The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) has launched a new internet-based data service for the global user community. It brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point (http://data.un.org/) from which users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN System. Access at UNdata
Policy Archive, the first free comprehensive online archive of public policy research was launched recently by the non-profit Center for Governmental Studies in partnership with the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library and support from major U.S. charitable foundations. At its launch the archive contains 12,000 policy documents from over 220 think tanks and other research organizations with the plan to increase to 20,000 by the end of 2008. Access at Policy Archive
SCOTUSblog has published its "Super StatPack" compilation of statistics with charts, lists, and observations about the just-concluded Supreme Court Term. Find the the complete report (pdf) at StatPack
Brian C. Murchison, The Fact-Conjecture Framework in U.S. Libel Law: Four Problems, 13 Media & Arts L. Rev. (forthcoming 2008), available at SSRN.
The law library subscribes to both the print and the online versions of U.S. Law Week. For online access go to the law library research page and click on "BNA" which lists the BNA publications subscribed to by the law library. The BNA page also has links for e-mail notification, which for U.S. Law Week includes a choice of "Supreme Court Today" (daily updates summarizing U.S. Supreme Court docket activities) and "U.S. Law Week" (weekly highlights summarizing major federal/state cases and general legal news).
Scott E. Sundby, John H. Blume & Sheri Lynn Johnson, Competent Capital Representation: The Necessity of Knowing and Heeding What Jurors Tell Us About Mitigation, 36 Hofstra L. Rev. 1035 (2008) available at Westlaw
Viewed as Google's answer to Wikipedia Knol, also a user-generated encyclopedia was opened last week to the public. Unlike Wikipedia Knol authors are identified and can even earn a profit from their articles. Access at Knol
Casemaker is a database of cases and statutes similar to VersusLaw and Loislaw all of which are low-cost competitors to Lexis and Westlaw. Casemaker has primarily marketed their services through state bar consortiums, but is now offering their case/statute databases without charge to law students/faculty/staff (as also does Loislaw and VersusLaw with their similar databases). Although these services offer little that cannot be found in Lexis and Westlaw, students may like to experiment with them as examples of low-cost legal research useful after graduation. Casemaker is also developing a legal jobs bulletin board that may be of future interest. Access at Casemaker
Competition is in the news again. This from AP:
Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.
She believes her latest invention is even more valuable — only this time it's not for sale.
Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.
The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.
Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers — Russell Power and Louis Monier — searched for better ways to search.
Now, it's boasting time.
For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.
Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages. Access at CUIL
Russell A. Miller and Rebecca Bratspies, eds., Progress in International Law (Martinus Nijhoff Press 2008).
Russell A. Miller, ed., U.S. National Security, Intelligence and Democracy: From the Church Committee to the War on Terror (Routledge 2008).
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Medicare: What are the Real Problems? What Contribution can Law Make to Real Solutions?, 1 St. Louis J. Health L. & Pol'y 45 (2007).
Sarah K. Wiant, Developments in Copyright Law: The Search for Balance Goes On, in The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information 46 (53d ed. 2008)
In Jacobsen v. Katzer (No. 2008-1001, Aug 13, 2008), the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit reversed a lower court's ruling that copyright protection is not available for software distributed free-of-charge under an open source license. Read the opinion
Scott Sundby and Maria Angeles Perez Cebadera, Caminando Sobre La Cuerda Floja Constitutcional: La USA Patriot Act Y La "Guerra Contra el Terror", Revista General de Derecho Procesal 15 (2008).
Oyendo Al Jurado A Traves De La Puerta: Una Perspectiva De La Aplicacion De La Pena De Muerta En America, Revista General de Derecho Procesal 15 (2008).
