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 MainStream Marketing or Reno -- are available online from many sources and you can find them with Google. As an example, try Googling "Mainstream Marketing v FTC" 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 Mainstream opinion now on Lexis-Nexus:

1. Go to MIT's Vera site for electronic journals, and Lexis Nexis Academic Universe. This will bring you to the Lexis search form.
2. Search by the party names "Mainstream Marketing" and "Federal trade Commission" and you should find the opinion.
3. Go back to the Lexis search page and search for the same case by its legal citation, "358 F.3d 1228". For an explanation of these citations, see Introduction to Basic Legal Citation by Peter W. Martin of Cornell Law School. The easiest place to start is in the example section (chapter 3).

4. Go back again to the search Lexis page and search under US Legal in Law Reviews. bring you to the law review search page. Search for "Mainstream Marketing" and "FTC" and "do not call". You should find more than 40 law review articles that mention this case. This is an example of how you can do research for your papers over the semester. 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.