Fundraiser For the Criminal Justice Society at Pace

On behalf of the Criminal Justice Society (CJS) at Pace Law School, please come and support the students' fundraising efforts by participating in any of the following exciting events:

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Please join the Criminal Justice Society for dinner and conversation starting at 7:00 pm in the Antipasti Restaurant located at 1 North Broadway, White Plains, NY.

Thursday, November 19, 2009
Attend a showing of the movie Dead Man Walking with a follow up lecture and discussion led by the Associate Professor of Law at Pace Law School, David D. Dorfman. The event is scheduled at 3:00 - 6:00 pm in Preston Hall, Room 401. Bring your friends!

Monday, November 23, 2009
It's bake sale time! Please stop by the CJS table located in the hallway outside of cafeteria anytime between 10:00 am and 6 :00 pm to get yourself a sweet dessert. What will be available is a surprise!

Please note that none of these events is sponsored by Pace.

Kindle for PC

Via Wired Gadget Lab, Kindle for PC Ships, Hints At Future Color Kindle features Kindle for PC. For those who don't have Kindle or Kindle for iPhone but still desire to read the more then 360,000 of Kindle e-books, you can get a free application for your Windows PC and your e-books on your computer. The free application is for Windows 7, Vista, and XP, and available at the above link.

The application does pretty much what the iPhone version does: your place is synced with other devices by Whispersync, and there is support for your bookmarks and annotations. You can browse and buy from the Kindle Store, but you can’t access blogs, newspapers or magazines.

... This may mean a color Kindle is on its way. ... [Y]ou can now buy and read Kindle books without buying a Kindle.

Any thoughts or comments?

FAOLEX Legal Office

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has online legal office called FAOLEX.

A multilingual team summarizes and in many cases translates laws and regulations on topics falling within FAO's mandate - agriculture, cultivated plants, environment, fisheries, food, forestry, land and soil, livestock, water and wild species and ecosystems. Legal information is received by FAO from Member Nations pursuant to Article XI of the FAO Constitution.

The website offers advanced search, which allows a user to narrow search by the following subjects: agriculture, forestry, cultivated plants, environment generally, air & atmosphere, fisheries, land & soil, water, mineral resources, energy, food, livestock, wild species & ecosystem, sea, and waste & hazardous substances. The website is available in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic. It also offers Basic Texts, Fishlex, Waterlex, Water Treaties, Publications, Right to Food, and Treaties generally.

Happy Birthday Mozilla Firefox

Via The Mozilla Blog, the popular browser Mozilla Firefox celebrates its 5th birthday today!

Five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. Within the first four days of launch, more than 1 million people had downloaded a brand new browsing experience.

In just five years, that number has swelled to over 330 million users worldwide; almost a quarter of Internet users worldwide choose Firefox. Today, Firefox ships in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7,000 add-ons to help customize their browsing experience.

Congratulations and Happy Birthday Mozilla!

U.S. Supreme Court Database Is To Extend To 1792

Via Law.com, Law Schools Help Extend Court Database to 1792, "[a] group of law schools will help expand an online U.S. Supreme Court database so that it reaches back to the court's first recorded decision in 1792."

The schools received an $874,000 National Science Foundation grant in September to begin the four-year project, which will add 19,675 cases to a database that now extends from the Court's 1953 term through 2008, said Lee Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. The group will post 4,400 cases by next summer and add more in installments each year, she said.

The other schools involved are the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Washington University Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the political science departments at Princeton University and Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y

Alexander Greenawalt On Radovan Karadzic

Alexander Greenawalt, Associate Professor of Law at Pace University School of Law, regularly contributes to the New York Times Microblog: Latest On Radovan Karadzic. You can view the microblog here or you can directly subscribe to it via RSS feed.

Splitting the Infinitive

Via the (new) legal writer, Raymond Ward's post titled Sure, You Can Split an Infinitive, But This Is Ridiculous points out the absolute NO way to split an infinitive. Those who are involved in any type of legal writing might find this useful and perhaps humorous.

This blog's official position on split infinitives is that they're okay. The Star Trek catch phrase - 'to boldly go' - as A-okay with us. But please, please don't use your freedom from the no-split-infinitives superstition to write a sentence like this:

'Is it kosher for a law enforcement agency to, pursuant to a lawfully granted search warrant, search your G-mail account without telling you?' [Wall Street Journal Law Blog].

Visit the original post (referenced above) to read a full post and be aware of those infinitives!

Statistical Reports of the U.S. Courts

The U.S. Courts website includes a page listing various statistical reports.

• Annual Report of the Director: Judicial Business of the United States (available online since 1997)
• Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act Statistics (tables are available for 2008 calendar year)
• Bankruptcy Statistics (Some tables date back to 1990s. Additional statistics are available via PACER.)
• Federal Court Management Statistics (available online since 1997)
• Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics (available online since 2001)
• Judicial Facts and Figures (available online since 2005 and now including caseload statistics and judgeship totals for fiscal year 2008)
• Statistical Tables for the Federal Judiciary (available online since 2001)
• Wiretap Reports (available online since 1997)

JOTWELL - Journal of Things We Like (LOTS)

JOTWELL, the Journal of Things We Like (LOTS) is a new blog that aims to collect/post/highlight the "leading academics and practitioners providing short reviews of recent scholarship to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience."

Jotwell is a special type of law review housed on a set of inter-linked blogs. As a law review, Jotwell has only mission: to bring to readers' attention great recent scholarship related to the law. As a blog we invite your comments, and hope that some of our reviews will spark a conversation.

Jotwell features information in the following areas of law:

• Administrative law
• Constitutional law
• Corporate law
• Criminal law
• Cyber law
• Intellectual property law
• Legal profession
• Tax law

To access information, a reader can directly visit the Jotwell blog where browse and search features are both available. Jotwell offers RSS feed subscription to the main Jotwell section or to the individual subject sections. Readers can also subscribe via email to receive a message every time a new article is available. Happy Reading!

2009 Global Fraud Report

The 2009/2010 annual edition of Global Fraud Report is available.

Kroll commissioned The Economist Intelligence Unit to conduct a worldwide survey on fraud and its effect on business during 2009. A total of 729 senior executives took part in this survey. A little over a third of the respondents were based in North and South America, 25% in Asia-Pacific, just over a quarter in Europe and 11% in the Middle East and Africa. Ten industries were covered, with no fewer than 50 respondents drawn from each industry. The highest number of respondents came from the financial services industry (12%). A total of 46% of the companies polled had global annual revenues in excess of $1billion. This report brings together these survey results with the experience and expertise of Kroll and a selection of its affiliates. It includes content written by The Economist Intelligence Unit and other third parties.