Online Access to Archives of Five Courts Discontinued

Due to changes in technology, online access to records of five courts through the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system has been discontinued. A notice on the PACER webpage states the locally developed legacy case management systems in the five courts listed below are now incompatible with the new PACER Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system;

• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit - Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit - Cases filed prior to January 1, 2008
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit - Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - Cases filed prior to March 1, 2012
• U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California - Cases filed prior to May 1, 2001

A note says to contact the court directly to obtain copies of documents and dockets in the above cases. Contact information for each court is available on the Court Locator page.

A Washington Post blog article contains statements from Charles Hall, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and Brian Carver, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information and co-founder of the nonprofit Free Law Project. The project along with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy maintains RECAP, a crowd-sourced platform hosting free archives of documents obtained through the paid PACER system.

New Copyright Publication

The U.S. Copyright Office has made available for viewing a public draft of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition, the first major revision in more than two decades. According to the announcement,

the draft presents more than 1200 pages of administrative practices and sets the stage for a number of long-term improvements in registration and recordation policy. It will remain in draft form for 120 days pending final review and implementation, taking effect on or around December 15, 2014.

More information and a link to download the draft is available at http://copyright.gov/comp3/.

For previous editions see The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, First Edition (1973) and Second Edition (1984).

Overview of Nonmarital Births

On July 30, 2014 the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report by Carmen Solomon-Fears, Specialist in Social Policy, entitled Nonmarital Births: An Overview. CRS studied this topic because "although marriage and family life are generally considered private issues, they have become part of the public arena primarily because of public policies that help families affected by negative outcomes associated with nonmarital births to maintain a minimum level of economic sufficiency." The report "analyzes the trends in nonmarital childbearing, discusses some of the characteristics of unwed mothers, addresses some issues involving the fathers of children born outside of marriage, and offers some concluding remarks."

Africa Rising: Harnessing the Demographic Dividend

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released an August 2014 working paper revealing "Africa will account for 80 percent of the projected 4 billion increase in the global population by 2100." The authors of the paper, Paulo Drummond, Vimal Thakoor, and Shu Yu, state that the increase in this working age population "creates a window of opportunity, which if properly harnessed, can translate into higher growth and yield a demographic dividend." To translate this opportunity into concrete economic growth, the right supportive policies fostering human capital accumulation and job creation must be in place.

For more information access working paper WP/14/143, Africa Rising: Harnessing the Demographic Dividend.