Robin Wilson,"Unauthorized Practice": Regulating the Use of Anesthetized, Recently Deceased, and Conscious Patients in Medical Teaching, 44 Idaho L.Rev. 423 (2008)
A. Benjamin Spencer, Acing Civil Procedure, 2d Ed. (Thomson West 2008).
A. Benjamin Spencer, Civil Procedure: A Contemporary Approach, 2d Ed. (Thomson West 2008).
Timothy S. Jost, et al., Liability and Quality Issues in Health Care, 6th Ed. (2008 Thomson West).
Timothy S. Jost, e al., Bioethics: Health Care Law and Ethics, 6th Ed. (2008 Thomson West).
Timothy S. Jost, et al., The Law of Health Care Organization and Finance, 6th Ed. (2008 Thomson West).
The Mississippi Supreme Court ordered one of its sitting justices not to publish his dissent with the Court's majority decision. Apparently the Court stopped its court clerk from filing Justice Oliver Diaz's opinion into the record. Here's a copy. In the opinion, Justice Diaz writes "A majority vote to censor a justice of the court and prohibit the issuance of a dissenting opinion may be unprecedented in the history of American jurisprudence.”By not being part of the record, Justice Diaz's opinion has no legal status.
It was published by Folo, a blog.
Robert T. Danforth & Mark Archer, Federal Income Taxation of Trusts and Estates, 3rd Ed., (Carolina Academic Press 2008).
Mark A. Drumbl, A Hard Look at the Soft Theory of International Law, in The Theory and Practice of International Criminal Law: Essays in Honor of M. Cherif Bassiouni (Martinus Nijohoff 2008).
Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts (Robin Fretwell Wilson, Douglas Laycock, and Anthony R. Picarello, Jr. eds.) ( Roman & Littlefield Pub. 2008).
The Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the state’s anti-spam law for violating the First Amendment because it bars anonymous transmission of political, religious and other speech protected by the First Amendment and fails to limit its restrictions to fraudulent or commercial e-mail or to unprotected speech such as defamation or obscenity. Writing for the court, Justice G. Steven Agee observed, "were the Federalist Papers just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by 'Publius' would violate the statute" because it bars anonymous transmissions. Read the opinion here.
President Bush signed new Federal Rule of Evidence 502, S. 2450, into law on September 19, 2008. The rule applies to the inadvertent disclosure in discovery of information protected by the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine. Check out the very good Federal Evidence Blog for the text of the rule, analysis and links, including this one to Statement of Congressional Intent Regarding Rule 502 of the Federal Rules of Evidence (154 Cong. Rec. H7818-H7819 (Sept. 8, 2008)).
Robin Fretwell Wilson, A Matter of Conviction: Moral Clashes over Same-Sex Adoption, 22 BYU J.Pub. L. 475 (2008).
Robin Fretwell Wilson, A Matter of Conviction: Moral Clashes over Same-Sex Adoption, 22 BYU J.Pub. L. 475 (2008).
The House is expected to debate its version of the financial industry bailout bill, Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, today. The text of the bill was released yesterday:
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
Summary of the Act
The Office of Legal Affairs Treaty Section has rolled out a redesign of the United Nations Treaty Collection. While the content remains free, the collection has been refined to offer a variety of advanced search features including: popular name search; title search; and participant search.
Erik Luna, Drug Détente, 20 FSR 304 (2008). Access here.
Lawton P. Cummings, Globalization and the Evisceration of the Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege: A Re-examination of the Privilege and a Proposal for Harmonization, (forthcoming 76 Tenn. L. Rev.____ (2008)).
Sean B. Seymore, Heightened Enablement in the Unpredictable Arts, 56 UCLA L. Rev. 127 (2008)
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Health Care Access in the United States. Conflicting Concepts of Justice and Little Solidarity, 27 Med. & L. 605 (2008) available at Westlaw
CiteGenie is a new extension for the Firefox web browser that creates Bluebook formatted pinpoint citations from Westlaw.Read a review of CiteGenie and explaination of how to install the FireFox extension at Review of CiteGenie - Automatic Bluebook citations when using Westlaw.
