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Law Sites/The Securities Business/News of the World/Of Historical Interest/Nobody Asked Me, but . . .

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• Is it useful?
• Is it interesting?
• Does it tell you something useful or interesting about the proprietor?  

Comments on current connections or proposals for new ones may be directed to webmaster@wiestlaw.com

Law Sites    

If you want to look up things for yourself--and you should--these are the best free (and not so free) sites on the web:

These are the principal sites for primary Massachusetts legal materials (judicial decisions and statutes

Searchers should note that while the Federal court sites offer keyword searches, I wouldn't try to run any search which did not include a party and/or the judge's name.

All these Massachusetts sites can be linked through the Legal Information Institute, which attempts to collate free Internet law sites; the scant availability of Massachusetts material demonstrates LII's weaknesses, although it is a good mean of pulling down Federal statutes (including the entire United States Code) and the text of the Code of federal Regulations.  The Social Law Library in Boston is the best Internet site for Massachusetts administrative materials, such as the Code of Massachusetts Regulations, but many of these databases are available only to paying subscribing lawyer (like me).  

Law.com--Good for current news (most often from New York, DC, Philadelphia, Miami and California), but you have to go elsewhere for the text of opinions.

Findlaw and Lawyers.com portray themselves as consumer-oriented sites, but in fact are sponsored by the two dominant law publishers, West Publishing/Thomson (Findlaw) and Lexis/Reed Elsiver (Lawyers.com).  Their best feature may be their lawyer directories; the champion is the electronic Martindale-Hubbell on Lawyers.com (funded by lawyers like me who purchase various forms of professional announcements  (here's mine) )and web page templates.  The West Legal Directory available on Findlaw is the challenger, built up from the database of users of West products (like me) West is also happy to provide enhanced listing and Web page development for a price.  Either of the directories can give you some idea of what the attorney you may be engaging--or opposing--did before you met him.  

I participate actively in the work of the Boston Bar Association, particularly its Litigation and Solo and Small Firm sections and the Antitrust committee of the Business Law section.  I continue to pay American Bar Association dues to subscribe to ABA-sponsored journals.  Neither organization's site is particularly helpful to laymen.  

The Securities Business      

From my perspective, the site of the regulatory arm of the National Association of Securities Dealers (now known as NASD Regulation, Inc.) and the companion site of NASD Dispute Resolution, Inc., (which now operates as a sister corporation) are among the most useful on the web.  NASD sites make available brokers' personal, disciplinary and litigation records stored in NASD's Central Registration Depository (the "CRD", described in this article of mine), rules governing arbitration and mediation proceedings, general securities industry rules, and current enforcement and rulemaking activity, reflected in NASD Regulation press releases and Notices to Members.  If you're looking to see how the industry works (or is supposed to work), rather than researching individual stocks (if you've gotten this far, you probably have your own favorite stock data site), this is the place to go.  

While I was preparing this page, I discovered that the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission has improved dramatically in mid-2002.  While it's still difficult for those without a knowledge of Federal Securities laws to drill down, the EDGAR system for locating company filings has become much ore user-friendly, providing pick lists when a search string generates more than one company name and actually explaining what the listed document is, (e.g., an annual report, prospectus or proxy statement).  The SEC is also now providing an easy to read (if sometimes hard to navigate) glossary of form types and numbers.  Once, I would have recommended following the EDGAR link off a company page on one of the commercial investor sites (Morningstar, Motley Fool or wsj.com) to pull up SEC filings for a specific company.  The new EDGAR makes such advice far less compelling.  

News of the World 

The newspapers of record are at wsj.com  and nytimes.com--period..  In fact. even though I still read the paper Wall Street Journal daily, I am willing to pay for its Web content, both as a source of late-breaking business news and its briefing books on individual companies and securities.  Dow Jones' free Opinion Journal page, particularly its daily Best of the Web  webletter gives you some insight (albeit sometimes dosed with too much sarcasm) as to what's going on in the Journal's editorial chambers--even when you don't agree with them.  Why can't some rag at the other end of the spectrum come up with something similar?

In most cities with press competition, the tabloid usually has better local politics, crime and beat sports coverage.  That's why I read the Boston Herald.  

