Goal of New ABA Web Effort: All the Federal Decisions that Are Fit to Print
Want to know more about a 9th Circuit opinion on the First Amendment rights of a citizen ejected from a city council meeting for giving a Nazi salute? Or the 5th Circuit opinion allowing a Halliburton employee to sue over her alleged rape in Iraq?
You can find those opinions summarized on a revamped Media Alerts on Federal Courts of Appeals page on ABAnet.org. Students and professors at four law schools are choosing the opinions most likely to be of interest to journalists and the public for the pilot project, sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements.
The pilot project, which officially launches on Wednesday, now covers the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 5th and 9th Circuits. The plan is to eventually add all of the circuits.
Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the 9th Circuit, a special adviser to the project, says the idea for the special coverage of the circuits grew out of some discussions between judges and journalists at a meeting at the First Amendment Center earlier this year.
About 60,000 cases are filed every year in the federal courts of appeals, McKeown told the ABA Journal. “Most courts have very good websites, but there is a lot of information out there, so this provides a special niche,” she says. “There is a certain needle-in-the-haystack element for someone to go through them every day in every jurisdiction of interest to find cases.”
“Our view is that fair and accurate reporting about the courts is important, both for the public and also in order to emphasize judicial independence,” says McKeown, whose three-year term as chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements ended in August.
Law schools working on the project are the University of Texas School of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law, the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and the University of San Diego School of Law.
UT law professor Stefanie Lindquist says each law school is making its own decisions on how the work gets done. At UT, Lindquist is supervising five students this semester and seven next semester who are doing the work as part of a pass-fail class she is teaching.
Students had to apply for the class, and Lindquist decided which ones made the cut. One of the students is a former Dallas Morning News reporter; others are on law review or will be going on to federal clerkships. Lindquist and another professor handle the final edits.
“It’s a wonderful teaching opportunity in the law school and a wonderful opportunity to publicize information about the courts,” Lindquist told the ABA Journal. Students are trying to keep legalese to a minimum, and are scouring the decisions for parties and subjects likely to be of interest. Sometimes, she admits, the law can be pretty complicated, and the issues “incredibly varied in terms of topics and substantive areas.”
“It’s actually not as easy as I thought originally,” Lindquist says. “It’s fun, though—it’s challenging and fun.”