The Christian Science Montior has announced that it will "become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily edition with its website". The Bluebook is adjusting to these new publication trends with Rule 18.2 providing guidance on how to cite to Internet publications.
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Krankes Gesundheitssystem, Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, October 10, 2008 available at bpb
The Law Library has subscribed to E&E Publishing's web service, providing comprehensive, daily coverage of environmental and energy politics and policy. Includes articles, webcast video, and transcripts, presented under the titles: ClimateWire, Environment and energy daily, Onpoint, Greenwire, E&ENews PM, E&ETV news, Land letter, and E&E Special reports. It can be accessed via Annie, under any of the titles included above.
The Law Library of Congress contains approximately 75,000 volumes of printed Congressional Hearings.As part of the Law Library’s transition to the digital future, a collaborative pilot project was undertaken with Google, Inc. to digitize the entire collection and make it freely available to Congress and the world. Three collections have been selectively compiled to provide users with a test experience:
* Census: U.S.
* Freedom of Information/Privacy
* Immigration
These selected Hearings, presented as Adobe Acrobat PDF files, are samples of a larger group that will be digitized and made available as a result of this project. Ultimately, both the Library and Google will provide full-text access to the larger group of Hearings.
In Class Lawyers Against Coke Get More Than $31.5 Million, Robin McDonald reports that U.S. District Court Judge Willis B. Hunt disallowed $93,960.67 for LexisNexis and Westlaw expenses in a $137.5 million class action securities fraud settlement. Judge Hunt explained, "This Court is of the opinion that charging separately for use of a research service is akin to charging for the use of a case law reporter. That is, the research service is a tool, much like a computer or a pen, and this Court considers the use of such a service part of a firm's overhead. ... Moreover, this Court is aware that many firms pay a flat rate to Lexis and Westlaw regardless of their usage, and class counsel cannot claim such flat rate payments as an out-of-pocket expense." Read more
Restating Restitution: The Restatement Process and Its Critics, 65 Wash. & Lee L.Rev. 933 (2008).
Commonwealth Legal Infromation Institute (CommonLII) has added free access to English Law Reports 1220-1873. Access at EngR
If you want to search law school sites collectively, try Search All Law Schools on the CALI webpage. Possible uses? Research tuition figures, law professors, academic concentrations and law school clinics. The all law schools search was created using Google Custom Search.
Read an Atlanta Constitution article about Robin Wilson's presentation.
A comparison of legislative resources available on GPO Access and other
Government and non-Government Web sites was recently completed. Eight
Web sites were selected for in-depth analysis including GPO Access,
THOMAS, House.gov, Senate.gov, CQ.com, HeinOnline, Lexis-Nexis
Congressional, and Westlaw. The report specifically evaluates the
availability of legislative resources on all of the databases examined,
the scope of the resources on each database, the source of those
resources (i.e., whether they house their own content or link to other
Web sites for it), and additional legislative resources or features
exclusive to comparable Web sites.
The 2008 comparison report and previous reports are available through
the Federal Bulletin Board (FBB)) at
The Tennessee Supreme Court has decided to close all three of its law libraries in an effort to save money according to the Nashville Business Journal. Combined the law libraries housed about 125,000 volumes. The closures will happen on December 31, leaving at least five librarians and staff unemployed.
The GPO and the GAO have reached an agreement where GAO will now provide public access to the GAO Reports and GAO Comptroller General Decisions databases from its website. The GPO will maintain archives of both databases, but no new content will be added to the GPO Access versions of these databases. This agreement will eliminate duplication of effort on these databases, as well as minimizing version control issues. Under the partnership agreement, if for any reason GAO is not able to provide access to these materials, GPO will resume the responsibility.
Coverage of the databases:
The GAO Reports database contains reports on audits, surveys, investigations, and evaluations of Federal programs conducted by GAO. The content in this database dates back to 1970 and earlier.
