Legal Research

Twitter Job Search?

Posted on April 27, 2009
Twitter job search - click on the title to this post to go -- claims that it has posted 159,602 new jobs in the last 30 days. In their "about us" section, they explain the site as a new search engine for social media websites: Until now, search engines for social media sites merely looked for words...

Students with some firms paid to defer jobs

Posted on April 27, 2009
The Boston Globe today runs a story by Rich Barlow about a number of luckier law graduates at large firms being paid a decent salary to defer their job a year to perform public service. With his degree from Harvard Law School due in June, Juan Valdivieso makes an attractive prospective hire, and last summer, he scooped up a postgraduation job offer from the white-shoe firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in his native Washington, D...

"Flow" and Creativity: Links to the "baby mind" in us all

Posted on April 26, 2009
A few years ago, I wrote a post here about happiness at work, and the concept of "flow" in your work. When you lose yourself in the moment, lose your sense of self-consciousness, you can become more creative and more effective in many types of work. It's also very enjoyable...

Pirate Bay

Posted on April 26, 2009
I had been following the Pirate Bay story for a while. My son had clued me in, and made their story rather entertaining. This Swedish file sharing site was quite in-your-face about their battle with the copy-right police. They have a pirate ship as their logo, and of course, their name flaunts the piracy theme as well...

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CIA & MilitaryTorture in Afghanistan & Iraq - It's back & it's worse

Posted on April 25, 2009
A stellar investigative report in the Washington Post today by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick details:* Warnings in 2002 from the Pentagon against the use of torture to extract confessions; Besides obtaining unreliable information, such methods of interrogation would justify other nations in torturing captured U...

New Blog: Suffolk Media Law

Posted on April 24, 2009
?Hooray! A new student group at Suffolk is posting very actively at an interesting new blog, http://suffolkmedialaw.com/. The Suffolk Media and Communications Law Society has wide ranging interests. They have posts ranging from Supreme Court cases on First Amendment cases on dog fighting videos, to Congressional Tweeters, to issues with Facebook abuse among jurors and fair use rights for news aggregators...

Visit to Justice Ginsburg

Posted on April 24, 2009
Illustrator Maira Kalman has created an inspiring graphic representation of her recent visit to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that appears in today's New York Times. I found both the illustrations and the text to be enchanting. It turns out that Justice Ginsburg loves the painter Henri Matisse, as do I, and her illustrations evoke his style and use of color...

Employment Issues & the Specter of a Permanent Underclass

Posted on April 23, 2009
The ABA has a book, Fair Measure: Toward Effective Attorney Evaluations. The book actually came out last August, but they featured it on their blog today, with an eye-catching come-on, asking, "Do Women Lawyers Receive Fair Treatment in Their Performance Evaluations?" Most gender bias is subtle rather than overt, however...

The Legal Workshop

Posted on April 23, 2009
From Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch (and with a tip of the OOTJ hat to my colleague Irene Good!), Is legal scholarship on its death bed? The current and former editors of several law reviews suggest it is and they believe they have a way to revitalize it...

Ephemeral Digital Archives

Posted on April 22, 2009
Most librarians are following the Google Book Settlement carefully, wondering what it will mean for long-term access to a large part of the scholarly record. This article from Inside Higher Ed will do nothing to quiet their concerns. It describes the "fate of 'Paper of Record,' a digital archive of early newspapers with a particularly strong collection of Mexican newspapers ...

Elizabeth Warren

Posted on April 22, 2009
When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law Library, I had the pleasure of knowing Professor Elizabeth Warren, a leading bankruptcy scholar, who has since left and now teaches at Harvard Law School. She is the subject of a recent Newsweek article, entitled "The Debt Crusader," describing her new post as head of the "Congressional Oversight Panel, the group that's critiquing the government's bank bailout and advising legislators on how to reform the financial system...

U.N. opens it Digital Library

Posted on April 22, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education online has a brief but eye-catching note that the United Nations has opened a World Digital Library. Well, when you get there, it turns out to be more like a digital archive. It's pretty cool. It has lots of map images and photo images, a few scanned pages...

Hungary's Horse

Posted on April 21, 2009
The New York Times' story 4/20 about Overdose the racehorse who is carrying Hungary's heart in every race, caught my attention. My sister sent me the link, and I'm a sucker for stories like this. Tip of the OOTJ hat to Barrett Hansen. A racehorse bought for a pittance has turned into a national hero in crisis-stricken Hungary...

Get Ready for Earth Day! 4/22/2009

Posted on April 21, 2009
Earth Day is easier than ever to link up with; you can use the Earth Day Network to look for Earth Day events near you, or by interesting keyword. They have a blog, with entries from around the world --including a cool one from Tokyo. There is a GreenPeace YouTube video call to arms...

Access to Justice should become Access to Government

Posted on April 20, 2009
Courts, especially in New York, are the last public arena for resolving disputes. Working the reference desk, I have often wondered why I get so many questions from non-attorneys that struck me as administrative agency questions: labor law enforcement, credit collections, and housing law enforcement ...