Of Historical Interest     

My primary loyalty still goes to the University of Pennsylvania, more specifically The Daily Pennsylvanian (on whose sports staff I toiled for four years) and Van Pelt College House, a low-rise structure at 40th and Spruce now buried administratively in an entity with an institutional Web page called Gregory College House.   Thirty years after I arrived, the original Van Pelt's leading faculty lights, Alan Kors and Mark Adams,  remain at Penn, although none of the classroom instructors who principally molded me through majors in American history and economics appear to be left.  3909 Spruce continues to rear its head here, as I began to get ideas on how to mix the personal and professional in a web page from Al Filreis, an English professor who served as Van Pelt's master in the mid-90's.  I must still like the place, insofar as I have participated as an alumni interviewer on Penn's Secondary Schools Admissions Committee for over a decade and as an active board member of the Penn Club of Boston (with stints as secretary, treasurer, and occasional newsletter editor) for nearly as long.   

I attended Harvard Law School in the late 1970's.  Apart from academics, I spent much as my time either writing one article, text editing others, and managing the business of the Harvard Journal on Legislation.  These days, reality TV shows might have become my avocation. . . . . 

I spent six years of middle and high school at the long-gone McBurney School , formerly of 15 W. 63rd St. in Manhattan.  The school died in the 1980's; the building's facade had been incorporated into a new condo building employing the air rights of the New York West Side YMCA.  The only extant remaining reference is on page six (or so) of The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield lost the fencing equipment on the way to a meet at a school J.D. Salinger once attended).  If any ex-Highlander knows of a web site other than Classmates.com keeping what embers remain alive, please let me know--I'd love to help out.  

   Nobody Asked Me,  but. . . 

Notes from a Attorney/Advocate/Scribbler/Combatant

    If you were to ask me the name of the writer I would be most likely to read for pleasure (when I still have the chance), I'd reply with the name of H.L. Mencken.  A well-worn copy of the Chrestomathy (the last compilation of writings assembled by its author) came into my hands long ago and has never escaped from my sight since.   Many of HLM's views are far beyond the scope of acceptable political and social discourse today--even more so than when they were written in the first half of the last Century.  His style as an iconoclast, however, was nothing short of masterful.  Consider, e.g.,

. . . [L]ife in the Republic has always seemed to me to be far more comic than serious.  We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with- alarm.  I have had too good a time of it in this world to go down that chute. . . .

Preface, H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy at vii (1953 printing)

Bill Maher, as well as R. Emmett Tyrrell and some of his colleagues at The American Spectator (who I now see have moved on to a new site known as The American Prowler) could take a few lessons from him.. 

    Another iconoclast I admire is the somewhat more forgotten A.J. Liebling, best known as a New Yorker writer whose far-flung portfolio included press criticism, Europe and North Africa during World War II, food and the fights.   Some quote sites will give you taste of his material; the major book sites tell me few of his works remain in print courtesy, but The New Yorker archive page will redistribute Liebling articles when topically appropriate (e.g., when David Remnick publishes a boxing article).   

     I doubt I'm the only person in the advocacy/dispute resolution business fascinated with head-to-head competition.  My skills at either chess or boxing are on a par with the aforementioned Mr. Liebling:

I continued to box occasionally for many years more, generally just enough to show I knew what was all about it, as the boys say.  I went shorter rounds every time.  The last was in about 1946, and the fellow I was working with said he could not knock me out unless I consented to rounds longer than nine seconds.

Introduction, The Sweet Science (published 1956, Penguin Sports Library Edition (1982, out-of-print)  p. 7)

    In early 1991, I attended a practice seminar.  An instructor (a seasoned trial lawyer whose name I cannot recall with certainty without my notes) commended the writings of Ernest Hemingway to those present.  I agree--perhaps because for advocates as much as the torreos in Death in the Afternoon,

. . . . The cynical ones make the best companions.  But the best of all are the cynical ones when they are still devout; or after; when having been devout, then cynical, they become devout again by cynicism. . . .

         (Scribner Library Edition at 59)

Suggestion from an Employment Lawyer Who Was Once an Employee

   For my money, the best employment advice site on the 'net is Ask the Headhunter, with its emphasis on "Doing the Job" to get the job instead of purifying the résumé and cover letter.  While only paying subscribers to Motley Fool now have access to the bulletin boards, the free public site remains a great source of practical information and encouragement.

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