UHLC Nota Bene

Yesterday the National Archives released 2,891 records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The documents are subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act) , which mandated their release no later than 25 years after its enactment. The documents are available for download here . For some of the highlights from this trove of new information, see this article from Politico.

Yesterday the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) announced the completion of the discovery phase of its development of a National FOIA Portal. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was enacted in 1966 and created a presumptive right of public access to government documents. In practice, however, obtaining those documents has not always been easy. The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 sought to streamline the process by directing the Department of Justice and the Office of Management and Budget to create an online portal that would allow members of the public to submit FOIA requests to any agency from a single website. In other words, a one-stop shop for FOIA.  The OIP has issued a report on its findings and recommendations for the project. The portal will be developed on GitHub with opportunities for feedback from the public.  

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently published the second volume of its EDGAR Filer Manual , which describes the process for submitting a filing with the SEC. EDGAR stands for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval. It is a publicly accessible database that provides investors with information on SEC-registered companies. For more information on EDGAR, click here .

The Free Law Project has announced that they have collected every free written order and opinion that is available in PACER, the online hosting source of federal court opinions and case documents. They are now available at  free.law  and are completely searchable.  The  Free Law Project  reports that this collection contains  "approximately 3.4 million orders and opinions from approximately 1.5 million federal district and bankruptcy court cases dating back to 1960." The project required the scanning and implementing OCR for more than  "four hundred thousand of these documents . . .  amounting to nearly two million pages of text extraction." This archive of opinions and orders is available for search  here . In addition to common search categories (judge, nature of suit, etc.) it also has advanced search capabilities including field search, as well as proximity and fuzzy search capabilities.  The Free Law Proje...

In February of last year, the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO) launched the beta version of govinfo.gov , which will eventually replace the Federal Digital System (FDSys) as the GPO’s free, searchable repository of government documents. Last week the GPO announced the addition of several new features to govinfo. Here are some of the highlights: New links allow you to click through from Congressional Records details pages directly to related bills.  Thumbnails are now displayed in the search results for applicable documents (which is very helpful if you are searching for photos).  RSS feeds are now available for bills and statutes, budget and presidential materials, congressional committee materials, judicial publications, and several other types of government publications. To learn more about these and other recently added features, see the latest release notes .

Should some PACER filings be blocked to ensure the safety of witnesses and informants? Possibly, according to a recently published a survey of federal judges, prosecutors, defenders and probation officers by the Federal Judicial Center. Originally reported in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required/ available via Lexis Advance), recent survey (PDF) of federal judges, prosecutors, defenders and probation offices by the Federal Judicial Center found that nearly 700 witnesses and informants perceived as snitches had been threatened, wounded or killed over a three year period. According to the Wall Street Journal article, "Federal inmates are restricted from accessing PACER themselves, but it is easy for them to ask people outside the prison to search the online system and report the information back into the prison by phone, according to judges." Inmates are becoming more sophisticated at decoding available criminal findings within the case filings, leading to a substant...

Earlier this week, the Library of Congress announced that it was making over 25 million of its catalog records available for free bulk download. These records will be available at data.gov and on the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php . Previously these records were only available individually or by subscription. This new free service of the LOC will be an invaluable resource for anyone doing bibliographic research. The records are in the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) format, the international standard for bibliographic data. To learn more about MARC records, see this tutorial on the LOC website.      

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) recently announced the launch of its beta.gpo.gov website, which will eventually replace the old GPO website launched in 2009. Among other things, the new site features a mobile-friendly design, access to GPO social media platforms, and a directory of Federal Depository Libraries. This follows closely on the February launch of the beta website govinfo.gov , which will eventually replace the Federal Digital System (FDSys) as the GPO’s free, searchable repository of government documents, including regulations, statutes, legislative documents, and court opinions. For more information about govinfo.gov and what is available there, see this Q&A.

The Center for Responsive Politics recently launched a new research tool called Foreign Lobby Watch . It provides a searchable database of organizations and individuals registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), a federal law enacted in 1938 in response to German propaganda efforts in the United States. You may have read about this law in the news recently: President Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was required to register as a foreign agent for his consulting firm’s work on behalf of a company with ties to the Turkish government. The database is made up of FARA forms filed with the Department of Justice. The registration forms include information on the organization serving as a foreign agent, details of the business arrangement, and political donations made by the organization. The database also contains short forms (filed by individuals), and supplemental forms, filed every six months, that provide detailed information on work performe...

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently granted summary judgment to plaintiffs in a copyright and trademark infringement case involving technical standards that were incorporated by reference into law.  The case,  American Society for Testing and Materials, d/b/a ASTM International v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc . , is of possible interest to legal researchers given its implications for the accessibility of legal documents. In this case, the defendant was a website dedicated to providing the public with access to free copies of federal, state and local government codes.  Some of the federal codes hosted by the defendant incorporated voluntary industry standards and best practices into federal law by reference, as is permitted under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1)(E) .   The defendant hosted free copies of these standards on its website along with the federal codes, and was sued by the organizations that drafted and publis...

President Trump recently nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. For those interested in learning more about the appointment process, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has published a new report, Supreme Court Appointment Process: President’s Selection of a Nominee . It includes information on the criteria for selecting a nominee, the advice and consent role of the Senate, the political aspects of the process, and the use of recess appointments to temporarily bypass Senate confirmation. For a more detailed account of the Senate’s role, the following CRS reports may also be of interest: Supreme Court Appointment Process: Consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee Supreme Court Appointment Process: Senate Debate and Confirmation Vote For more information on finding CRS reports online, see our blog post on the subject.

The CIA recently announced that its CREST tool is now available online.   CREST is an electronic database of records that have been declassified under the CIA's 25 year program.   While the CREST tool only contains a subset of the declassified records, previously researchers were required to visit the National Archives in Maryland to search the database, so the online tool greatly increases the availability of these records.   The records include information about topics such as the Berlin Tunnel , Project Stargate , and Secret Writin g.   Users can browse the archive or use the website’s advanced search feature to search the records.   To learn more about CREST, visit the CIA website .