The Comptroller General Decisions database contains decisions and opinions issued by the Comptroller General in areas of Federal law such as appropriations, bid protests, and Federal agency rulemaking. It also contains historic material dating back to 1970. GAO is actively working on digitizing its legacy collection so historic material will continue to be added to the two databases.
[JH]
Elizabeth J. Fowler & Timothy Stolzfus Jost, Why Public Programs Matter--And Will Continue to Matter--Even After Health Reform, 36 J.L. Med. & Ethics 670; available at Westlaw
FormFinder is a new tool and database that allows users to easily find their form faster. FormFinder includes a new single access point for Westlaw's most extensive collection of forms with better organized content and improved search functionality. FormFinder searches hundreds of thousands of forms on Westlaw, pulling from major national treatises and form sets, as well as from state-specific and practice-area analytical titles, regulations and statutes. Please note that this is a separate product/database than FORMS-ALL. The main differences between the two are the following: FormFinder's easy-to-use search template allows users to pinpoint the form they need, FormFinder has twice as many actual forms, and FormFinder includes only forms. (FORMS-ALL includes non-form content such as analytical and explanatory documents)
The five-volume Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States, which contains among its 1,100 entries several by members of the W&L School of Law faculty -- Dean Rodney Smolla, Ann Massie, Scott Sundby, and the late Louise Halper has been acquired by Leburn Library. It is part of the Gale Virtual Library and there is a link in Annie.
Law School Exchange, a new online networking and content sharing site from West and Foundation Press, allows law profs to share, digitally publish, and find teaching materials in collaboration with an online community of peers. West and from Foundation Press publications will also be available. Integration with TWEN makes delivering digital course materials directly to students easy. Law School Exchange is free.
Pleading Civil Rights Claims in the Post-Conley Era, 52 How. L.J. 99 (2008)
Escape into the Panopticon: Virtual Worlds and the Surveillance Society at Yale Law Journal cite
GPO has integrated Authenticated Congressional Bills into the live Congressional Bills application on GPO Access. Users of this application will notice digital signatures on bills from the 110th and 111th Congresses.
Concurrent with the change in Administrations, the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents has been replaced by the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, effective January 20, 2009.
The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents will continue to be available on GPO Access and the new Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents will also be accessible through GPO Access and through FDsys
CALI in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has launched the Legal Education Commons, an open, searchable collection of resources designed specifically for use in legal education. Materials include 700,000 federal court decision obtained from public.resource.org and 300 original illustrations from CALI Lessons. The digital collections are expected to grow over time and contributions are welcome
Todd C. Peppers & Christopher Zorn,Law Clerk Influence on Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical Assessment, 58 DePaul L. Rev. 51 (2008).
May the President Appropriatel Invoke God? Evaluating the Embryonic Stem Cell Veteos10 Rutgers J. L. and Religion (Fall 2008).
The UN Office of Legal Affairs, Codification Division has launched several new online resources:
* Official Records of Diplomatic Conferences;
* A new portal for all legal publications;
* UN Legal Publications Global Search; and
* RSS feed for the Audiovisual Library of International Law.
Bankruptcy Bondage, 2009 U. Ill. L. Rev. 191 available at Westlaw.
The Day the Earth Stood Still: Reading Jurgen Habermas' Essay "February 15" Against Ian McEwan's Novel Saturday, 10 German L.J. 81 (2009) available at Westlaw
Escape into the Panopticon: Virtual Worlds and the Surveillance Society, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 131 (2009) available at PocketPart
If you go to google.com/alerts and type in the title of your article and an email address, you'll get an alert every time the article is mentioned in a web page that's indexed by Google, e.g. as a reference in a paper. Just repeat for every article you've written. Not entirely fail safe, but pretty good.
