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Friday, February 26, 2016

Bob and SCOTUS

Based on a poll of State of Oregon Law Library employees 100% of Oregonians love Bob Dylan! 

If this is true then we're in august company! A recent article in the New York Times notes that The Supreme Court of the United States regularly quotes and misquotes a certain Robert Zimmerman.

If you'd like to read more about the connection between America's bard and SCOTUS check out Alex Long's law review article The Freewheeling Judiciary: A Bob Dylan Anthology.

So how much influence does Bob have over our judiciary? As always the answer is blowing in the wind.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Presidential Document Sources

The President of the United States produces a large amount of papers and public documents. Finding these documents can sometimes be difficult. They are collected by organizations as varied as the National Archives, the Office of the Federal Register, and various presidential libraries.

A great place to start when looking for these documents is The American Presidency Project. This University of California hosted site has a wealth of presidential documents. The site archives includes the following collections:
If you are interested in the more ephemeral information contained in the presidential web page you may be interested in the following pages:

Friday, February 5, 2016

GovInfo Beta - FDsys' next generation replacement

The U.S. Government Publishing Office has long made a huge amount of government publications available online through it's FDsys database.

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/home.action

The GPO has just released their new website GovInfo to the public. GovInfo will eventually replace FDsys but for now it's still in beta.

All the documents available on FDsys are available right now through GovInfo's search interface. However they are still working on adding sources to the category and alphabetical indexes.

The site provides links to various other government resources as well. You may be familiar with government documents like the United States Code and the Federal Register. There are also links to less well known and useful sources like FRASER, The Federal Reserve's database of economic research; and PubMed, the National Institutes of Health's index of medical publications.