Author: Ellen Augustiniak

From the “Westlaw Insider” blog comes a series of posts that detail how a Supreme Court case – here, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act case – is dealt with by editors at West Publishing.

• Part 1 – Loading the electronic document – Technical teams prepared for loading the document; they even tested different scenarios since they weren’t sure how the Court would send the data.
• Part 2 – Keycite – An editor verified the procedural history and updated flags for related cases.
• Part 3 – Headnotes – Editors added the short restatements of legal issues that appear in the digest at the beginning of a case.
• Part 4 – Key Numbers – Editors classified the headnotes into a system of 400 major topics. For the ACA case, there was a team of 10 classifiers! Favorite line: “[W]hen you are classifying a monumental case, you feel like you are part of a historically significant event.”
• Part 5 – Codes validity – Editors from the “USCA team” added notes to all code sections affected by the original act and, after review, added a “Validity” note to the section that dealt with state plans for medical assistance.

There’s a huge amount of intellectual capital that goes into online legal research systems, and this series of posts gives some nice background on where all that information comes from. 

It’s a beta site, with a simplified search screen and sleek new search results, available at: http://beta.congress.gov/

Searching’s easier – there’s a big search box that doesn’t default to the most current session. And once you see your results, you can narrow on the left by date, chamber, subject, and other categories (just like in some expensive legal research systems.)

Once you’re in a search result, it’s now much easier it is to tell how far along a bill is, what its text is, and what kind of related information exists —  e.g. the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011:

• H.R. 1249 from beta.congress.gov 
• H.R. 1249 from Thomas.loc.gov

For those of you who aren’t government information fanatics: this is a Big Deal. The THOMAS website was groundbreaking at its launch in the 1990s. It’s been gradually updated to its current state, where it still does an admirable job providing information about legislation and the legislative process. However, this update looks like an attempt to make some big changes  — to make the site much more modern and intuitive in the way it looks and acts. It’s even responsive, so it’s still legible on my phone’s tiny screen.

There are some significant chunks of information still missing. For example, the beta site doesn’t yet seem to have an option to view all the actions on a bill (vs. just the “Major Actions), and there are no click-through links to everybody’s favorite legislative history resource – Congressional Reports. But it’s a great start on making free government information easier to use, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Update: “Other data, such as the Congressional Record, committee reports, nominations, treaties and communications, will be incorporated over time in a planned, prioritized order. The Library anticipates Congress.gov will operate as a beta site for approximately one year as this work is completed.” – http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2012/12-171.html

H/T: Sunlight Foundation, “Congress launches THOMAS successor Congress.gov,” 9/19/2012.