The Journal of Legal Analysis, a new open-access law journal co-published by HUP and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School is up and running. The inaugural issue's articles include
* Adrian Vermeule's Many-Minds Arguments in Legal Theory Abstract,
* Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati and Eric A. Posner's Are Judges Overpaid? A Skeptical Response to the Judicial Salary Debate, and
* Edward L. Glaeser and Cass R. Sunstein's Extremism and Social Learning. Access at
JLA
States, Markets and Gatekeepers: Public-Private Regulatory Regimes in an Era of Economic Globalization, 30 Mich. J. Int'l L. 125 (2008).
The GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) is an innovative content management system containing files submitted by Congress and Federal agencies, information harvested from Federal agencies' websites and scans of previously printed publications. FDsys is now online and migration of information from GPO Access into FDsys will be complete in mid-2009
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has put together 56 new, "plain English" forms, both civil and criminal. You can find them among 126 forms listed here.
Robin Fretwell Wilson and Michael Clisham, American Law Institute's Principles of The Law of Family Dissolution, Eight Years After Adoption: Guiding Principles or Obligatory Footnote?, 42 F. L.Q. 573 (Fall 2008)
A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise (FY10 Budget Overview Document) is now available from the U.S. Government Printing Office. This document provides a description of the Obama Administration's fiscal policies and major budgetary initiatives. This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget, expected to be released this spring. Available at FDsys Latest Resources.
Anti-social Contracts: The Contractual Governance of Virtual Worlds,53 McGill L.J. 427 (2009).
Denis J. Brion, Trial Argumentation: The Creation of Meaning, 22 Int'l J. Semiotics L. 23 (2009): available at Springer
Two new Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) Sponsored Subject Matter eJournals -- European Private Law, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law at the University of Amsterdam, and Law, Politics, & the Media, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, & the Media at Syracuse University.
Is Health Insurance a Bad Idea? The Consumer-Driven Perspective, 14 Conn. Ins. L.J. 377 (2007-2008).
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's report entitled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law has generated enough interest in the legal academy that the Foundation working with Stanford Law School has assembled a group of legal educators to engage in further efforts to reform legal education. The project has been named LEARN, which stands for Legal Education Analysis and Reform Network and ten law schools are represented at this phase of LEARN's development: CUNY, Dayton, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana-Bloomington, New Mexico, NYU, Southwestern, Stanford, and Vanderbilt. Recently LEARN released an outline of the initial projects it plans to launch.
The beta version of the OpenCongress Wiki is now online. Check out the project's description.
It was just a matter of time, really. As many as nine jurors in a recent federal drug trial disregarded a Florida judge's instructions not to do their own research. Today's NYT has the story, Mistrial by iPhone: Juries' Web Research Upends Trials.
The Judicial Conference adopted a new revised Code of Conduct for U.S. judges at its biannual meeting yesterday. This is the first substantial revision of the Code of Conduct since 1992. The Code of Conduct which addresses judicial impropriety, disqualification, and extra-judicial activities, has also been reworded into plainer, clearer English. The Conference also asked Congress to create 63 new federal judgeships (permanent and temporary). The announcement from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts here.
Timothy S. Jost, Value-Based Purchasing In Traditional Medicare: Legal Issues, available at New America Foundation
Johanna Bond, Multiscalar Civil Society?: Legal Pluralism and Inequality, 10 Or. Rev. Int'l L. 391 (2008).
Timothy S. Jost, The Regulation of Private Health Insurance available at the National Academy of Social Insurance
Timothy S. Jost,Health Insurance Exchanges: Legal Issues available at the O'Neill Center
Robin Fretwell Wilson, Sandra Johnson, Joan Krause and Richard Savor, Eds., Health Law and Bioethics: Cases in Context (Aspen Pub. 2009).
Rodney A. Smolla, Classic Revisited Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451, 107 Mich. L. Rev. 892 (2009).
Hari M. Osofsky, Is Climate Change "International"? Litigation's Diagonal Regulatory Role, 49 Va. J. Int'l L. 585 (2009).
Georgetown Law's Free & Low Cost Legal Research Guide has been posted on the Georgetown Library's web page. It's a must-have for library users who do not have access to Lexis or Westlaw because the guide lays out resource options in an easy to understand way.
