There is a very interesting discussion going on over at The Volokh Conspiracy regarding whether legal doctrines, when applied to machines or computers, should treat the machines/computers as people. “Daire and Smith are interesting cases, I think, because the outcome apparently hinges on how to apply legal doctrines designed for people in the case of automated machines.”
TurboLaw – Criminal Law (for Massachusetts) is now available. If you have our General Practitioner’s Suite (which almost everyone does), the next time you check for updates in TurboLaw, you’ll automatically receive Criminal Law.
“It’s all words, that’s all the law is,†Scott Turow, a lawyer and the author of “Presumed Innocent†and other novels, said when asked to speculate on reasons for the proliferation of law-related blogs, sometimes called blawgs. When people think of law, he continued, “You think of jails and marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is, that’s what it is – it’s all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the written stuff and the spoken stuff.â€
Recently, Massachusetts announced that all documents “created and saved” by state employees from the beginning of next year “would have to be based on open formats.” These open formats include OpenDocument, which is used by OpenOffice – and Adobe’s PDF format. Here are some news stories about this announcement.
Ernie The Attorney has an interesting story about how a laptop, a Wi-Fi wireless signal, and some quick thinking saved one person from a traffic violation.
The New York Times reports (free registration required) on a U.S. News & World Report regarding how law school rankings are computed.
When we added the Conflict of Interest check to TurboLaw, we never imagined that people would come to depend on it as much as they have. Of course, once we learned how much people were using it, we immediately set out to make it better!
From Bruce Schneier’s blog and Boston.com:
Tax liens, mortgage papers, deeds, and other real estate-related documents are publicly available in on-line databases run by registries of deeds across the state. It’s easy to say “we haven’t seen any cases of fraud using our information,†because there’s rarely a way to tell where information comes from.