi-tech tools that can gather information from social media sites.

Tomoko

Tomoko is an app which includes a client, enhanced searching for Facebook, and other eDiscovery tools. I viewed a demonstration of the app given by its creator Karhrman Ziegenbein and it was quite impressive. First, he showed me a search of a person’s Facebook profile using the regular Facebook search tools that anyone can access (the same sort of search I was able to perform as an intern); this yielded three groups the person is known to be a member of. Then, using Tomoko, we performed the same search which yielded dozens of results. The app also allows the user to save a copy of a website, create a video of whatever is being presented on the screen, and create authentication data sufficient to satisfy evidence standards. In addition to many other real world uses this tool has been used to prosecute human traffickers conducting online auctions via the darknet.

Vijilent

Vijilent is an app that can be used to create a profile of an individual’s web presence. Vijilent has a demo version which anyone can use to create a snapshot of an individual and includes as much information as can be gleaned publicly from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also searches public records. This data is presented in a report that includes photos, social media links, personality analysis, and analysis of sentiment towards the individual. The paid version includes ongoing social media tracking, authentication tools, and cloud storage of this data.

TrialDrone

TrialDrone is another social media analysis product. TrialDrone does many of the same functions as the other products discussed here but also uses social media to help digitally reconstruct an event. This can help litigators to find potential witnesses and evidence before it disappears. TrialDrone can also be used to track individuals—for instance tracking the social media output of an individual. Among other uses, this tool has been used to recreate the events related to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

All of these products can help a litigator to discover facts about individuals and events that before the widespread use of social media would have been impossible.

CourtListener

CourtListener

 

CourtListener is a powerful free legal research website containing millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts. Users can search these opinions by case name, topic, or citation for over 402 jurisdictions. Lawyers, academics, and the public can research an important case, stay up to date with new opinions as they are filed, or do deep analysis using CourtListener’s raw data. There are even oral arguments from many jurisdictions, judge profiles, and documents from the federal PACER system.

This site is sponsored by the Non-Profit Free Law Project /, which seeks to provide free access to primary legal materials, develop legal research tools, and support academic legal research. The Project works with volunteers to expand efforts at building an open source, open access, legal research system.

What makes CourtListener stand out for me is that is has a citator that shows you which subsequent opinions have cited to the opinion you are viewing, an important tool in researching whether a given precedent is still good law. Many free sites lack such a tool. Also, the search filters, advanced search options, and relevancy search enhancements produce refined search results. Especially useful is the free access to PACER documents provided through the RECAP Archive. 

Give CourtListener a try!

Social Law Library: Unique Resources for Massachusetts Law

The Social Law Library (SLL), located in Boston, was founded in 1803 which makes it the second oldest law library in the United States.* The SLL was founded before the ABA started pressing for the shift in legal education from reading the law to compulsory law school education for bar admittance; in fact, the SLL predates both the ABA and legal education as we know it. While the SLL is a private institution, it has a significant partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and provides free access to all attorneys employed by Massachusetts state agencies or courts.

Members of the Western New England University School of Law Community have access to the SLL through the Law Library’s databases page.** The SLL has also been actively seeking new members here at the Law School by offering students who attend a presentation a free membership upon graduation that expires at the end of September the following year.
In addition to being one of the oldest law libraries in the country the SLL has embraced the modern paradigm shift to digital materials. To this end they provide members access to many online services including: eBooks through OverDrive, CLE Materials, Links to Federal and State Materials, their Researcher’s Toolkit, Reference by Email, Substantive Law Databases, and many others.

Of particular interest is their unique collection of Massachusetts Administrative Databases. While much of what is accessible through SLL is available elsewhere, the SLL’s Administrative Databases tend to be the best and most comprehensive place to get the information for the covered state agencies. In some instances, Westlaw or Lexis may have some coverage; however, for the most sweeping, one stop place to do research in these areas SLL has the most comprehensive collection of Massachusetts Administrative Law. In fact, some of materials therein may not be available anywhere else in the world.

Let’s look at how to use one of these Administrative Law Databases. From the Law Library’s Databases page, select S-U then select the SLL’s Administrative Law Databases. This link brings us to the SLL’s Research Databases page. For our example, let’s select the Board of Bar Overseers, an independent administrative body responsible for adjudicating complaints against attorneys.

One can search the different parts (Case Number, BBO File Number, etc) within the Board’s decisions using the boxes shown. While the Board of Bar Overseers has only a few different parts to their decisions, other Administrative databases may have additional options.

Entering multiple search terms in the text box will return only decisions in which all the words appear. You can make the search return decisions in which any of the search terms appear by including the word or between them. You can also search for a phrase by searching within quotes. For example: searching recovered alcoholic returns 5 decisions, searching recovered or alcoholic  returns 89 decisions, and searching ”recovered alcoholic” returns 2 decisions.

Adjusting the “Words Around Hits” will increase or decrease the number of words the search results will display for each instance of your search terms within a decision. This context can help you determine if the decision is relevant to your issue before reading the whole case. The image below compares the same search using 20 “Words Around Hits” and 5.

Once you decide to look at a decision, like the one pictured below, you can either print the document or download a pdf from the black bar above the document. You can also use the red bar to navigate to other documents from the same search results, modify the search, or save the document to your SLL account.***

In conclusion, obtaining SLL membership is a no-brainer for our soon-to-graduate law students since it has so much to offer. It is also very reasonably priced for other Massachusetts attorneys considering that it is the only resource available for some materials.
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* The Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia was founded in 1802.
** From the Databases Page select “S-U” then select “Social Law Library’s Administrative Law Databases.”
*** Once you obtain your own account.