Yesterday the NY Times had another article about the ongoing activities of Carl Malamud, the guerilla legal publisher who’s trying to shove PACER into the 21st century. The article doesn’t really say anything that hasn’t been said before: Malamud says the PACER system is outdated and we shouldn’t have to pay to see legal documents, which are part of America’s “operating system”.

Lets be real here. The federal government is good at spewing out documents. They’re not so good at analysis. So if they got their you-know-what together, the feds would be absolutely fabulous at dumping huge amounts of cases on us. (At the EPA, we used to call that “shovelware”.) But would they make it easy to analyze the cases to determine which ones are the “good” ones, the ones to use as legal precedents? No. That’s why we have aggregators such as LexisNexis and West. The hard reality is that anybody who wants to do serious legal research is going to have to deal with “Wexis” at some point.

Spoiler Alert: Here comes the shameless plug for Jenkins.

We understand that legal research can be expensive. That’s why we make a bunch of quality legal tools available to our members. From your desktop at home or in the office, you can access:

• Fastcase – Unlimited searching of cases, statutes and regulations (federal and all 50 U.S. states)

• Hein Online – Law review articles, CFR, and a whole lot more

• LegalTrac – Index to law review articles since 1980 (full text available for many of these)

• Lexis Thru Jenkins – Shepard’s, cases, statutes, regulations, court rules and PA secondary sources (20 minutes per day)

• LexisNexis Congressional – Hearings, Congressional Record, U.S. Code, Code of Federal Regulations

• PA Legal Forms – Do I really have to explain this one?

• WilsonWeb – Full text of law review articles since 1981

Now I know that these tools are not technically “free”, because you have to pay to become a Jenkins member. But the services you get more than make up for what you spend to join.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on February 13, 2009 - 10:31 am

Comments (2) | More About Jenkins, Federal, Law, Legal Research Tips Posts