Dave Drager -- If you were one of the multitude who received a Kindle over the holidays, you are probably wondering what you can do to get more from it. For starters, we'd recommend setting it up with read-it-later service Instapaper.

Once you get Instapaper synchronized to your Kindle, you'll wonder what you ever did before. Basically, when you're done setting it up, you can shuttle any article on the web to your Kindle for reading later, in a more distraction-free environment.

Setting up Instapaper for Kindle is easy--just follow the steps set out in the LifeHacker article here.

[Thanks to our expert on all things Kindle, Vincent Tehan, Esq.]

A dozen federal courts have been selected to participate in a pilot program in which the federal judiciary and theGovernment Printing Office are partnering to provide free public access to court opinions through the GPO's FDSys system.

The one-year pilot project was approved by the Judicial Conference in March 2010, and the GPO received approval from the Joint Committee on Printing - often referred to as the oldest joint committee of the Congress - in February 2011.

When fully implemented later this year, the pilot will include two courts of appeals, seven district courts, and three bankruptcy courts. In March, the Judicial Conference approved expansion of the pilot to include up to 30 additional courts.

The judiciary continually has sought ways to enhance public access to court opinions. Free access to opinions in all federal courts is currently available via the judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records service (PACER).

Building on that success, staff from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts met with GPO management to explore making opinions even more accessible. Fdsys can provide the public with a robust search engine that can search common threads across opinions and courts.

The initial 12 participating courts are the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Eighth Circuits; the U.S. district courts for the Districts of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Maryland, Idaho, and Kansas, the Northern District of New York, and the Northern District of Alabama; and the U.S. bankruptcy courts for the District of Maine, the Southern District of Florida, and the Southern District of New York.

The site for Wagner Elliot apparently is intended to help lull actual attorneys into a sense of security as they deposit a certified check from the "law firm," purportedly paid on behalf of a foreign client closing a local real estate transaction.

Read details of this scam on lawyers in full article here.

San Francisco has put sensors into 7,000 metered parking spots and 12,250 spots in city garages. If spaces in an area open up, the sensors communicate wirelessly with computers that in turn make the information available to app users within a minute, said Mr. Ford, of the transportation agency. On the app, a map shows which blocks have lots of places (blue) and which are full (red).

San Francisco's is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with.

Last December, Los Angeles worked with a company called Streetline to introduce a system covering spaces in West Hollywood, and it is expanding the program elsewhere. Streetline has since set up smaller projects on Roosevelt Island in New York City's East River, as well as at the University of Maryland and in Forth Worth, Tex. (Emphasis added)

Read entire NYTIMES article here. (requires free subscription)

This site was created by Michael Lissner as part of a masters thesis at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. Michael was advised by Assistant Professor, Brian Carver. The goal of the site is to create a free and competitive real time alert tool for the U.S. judicial system.

At present, the site has daily information regarding all precedential opinions issued by the 13 federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Each day, they also have the non-precedential opinions from all of the Circuit courts except the D.C. Circuit. This means that by 5:10pm PST, the database will be updated with the opinions of the day, with custom alerts going out shortly thereafter.

The coverage of their corpus for a given court varies, but it is growing on a daily basis. They are working to integrate the documents from other online sites that provide free public access to court documents.

To see a detailed overview of their corpus (updated daily), visit their coverage page

But in fact, its very ordinariness is what makes this decision worth pondering. It's worth stopping to consider the assumptions about human nature that underlie not only this ruling but much of the court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. It's worth wondering what planet the justices -- most of them, anyway, and not just the incumbents, but many of their predecessors -- have been living on when it comes to encounters between the police and the rest of us.

What the court held, in an opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., is that warrantless entry to prevent the destruction of evidence is justified as long as the police "did not create the exigency by engaging or threatening to engage in conduct that violates the Fourth Amendment."

"...Following the suggestions of proposed changes to the Model Rules and comments to the Rules, the Committee provided an explanatory report that outlined the basis for its proposed revisions. In that report, the Committee described the rationale behind the proposed changes to the Comment regarding Rule 5.3:

"The last sentence of Comment [3] emphasizes that lawyers have an obligation to give appropriate instructions to nonlawyers outside the firm when retaining or directing those nonlawyers. For example, a lawyer who instructs an investigative service may not be in a position to directly supervise how a particular investigator completes a particular assignment, but the lawyer's instructions must be reasonable under the circumstances..." (Emphasis added).

Given my previously expressed concerns, I was happy to note that the Commission limited the scope of an attorney's duty to oversee the activities of non-lawyers retained to provide services on behalf of the firm. The italicized section is particularly important since it acknowledges that lawyers may not always have the necessary expertise to supervise non-lawyers, depending on the services provided..."

Read her entire analysis here.

Teaching With Documents:
Lesson Plans

As one of his final acts in office, on December 22, 2010, Governor David Paterson signed a significant law regarding exemptions for personal and real property, Chapter 568 of the Laws of New York 2010.  The law amends and adds certain exemptions relating to the satisfaction of money judgments under Civil Practice Law and Rules (CPLR) § 5205(a) for exemption of personal property, and under CPLR § 5206 for the exemption of real property.  The law also amends N.Y. Debtor and Creditor Law (DCD.) §§ 282(1), 283, and adds § 285 specifically regarding exemptions for debtors in bankruptcy.  The amendments update and modernize several exemptions, some of which had not been altered for decades.

Read entire article and get details of new exemptions here.