A Challenge to the Goddess Test

Posted on April 20, 2009
When I last took the Godddess test, I was pleased to find that I am inspired by the spirit of Athena. I should have taken the exam discussed in John Loy's review and linked in the title to this post. I do think that I would prefer a personality test to a job interview...

Hybrid approach to saving newspapers?

Posted on April 20, 2009
Follow this link to an editorial in today's Boston Globe by Donald Kimelman, "A Hybrid Path for Saving Newspapers." Having been appalled by recent threats to shut down the Globe, I have contemplated a future in a large American city without newspapers...

FBI Expanding DNA Database to Include Suspects

Posted on April 19, 2009
The New York Times article today by Solomon Moore reports on a plan by the FBI to expand their shared DNA database by including DNA samples from people arrested or detained as suspects but not yet convicted. Currently 15 states collect DNA from that class of people as well as from immigrants who have been detained...

If you use Nokia cell phone for e-mail, you should know...

Posted on April 18, 2009
Thanks to Slash-dot, I ran across several pieces of information about Nokia cell phones that ought to be more widely known:1. If you set up your newer Nokia phone for e-mail access, you have to use a wizard that demands you input your e-mail address, user name and password...

Just for fun: Spring Migration Tracker once again!

Posted on April 18, 2009
It's spring migration time and for folks like me who are so hungry for spring they are walking up perfect strangers' driveways to pay homage to daffodils and crocuses, the Spring Migration Tracker at E-Nature.com is perfect! No more worries about trespassing issues, for instance! And I can glory in spring even in bad rainstorms! You can click on the region of the country that interests you, and see what birds are migrating by the date...

Profs sue over sham treatise

Posted on April 16, 2009
Law.com has an article here about two law professors suing West publishing company for putting their names on a supplement that they said was a) not necessary and b) so poorly researched that it will harm their reputations. An ugly dispute has erupted between West Publishing and two law professors who claim they were falsely identified as the authors of an annual supplement to a treatise on Pennsylvania criminal law even though they had nothing to do with writing it...

Tax Day Tea Party

Posted on April 15, 2009
This should be interesting. The right wing is pushing a nation-wide protest today. I don't know how well-attended it will be. I suppose I will know by the end of the day since my office is at the base of Boston Common, just below the Massachusetts State House, and I suppose I will hear the protests, as I usually do...

Feds warning on Foreclosure Rescue Scams

Posted on April 15, 2009
The Treasury Department's Office of Thrift Services has a great web page here warning consumers against scammers who offer "rescues" if the homeowner is facing mortgage foreclosure. DON"T PANIC! Just because you are behind on your mortgage payments, you may not be actually facing foreclosure yet...

Judith Krug, ALA's First Amendment Leader, Dies

Posted on April 15, 2009
Click here for the New York Times obituary for Judith Krug. She was the woman who helped found Banned Books week. She also led the ALA in its struggle against forcing public libraries to filter the internet for youth. And she was one of the leaders in the fight against provisions of the USA Patriot Act that would require libraries to give circulation records to the FBI...

This Just In: It's National Be Kind to Lawyers Day!

Posted on April 14, 2009
Did you know there WAS a National Be Kind To Lawyers Day? Kudos to Above the Law for bringing this to our attention! According to Above the Law's blog post, the day was actually lobbied for by a non-lawyer, Steve Hughes, in St. Louis. He created the day by registering it with Chase's Calendar of Events, a McGraw-Hill publication...

Can you find me that red book I used before?

Posted on April 14, 2009
Librarians are used to being asked for help like this (at least we USED to be asked for help like that). Now, apparently, computer researchers are finding that people interact with webpages the same way. Technology Review reports in an April 10 story by Erica Naone that searchers are more successful looking for web pages when they combine a search with information culled from their search history information with thumbnail images...

True "Confessions"

Posted on April 13, 2009
Reading this article today from Inside Higher Ed about the "confessions" undergraduates make to reference librarians, I was struck by how similar they are to what we hear at the reference desk of an academic law library. They are also similar to the issues that the students in my Advanced Legal Research find confusing...

Another Sign of the Times

Posted on April 10, 2009
I blogged earlier this week about the phenomenon of people being imprisoned for not being able to pay court costs and other fees. Now in another sign of the bad economic times, more people are opting not to hire attorneys and to represent themselves...

FCC Seeking to Improve US Broadband Access & Affordability

Posted on April 10, 2009
Yay! The FCC has issued a document seeking comment to "inform the development of a national broadband plan for our country." ...infrastructure barely hints at the importance of what we are undertaking. High speed ubiquitous broadband can help to restore America's economic well-being and open the doors of opportunity for more Americans, no matter who they are, where they live, or the particular circumstances of their lives...

Google Books sued over "orphan books"

Posted on April 09, 2009
Click on the title to this post to read an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education online about orphan books -- the out-of-print works still under copyright, but for which the copyright holder cannot be found. Abandoned works, that is, by both "parents," the publisher and the author, alike, poor dears...

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