Skip to main content

Obtaining CRS Reports Online

By Lauren Schroeder
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a federal government department within the Library of Congress. It serves members of Congress through providing analysis and research that is comprehensive and designed to be unbiased and nonpartisan. This information, including reports, is given to the members only, and is not made directly available to the public.

The information contained in CRS reports can be very useful for legal research, but only a fraction of the number of reports produced have been released. One site that is designed to make it easier to search for the publicly-available reports is Open CRS.

Open CRS was created by the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit organization that wants to keep the Internet as open and free as possible. It provides a single search point for collections of CRS reports that have been gathered by six different organizations. When you conduct a search, the record for each report contains the report's order code, title and date, a summary, a link to download it in PDF, and a listing of all available versions of the report (in case it was modified or updated).

The site also allows you to get updates when new reports are added, either through Twitter, a mailing list, or RSS.

Check it out!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

This Day in Legal History -- Roy Cohn

By
Big lawyers have big personalities, and few had as big a personality as Roy Cohn who was born on this day in New York City in 1927. Cohn’s career was spent in the Washington DC—New York axis, famous in the press for his legal and social exploits, his list of famous and infamous clients, and as the poster-boy for every stereotype of the dishonest grasping lawyer. The legal career of Roy Cohn is an object lesson on the use, and abuse, of the lawyer’s power. Roy Cohn was born on February 20, 1927 in New York City. His father was a justice in the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court and was well connected politically. These connections, along with a precocious intelligence which allowed him to graduate from Columbia law school at age 20, paved the way for a bright legal career. Cohn’s first job (after waiting until he turned 21 to be admitted to the bar) was as an assistant U.S. Attorney in New York. He first came to prominence in his role as a prosecutor in the Rosenberg espi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bar Exam: Some History & Comparison

By Lauren Schroeder
It's that time of year again...time for two to three days of squeezing out all the material that hopeful lawyers have been pounding into their heads over several months - the bar exam. To mark the occasion, here is a brief history of the exam itself, as well as a taste of what is required to become an attorney elsewhere. Prior to the mid-1800s, there were no written bar exams. Instead, the path to becoming a lawyer led hopefuls through "apprenticeships, self-directed reading, and oral examinations." The next phase made use of a diploma privilege, which remained until the ABA began requiring exams in the 1920s. (A diploma privilege does still exist in Wisconsin, however.) The first state to employ a written version of the bar exam was Massachusetts, in 1855. (See Riebe, A Bar Review for Law Schools: Getting Students on Board to Pass Their Bar Exams , 45 Brandeis L. J. 269 (2007) for quoted material and historical information.) Bar exams consisted only of essays until...
Post a Comment
Read more