Legal Research

Independent Pacer Survey for Everyone!

Posted on November 23, 2009
The good folks at Stanford Law Library have put together an independent survey on Pacer, which you do NOT have to have a Pacer account to take. They explain:The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is in the midst of an assessment of PACER. This PACER User Satisfaction Survey will only take a few minutes...

Xyggy?

Posted on November 22, 2009
Rich Leiter twittered Xyggy legal, a new beta search engine for finding similar cases on the web. Xyggy offers more than just general legal searches, so you can reach Xyggy Patent, which covers patents from 1976 onwards. Xyggy Articles searches through archived news articles of the New York Times from 1987 - 2007...

Public Law School in Massachusetts?

Posted on November 21, 2009
Massachusetts is one of only six states without a public law school. I suspect it is a combination of the fact that there are so very many private law schools here, and that (at least some of them) have lobbied so assiduously against the idea every time the issue has come up...

Google enters the legal search engine fray

Posted on November 19, 2009
See here to see a fascinating post on the Google Blog. The Google engineers are pioneering a new radio button on Google Scholar that allows the user to search by legal topics or by case names. They include a rather graceful statement about "standing on the shoulder of giants:" We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public...

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Modified GoogleBooks Settlement Offered - Justice Department Considering

Posted on November 16, 2009
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google have re-submitted their revised Settlement Agreement for Google Books to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York. The Department of Justice, which had responded to the original Settlement with a list of concerns in a Statement of Interest, is reviewing the new revision...

Educational Entrepreneurship

Posted on November 16, 2009
My husband pointed out this article in yesterday's New York Times. There are many teachers in his family, and he thought it was interesting to learn that [T]thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises ...

Verbatim Transcript?

Posted on November 16, 2009
During my Advanced Legal Research class this morning, we were talking about the Congressional Record and the fact that members of Congress are allowed to edit and add to their remarks before they are published. One of the students mentioned that she had read a story in the New York Times over the weekend which described lobbyists for Genentech who managed to get statements they had written "printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress...

Second Life Advisors at Penn State

Posted on November 13, 2009
The Wired Campus feature of the Chronicle of Higher Education dated November 9, 2009 carries a story about Penn State requiring faculty advisors to appear in Second Life to advise students. Penn State has had a campus presence in the virtual world of Second Life for some time, and decided to offer advising there, in addition (according to a comment at the online article) to office hours, e-mail, phone and Skype...

Kindle's Read-aloud Function Not Accessible for Blind Users : Maybe Kindle Is Not the Answer!

Posted on November 12, 2009
The Boston Globe included a story yesterday about the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University in New York stating that they would not consider roll-outs of Kindle e-readers until Amazon addresses problems with accessibility for blind users...

Book Thieves, Rare Books, the Desire of the Book

Posted on November 08, 2009
The Boston Globe Idea section today has an interview with author Allison Hoover Bartlett about her recent book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (Riverhead), about John Charles Gilkey...

"Google Mistrial"

Posted on November 06, 2009
This editorial, published in today's Boston Globe, caught my eye because my husband is currently serving on a federal grand juror here in New York, where cell phones and other electronic devices are banned from the courthouse. The editorial discusses the growing phenomenon of "tweeting, texting, and obsessive e-mail checking" which now threatens the jury system...

Maine's Gay Marriage Repealed in Voter Referendum

Posted on November 04, 2009
Time online reports on Maine's voters repealing gay marriage in that state. GLAD.org, the organization that has engineered most of the gay marriage legal and political efforts across New England and beyond has more information at their website. I consider gay marriage to be a civil right issue...

Extraordinary Rendition Decision Places Executive Branch Above the Law

Posted on November 03, 2009
The New York Law Journal, in an excellent (and free!) article discusses an en banc decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen in 2002. Mark Fass writes The 7-4 majority held that the Canadian, Maher Arar, failed to state a claim under the Torture Victim Protection Act and that his remaining claims did not satisfy the test for "implied" constitutional causes of action under the 1971 U...

Professor Warren Takes on the Credit Industry

Posted on November 03, 2009
I had the pleasure of serving as the library liaison to Professor Elizabeth Warren when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has since moved on to Harvard Law School, where she specializes in commercial law and bankruptcy law. Her treatises on bankruptcy have been very influential, drawing as they do on empirical methods to paint vivid portraits of real people caught in the web of debt...

Kindle Review

Posted on November 03, 2009
A cogent review of the Kindle reader was published in today's Inside Higher Education. Written by Alex Golub, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the review discusses whether Kindle is appropriate for use by academics. He concludes that Kindle's current design is best suited to pleasure reading and not to reading of academic texts--"the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain--a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously...

