Justia, a relatively new legal portal, is quickly becoming an indispensable research tool. Created by FindLaw founder, Tim Stanley, Justia offers a multitude of resources, including:
One of the most useful things about Justia, though, is that several of its resources, including
U.S. Regulations Tracker and
U.S. Federal Case Filings, offer RSS feeds of search results so that users can be alerted to future, on-point content.
Regulations Tracker allows you to search, browse, and track Federal Register documents. Not only is there a RSS feed for every agency, but you can customize them by type of document or keyword.
U.S. Federal Case Filings is a database of federal district court civil cases back to 2004. You can browse by browse by state and/or type of lawsuit or view all recent cases. Search by party name, jurisdiction, type of lawsuit, and within a given date range.
Search results contain the party names, jurisdiction, date, docket number, and in some cases full-text opinions, orders, and complete filings. Cases for which opinions and orders and available have a gavel icon. Cases for with complete filings are noted with a star icon. Links to blog, news and web searches for each party name are also available.
For each case, Justia offers a link to a fee based service called
PACER in which many full-text filings are available. Contact
Bonnie Shucha, Head of Reference, for more information about obtaining filings from PACER.
As mentioned above, RSS feeds are available for U.S. Federal Case Filings search results. Feeds can be created for a specific party name, legal practice area, jurisdiction, or any combination of the above.
For assistance using Justia, or if you have any questions about your legal research, please contact a
reference librarian. We're available
in person, by IM, email or phone - and we're always glad to help!
Submitted by Bonnie Shucha on October 3, 2007
This article appears in the categories: Law Library/IT
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