Tech column: Researching Sotomayor, and upgraded BlackBerry App World

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When a U.S. Supreme Court justice is nominated, there’s always a rush to examine the nominee’s public writings, including, if the nominee is a judge, judicial opinions that he or she has written. That used to be a difficult task.

Beginning with the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts, however, it became easier to follow the players because the commercial (and expensive) computer-assisted legal research providers began putting together files on the nominee.

At one time, Westlaw put together a special file on the nominee, gathering all pertinent information in the system into one place. I later discovered that Westlaw continues the process at “sotomayor-nom,” but I couldn’t find any easy reference to it. Today, Westlaw has already done that for every judge and attorney in the country in its “Profiler” databases. So this should make the gathering process easy.

Simply log in to Westlaw, find a link for “Profiler — Attorneys and Judges” and enter the name you’re searching. On the opening research screen’s left column, scroll down to the “Profiler-Attorney or Judge” link, and enter “Sotomayor” into the search box.

It turns out that Sotomayor is not an uncommon name among U.S. (including Puerto Rico) lawyers and judges, as the search request brings up the first 20 — the default — of 34 entries in the database. Fortunately, there is only one “Sonia — Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit” on the list. Click on the link and the results list identifies 3,796 “Profiler References” under the categories Verdict and Settlement Summaries, Appellate Briefs, Oral Arguments, Cases, Law Reviews and Journals, Andrews, Dockets and Directories.

The “Directories” category is limited to the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary. “Dockets” seems to refer solely to the cases Sotomayor handled as a trial judge in the Southern District of New York and has nothing to do with her career on the 2nd Circuit, and “Oral Arguments” and “Appellate Briefs” came back with one case — but not the same case — for each topic.

When all else fails

I decided to call 800-Westlaw to speak with a reference attorney. The attorney’s first answer, after working with the database for a few minutes and confirming my results, was the bad news that the Profiler Database for Sotomayor seems to not be working correctly. “Dockets” should include the appellate cases, and there was more than one entry that should have been in Appellate Briefs and Oral Arguments, among other problems. Well, that happens, and I’m sure that by the time you are reading this article, the problems will be fixed.

The reference attorney also pointed out that West had built a database — identifier “sotomayor-nom” — for the sort of research I wanted to do. But if I really wanted to collect everything, perhaps I should search in as many as six different databases.

Also, even “sotomayor-nom” is merely another database and produces no “list” of cases, per se. You can search for opinions, articles or whatever by the nominee on any subject you may wish. (My understanding from the reference attorney is that “sotomayor-nom” also contains cases in which the nominee is mentioned in an opinion written by someone else, but I have been unable to confirm that.)

But even if Westlaw provided an easy list of everything it had mentioning the nominee, how in the world does one analyze more than 3,500 entries?

Perhaps the easiest way is to check out the blogs. Scotusblog, for example (www.scotusblog.com), has become one of the most valuable sources for what is going on in the Supreme Court, meticulously reporting on certiorari petitions, denials and grants, schedules, briefs and so forth, as well as providing knowledgeable analysis of each opinion.

A recent blog post at tinyurl.com/qz8amo provides the nominee’s completed Senate Judiciary questionnaire, as well as completed questionnaires from her confirmation hearings for the 2nd Circuit and the Southern District of New York. Not a lot of analysis, but certainly places to begin looking. (To find other blog mentions of the nominee, of course, surf over to blogsearch.google.com and search for “Sotomayor.”)

It would seem that whether paid or free, a lot of information on the nominee is available and not that hard to find. Separating the wheat from the chaff, however, may be a lot more difficult. But lawyers can be pretty good at that.

More Blackberry apps

A while ago I wrote of the new Blackberry Application online “store,” available at www.blackberry.com/appworld. The idea, of course, is modeled on the wildly successful Apple store, which makes it possible to accessorize your iPhone, making that particular purchase even more valuable than it already is.

I applauded the idea of the Blackberry App World, although I didn’t particularly care for the implementation. But it has since gotten better and easier to use, providing some details about each program available and dividing the program listings into categories. But I still would like to see a “big” computer analog site, making it easier to review information about the applications.

The first thing to do is to install the AppWorld application. The easiest way to do that is to surf to the appworld URL with your “big” computer, and enter your e-mail address for the “Over the Air” link. A few seconds later your smart phone should receive an e-mail containing a URL link. Click on the link to automatically open your BlackBerry browser and download and install the application. Run the application by clicking on the icon, and begin looking at what is available.

I began with 12 “featured items,” including:

• two “radio” programs (FlyCast and Iheartradio),

• two games (Platypus and Million Dollar Poker),

• two news-feed readers (Thomson Reuters News Pro and AP),

• a customer management sales-force application (Salesforce Mobile),

• a hotel reservation application (HRS Hotel Organizer),

• Flickr,

• Calorie Tracker by Livestrong,

• a market news updater (TheStreet), and

• a local search site (CitySearch).

Only the games were not “free,” and they weren’t very expensive.

I liked the AP and ThomsonReuters news feeds, which are very convenient for determining what is happening on a minute-by-minute basis when you are not close to a real computer.

FlyCast sends broadcasts from a wide variety of broadcast stations, including one of my favorites, Chicago’s WFMT. Alas, I couldn’t get the program to send more than about 10 seconds of any station. The developer maintains user forums for support, but telephone numbers are simply unavailable and questions on the forums go unanswered. True, FlyCast is “advertising supported” with no charge to users — just the way radio stations are — but that really doesn’t excuse the lack of support.

Other categories of applications include Utilities, Professional, Social Networking, Reference & eBooks, Sports and Travel. Many of these link to commercial services, but some of the others, including several “free” apps that I tried, didn&rsqu
o;t work so well and aren’t supported very well.

Smartphone applications are new. If Research in Motion is going to maintain an “App Store” it should have some standards for the applications it posts. One of those standards should be some reasonable level of support, even for the “free” apps. As the Smartphone app market matures, hopefully we’ll get there.

Barry D. Bayer practices law and writes about computers from his law office in Homewood, Ill. To contact him, write to Law Office Technology Review, P.O. Box 2577, Homewood, IL 60430; call him at (708) 957-3322; or send an e-mail to [email protected]. Specific origin and pricing information about the products discussed in these columns are available at www.lawtechreview.com/details.html.