The final paper for my Torts course, summarizing the history of tort reform in Colorado and taking a position on what kinds of reform are most appropriate. I chose to focus on medical malpractice torts, as the rapid growth in health care costs as a percentage of GDP and the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. health care reform, a.k.a. Obamacare) made the topic particularly apropos.
Tag Archives: research paper
Legal research cheat sheet
A list of web resources for fast, thorough legal research I put together for Introduction to Law. It was more than a little disturbing to me as a former librarian and FOIA officer that the state of Colorado farms its public statutes out to LexisNexis rather than managing their own website. The heavy reliance on the three dominant legal research companies (Lexis, Westlaw, and Loislaw) also made me uneasy. Call me a hippie or a hacker but I do believe that some information is meant to be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.
Primary Sources
Citation Web Location
State statute (CCR, CRS, COR) Colorado Constitution, Court Rules, Revised Statutes
United States Code (USC) United States Code
Cornell University browsable USC
Government Printing Office prior year codes
United States Code – Annotated (USCA) Westlaw signin
Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Annualized GPO edition
Local ordinance El Paso County ordinances
Secondary Sources
Citation Web Location
State digest Colorado Law Digest purchase page
Federal digest US Federal Law Digest purchase page
American Law Reports Lexis signin
Encyclopedia Wex, Legal Information Institute free encyclopedia
State LoisLaw Connect federal + one state ordering page
Corpus Juris Secundum Westlaw signin
Periodicals & treatises Hein Online signin
University of Colorado Law Review
More musings on legal ethics and information technology
Continuing on in the spirit of my post on “The Dream of the Paperless Office”, this is a research piece I did for Computers and the Law as a make-up for assignments that required software inaccessible to students with a used copy of the (exorbitantly expensive) textbook. While I understand that creating a textbook is a time-consuming process (I should know, one of my college courses created a free online textbook as a final project) and the creators deserve to be compensated for their effort, if prices become so steep that only a few students in the class can stretch their budget to accommodate a new copy of the course text, the publisher’s bottom line is still going to hurt. With free options like Coursera and Open University growing by leaps and bounds, publishers need to rethink their business models from the ground up or risk becoming obsolete.
Legal (Para)Eagle: Kimberley Hoff's legal blog 