Today is the First Monday in October and that means it is time to become United States Supreme Court watchers. Not that we don't already do that. But, October is the time when we begin to pay even closer attention than usual.
And how to we begin to pay attention? How do we follow the Court? Staying current is always a problem for lawyers. We can read newspapers, listen to NPR, and watch the news on Fox television. But these generalized sources can be unsatisfactory. These sources do not give lawyers sufficient detail, analysis, or access to the primary documents to allow us to stay up to date.
If we are interested in one particular case we can, of course, set up an Westlaw or Lexis alert of some kind (and there are several kinds, all very effective and fairly costly). But if we want to follow the trends in the Court, see how the current Term of Court is progressing, or find about about issues that we might not have been aware of, we have to hew to some middle ground between popular media pablum and the laser-like and tunnel vision focus of RSS feeds.
Three ways of staying current with the general workings of the Court are immediately apparent.
1. The USSC website itself. Brought to you by our friends in the federal government, this one is free.
2. The BNA service, Supreme Court Today, a feature of US Law Week. BNA's product page is here. This is a commercial service and there is a fee.
3. The relative newcomer - SCOTUS Blog with its direct links to SCOTUS Wiki. This is a free service from Akin Gump, a D.C. law firm that specializes in practice before the USSC.
So which is better? If you are just interested in keeping track of the USSC which of these three will serve you best? This week we present a multi-part look at these three sources for news about what is happening at the USSC. Tomorrow, the USSC site.
