On behalf of the Federal Judiciary, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts recently released the judicial caseload statistics for the fiscal year which ended September 30, 2012. The Federal Court Management Statistics system provides data for the 12 courts of appeals and the 94 district courts. Whether interviewing for a federal clerkship or researching the caseload of federal judges, these statistics detail the number of civil vs. criminal cases filed in each court, as well as the cases termintated on the merits vs. procedural terminations.

Archival statistics are available back to 1997 through the Federal Court Management Statistics system.

Georgetown Law Center graduate Nathaniel Burney (L '97) recently published The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law, which is available from Jones McClure Publishing.  Started as as a series of online comics to debunk popular myths about criminal law, the collection of writings and illustrations now covers seventeen chapters across more than 300 pages.

The five parts in the book cover an introduction, purposes of punishment, guilt, inchoate crimes, defenses and a summary of related topics.

Here's an example illustration from a series of comics relating to questions of police entrapment: 

Stop by the library to check out a copy, read the Tumblr site where this all began, or pick up a copy online.

On January 10th, House Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor announced that starting with the 113th Congress (2013), the Government Printing Office (GPO) will make all bills and resolutions under consideration by the House, as provided by the House Bill Clerk, available to the public for bulk download in XML format. They have posted a User Guide.  GPO also provides access to individual House and Senate Congressional bills (from the 103rd Congress; 1993 forward) via the FDsys website.

In 2011, the House directed the Clerk to create docs.house.gov, providing public access to committee documents and legislation (bills, amendments, resolutions) being considered by the House. Additionally you can access live video streaming from the House floor with your mobile phone or tablet via the House of Representatives’ Houselive website or House Committee activity via the Library of Congress.

Since 1995, as directed by the 104th Congress, the Library of Congress has been making federal legislative information available to the public via the THOMAS website. Here researches can find House and Senate legislative status information (when was a bill was introduced, who sponsored it, a summary of the bill, and legislative activity on the bill). THOMAS includes the text of bills and resolutions (from 101st Congress; 1989 forward), the Congressional Record (from 101st Congress; 1989 forward), committee information (104th Congress; 1995 forward), schedules, calendars, and more. The Library of Congress is working on the next generation of this website, Congress.gov, making it more user-friendly and improving the technological infrastructure.

As state legislatures reconvene in 2013, many bills relating to the Affordable Health Care Act will be introduced and debated at the state level. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) maintains a Federal Health Reform: State Legislative Tracking database allowing you to monitor this hot topic. It will be updated every Tuesday, beginning January 14th, to include newly introduced legislation. Currently, all legislation on this topic from the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions can be searched by state, year, keyword, status and/or primary sponsor.

This is only one of the "Hot Topics" databases maintained by NCSL. These resources allow you to monitor such issues as immigration, education and labor and unemployment across all 50 states.

For over 10 years, Science.gov has provided access to federal government scientific research searching “over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies”.

 As legal scholars and practitioners research across multiple disciplines, this web portal is an excellent starting point for the student working on a space law paper, a practitioner researching the environmental consequences of pesticides or a legal consultant on energy conservation.  The portal even searches the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office databases for those researching applied science and technology issues. Some of the other federal agencies searched include:

•  NASA
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Energy
• Department of Agriculture

 The results of a simple search on the home page can be narrowed by topic and date, as well as by text or multimedia. Feel free to ask a reference librarian if you have any questions about researching on the Science.gov web portal.

A new "Big Data" resource of tax material has recently been made available. On October 30, Public.Resource.Org made available 10 years' worth -- nearly 6.5 million -- Exempt Organization Form 990 returns filed by exempt organizations and private foundations as well as unrelated business income (UBIT) returns filed by these organizations. The data set contains returns from January 2002 through September 2012, and will be updated monthly.

At this time, these returns are only available in pdf format, but Public.Resource.Org plan to extract the underlying data from these returns to make them more amenable for data analysis.

These records and more information about the data set are available at https://bulk.resource.org/irs.gov/eo/readme.html.

Scout is a new alert service from the Sunlight Foundation, which can be used to easily monitor federal and state legislation and federal regulations. 

To get alerts, simply search for a keyword or phrase describing the issue in which you are interested and then click “Create Alert.”  Free registration is required.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently announced that their collection of Appellate and Amicus Briefs is now searchable online. The Appellate collection includes all briefs filed by the EEOC in which the United States is a party from 2000 to the present. The amicus brief collection contains all briefs filed by the EEOC in the U.S. Court of Appeals, district courts and state courts. The briefs are searchable by keyword, case name, case number, as well as by applicable statute.

The Supreme Court has posted its opinion in which it upheld nearly all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including the individual mandate. The opinion is available here.

The Freedom of Information Act gives citizens the right to request information from federal government agencies and the web portal,  FOIA.gov,  offers data and reports on the requests obtained and processed by the administrative agencies. Users of FOIA.gov can also create their own reports on the processing time, fee waivers and backlog of requests by agency for Fiscal Years 2008 through 2011.

The FOIA.gov web portal, created by the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy, also provides a direct link to the FOIA contacts by executive agency and  features detailed guidance on how and where to make a FOIA request.