MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier

Locating judicial opinions

Some of the cases we'll be looking at this semester - like Cubby or Reno -- are available online from many sources and you can find them with Google. As an example, try Googling "cubby compuserve" to see what's available.

Other times, you'll need a more complete source of legal opinions and legal research. For this, you can use Lexis-Nexus Academic Universe, which is a non-public commercial, to which MIT has a license. You'll need to either be on campus, or have an MIT certificate in order to access it. For practice that will be useful throughout the semester, try finding the Cubby opinion now on Lexis-Nexus:

1. Go to MIT's Vera site for electronic journals, at http://river.mit.edu/mitlibweb/FMPro?-db=RS_Items.fp5&-Lay=web&-format=ro_search.htm&-findany You'll want to bookmark this. MIT has an extensive collection of online journals, and you'll find Vera indispensable for pretty much any research you'll be doing in your MIT courses.
2. Use Vera to search for "Lexis", and then select "Lexis-Nexis Academic". At this point might be asked to accept the MIT site certificate, and you might be asked to provide your MIT certificate. This will bring you to the Lexis search form.
3. Search by the party names "Cubby" and "Compuserve" and you should find the opinion.
4. Go back to the Lexis search page and search for the same case by its legal citation, "776 F. Supp. 135". We'll explain the format of these citations in class.
5. Go back again to the search Lexis page and select "Legal Research" from the menu on the left, and then select "Law Reviews". This should bring you to the law review search page. Fill in "cubby compuserve" under keywords, and set the drop-down menu to "all available dates". You should find more than a dozen law review articles that mention this case. This is an example of how you can do research for your papers over the semester.
6. Go back to the search page and search under the keywords "defamation and liability" with the additional search term "internet service provider". You should find almost 600 articles. The point of this exercise is not that you should read all (or any) of these now, but to help you appreciate that there are a lot of resources available to support your work this semester. When you write papers for the course, we expect you to take the initiative to locate resources and use them appropriately.