Open CRS Network: CRS Reports for the People
Posted by admin on Apr 12, 2006
The goal of the Open CRS Network is to provide access to reports created by the Congressional Research Service.
From the website: American taxpayers spend nearly $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a “think tank” that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology through the cooperation of several organizations and collectors of CRS Reports, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.
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Lifting the Fog of Legalese
Posted by admin on Apr 11, 2006
Joseph Kimble. Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language. Durham, NC, Carolina Academic Press, 2006. KF250 .K54 2006
From the publisher: Professor Joseph Kimble, a leading expert on plain language, has collected in this one book many of his published essays. They will interest and inform judges, lawyers, law students, legal scholars, and anyone else who engages in legal writing.
The Outlaw Sea
Posted by admin on Apr 11, 2006
William Langewiesche. The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime. New York, North Point Press, 2004. HE571 .L36 2004
From the publisher: With typically understated lyricism, William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises–licit and illicit–that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. Forty-three thousand gargantuan ships ply the open ocean, carrying nearly all the raw materials and products on which our lives are built. Many are owned or managed by one-ship companies so ghostly that they exist only on paper. They are the embodiment of modern global capital and the most independent objects on earth–many of them without allegiances of any kind, changing identity and nationality at will. Here is free enterprise at it freest, opportunity taken to extremes. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems–shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of two perfectly adapted pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism.