More courts should heed Ernie and Leah's urging and get the lead out when it comes to making the law understandably available online.   After all, law is free.  In West Virginia, all Supreme Court opinions back to 1991 are online and searchable.   Moreover, thanks to Radio, since earlier this year links to the full text of all new opinions, along with topical summaries written in semi-plain english, have been available in a weblog format and as RSS feeds. 

• WV Recent Opinions (All Opinions and Court News): Official Blog | RSS
• WV Topics - Civil (News about civil cases): Official Blog | RSS
• WV Topics - Criminal (News about criminal cases): Official Blog | RSS
• WV Topics - Family (News about family law cases): Official Blog | RSS

So curious citizens can visit the official blog pages and learn, for example, of today's filing of a report in a case challenging the constitutionality of federal law terminating welfare benefits.  Perhaps more importantly, all of this primary source information about the law is sorted and freely available as RSS.   Also, because the RSS feeds are registered and available for subscription from a variety of personal RSS aggregators, folks who use tools other than Radio can stay posted and learn about developments in the law.  If, to use an old example picked up by Sam Ruby and Jon Udell, a lawyer or journalist in Louisiana wants to keep abreast of asbestos mass litigation developments in West Virginia, that lawyer could subscribe to the civil topical feed via services like Syndic8 (feed 1, 2, 3, 4) and Fyuze, among others.  (Though Radio permits custom elements in RSS feeds, I haven't seen the need to insert custom elements thus far.  I've been content to use the title element to describe the topic at hand.)

5:29:44 PM