THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web

Introduction

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks.

A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are part of the World Wide Web. There are several applications called Web browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide Web; Two of the most popular being Fire fox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Skau, 2005).

Criminal Law and Web site

A comprehensive on-line digest of American criminal law, the Penal Law Web is part of a comprehensive program to reform American penal law teaching, scholarship, and practice. Additional information on this program is available here. Click here for an interactive illustration of the Penal Law Web's role in criminal law teaching. Materials exploring the constitutional constraints on substantive, rather than procedural, criminal law--with an emphasis on, but not limited to, federal constitutional law and U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence(Polo, 2003). Three-level analysis of criminal liability with links to codes, cases, & commentary--with emphasis on the Model Penal Code & New York Penal Law. Comparative analysis of modes of culpability, under the Model Penal Code, Anglo-American common law, and civil law.

It would be very convenient if all state and federal codes, statutes, and caselaw were available on the World Wide Web. This would give lay people easy access to the laws that they must follow and it would allow attorneys to do legal research without having to leave their office to go to a law library, or pay for expensive collections of casebooks (Berners, 2008).

Unfortunately, economic realities dictate that we may never see all of the substantive law of all the states on the Web. Several states receive quite a bit of income by selling the exclusive rights to publish that state's caselaw. In addition, it is quite expensive to publish and maintain a web site, and money for such a project is not available in all states. Caselaw on the Web ideally would include decisions from at least the last 30 years, a sophistocated search engine for locating relevant law, case summaries, headnotes, etc. Providing all of these on a Web site would be very expensive(Berners, 2008).

Given the above, it is impressive how much substantive law is already available on the Web. Every state now has a Web site with some substantive law posted. Unfortunately the quality, accessibility, and completeness vary considerably from state to state. Rarely will we can see more than the last few years of a state's Supreme Court opinions on the Web (Nussbaum, 2007). Often the opinions that you find will only ...