Helping Our Students Bridge the Gap: Expert Legal Researchers

Posted on November 02, 2009
I have spent a couple decades by now teaching legal research. I started with the optimistic idea that I could just pour the information into students' heads. Well, not quite that naive, but nearly. Early on, we lectured, and then gave our students worksheets, and reading assignments to introduce them to the various research tools...

Why Lexis and Westlaw Should NOT be Like Google

Posted on October 30, 2009
For the first time, I had a student write in my Advanced Legal Research class that they wished that Lexis and Westlaw could be more like Google. I had heard other librarians moan about this but had just not run across it til now. It really gave me pause to have it in hand...

Berring on Free Legal Information Sites: Contretemps

Posted on October 30, 2009
At Legal Currents, a blog by Thomson Reuters (West), Bob Berring is featured in a very thought-provoking and articulate video about the efforts by government agencies and volunteers (read GPO and PublicResource.org/Law.gov, and the Legal Information Institute) to make legal information freely available...

New Building for CUNY Law School

Posted on September 30, 2009
The New York Law Journal is reporting that CUNY Law School will move into a new building in the fall of 2011. The story is below. As the story points out, the current facility at CUNY is notoriously hard to get to and has been inadequate since its founding...

Library Catalogs Getting Serious Upgrade

Posted on September 30, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a wonderful article in its Sept. 28, 2009 issue, Technology section and online here "After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software." ...traditional online library catalogs don't tend to order search results by ranked relevance, and they can befuddle users with clunky interfaces...

Withdrawing Print Titles

Posted on September 30, 2009
Ithaka has issued a new report entitled What to Withdraw? Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Its goal is to help libraries that want to recapture the space made available when digitized journals are discarded. To quote from the executive summary, "this report addresses two key questions: which types of print journals can libraries withdraw responsibly today, and how can that set of materials be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility?" For journals with reliable digital access, retaining the print serves primarily a preservation function...

A Jail for Books

Posted on September 30, 2009
I enjoyed reading this article from today's Boston Globe about Dunster House, the oldest dormitory on the Harvard campus, which is known for its "ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls [which] has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain...

How much have students really changed?

Posted on September 29, 2009
I went today to our university's Center for Teaching Excellence for a book group meeting. Part of the conversation turned to the Kindle. The group leader said she had talked to her undergraduate students last night about the Kindle and asked how many had one...

Right to Know Day (FOIA and all that jazz)

Posted on September 27, 2009
Monday, Sept. 28 is International Right to Know Day! International Right to Know Day was established by access to information advocates from around the globe. It was first celebrated on 28 September 2003, and 2009 will see the 7th International Right to Know Day...

Legal Jobs Outlook Roundup

Posted on September 25, 2009
Putting together several ABA articles today, the legal jobs outlook is maybe not as grim as before. It depends on the geography and practice area, and the job hunter's credentials (which is always the case, I suppose). Here are the links & how I put them together in my crystal ball:Look first at Above the Law and "Last Week in Layoffs" for the real scoop on what's happening on the street the week of September 21, 2009...

Obama's Judges

Posted on September 24, 2009
Jeffrey Toobin has written a trenchant analysis of President Obama's judicial-selection process in the September 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. Toobin discusses the difficulty of choosing candidates who will be successful in the confirmation process, and notes that "the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor...

Google Books Settlement Fairness Hearing Postponed (again!)

Posted on September 24, 2009
Bookseller.com reports that U.S. Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have asked the court to once again postpone the Fairness Hearing in the Google Books Settlement in order for these parties to consider and respond to the points made by the Justice Department in their Statement of Interest...

Future of Academic Libraries?

Posted on September 24, 2009
Librarians reacted "coolly" to a presentation by Daniel Greenstein, Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Programs at the University of California. The presentation was part of a meeting on sustainable scholarship sponsored by the Ithaka group. Greenstein's presentation was the subject of an article in Inside Higher Ed...

A follow-up to the story on the Cushing Academy Library Abandoning Books

Posted on September 22, 2009
OOTJ readers saw the post from the Boston Globe, a few weeks ago, where the headmaster of the private school, the Cushing Academy, was proudly announcing that he was disposing of all the 20,000 books in the library and moving to a "bookless" model. Henceforward, the Cushing Academy would use only a handful of Kindles, a flat-screen TV, and $12,000 cappuccino machine where the books formerly stood...

Justice Dept. Weighs in on Google Book Settlement

Posted on September 22, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education alerts us that the Department of Justice issued a statement of interest about the Google Book Settlement last Friday, Sept. 18, 2009. The link takes you to the PDF of the full text post of the document as submitted to the Court...

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