David I. Bruck, Simmons v. South Carolina (1994) in Death Penalty Stories (Foundation Press 2009).
Speedy Rice and Brandie L. Reisman, Access to Justice for Tort Claims Against a Sovereign in the Courts of the United States of America in Accesso Alla Giustizia Dell'Indivdua Nel Dritto Internazionale E Dell'Unione Europa (2008).
Saturday, April 18, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Sunday, April 19, 1 p.m.-11 p.m.
Monday-Friday, April 20-April 24, 8 a.m.-11 p.m.
Saturday, April 25, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Sunday, April 26, 1 p.m.-11 p.m.
Monday-Thursday, April 27-April 30, 8 a.m.-11 p.m.
Friday, May 1, 8 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturday, May 2, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
Sunday, May 3, Closed
Monday-Friday, May 4-8, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, May 9, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
Sunday, May 10, Closed
SUMMER HOURS - BEGINNING MONDAY, MAY 11
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday-Sunday, Closed
A project called "FreeLegalWeb" seeks to provide free-of-charge access to UK primary and secondary legal materials, and a free legal citator. The project is led by Nick Holmes of Infolaw, Robert Casalis de Pury of UniRom Systems Limited, and Harry Metcalfe of The Dextrousweb. This project seems complementary to the Free Access to Law Movement, which is organized around legal information institutes.
Rodney A. Smolla, Words "Which By Their Very Utterance Inflict Injury": The Evolving Treatment of Inherently Dangerous Speech in Free Speech Law and Theory , 36 Pepp. L. Rev. 317 (2008).
Rodney A. Smolla, Free Speech Does A Body Good: Restrictions on Pill Data Choke Off Valuable Information, 32 Legal Times (April 20, 2009).
On April 21st UNESCO and the Library of Congress officially unveiled its $60 million joint effort to allow libraries and museums across the globe to share valuable cultural and educational data with anyone who had access to the Internet. The results can viewed at
World Digital Library
The Legal Workshop is now online. It's a free magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews. Launched by the Law Reviews at Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern and Stanford.
Check it out at Legal Workshop
Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait,the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes.The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell (the Company debuting the machine) is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings. Read more at Espresso
Robin Wilson, Protection for All in Same-Sex Marriage, LA Times, May 3, 2009.
Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a fast-growing, free messaging service for people, and it's one that libraries (and librarians) can make good use of--without spending much time or effort. To read more go to Twitter for libraries
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the large-screen Kindle e-reader at Pace University yesterday ( primary market is university textbooks ). Called the Kindle DX, the list price is $489 or the price of a low-end utility laptop that does much more. Peter Glaskowsky's early analysis can be read on CNET.
WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year.WolframAlpha is different. For starters, it does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its "knowledge base" is made up of reams and reams of data -- ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences -- that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years.
Try it at WolframAlpha or read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/technology/internet/11search.html
The UN Office of Legal Affairs has launched a website that provides access to the official records of 12 UN diplomatic conferences that were held to to negotiate and adopt treaties. The user is provided access by individual document, and the entire collection of proceedings is searchable in full-text format. The website covers the following UN conferences:
Law of the Sea, 1958
Conference on Elimination or Reduction of Future Statelessness, 1959-1961
Law of the Sea (Second Conference), 1960
Conference on Diplomatic Intercourse and Immunities, 1961
Conference on Consular Relations, 1963
Conference on the Law of Treaties, 1968-1969
Law of the Sea (Third Conference), 1973-1982
Conference on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations, 1975
Conference on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties, 1977-1978
Conference on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts, 1983
Inference on the Law of Treaties between States and International Organizations or between International Organizations, 1986
Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, 1998
50 State Surveys (SURVEYS) provides topical surveys with references to the applicable state laws. If you want to know whether the statutes listed in the document are still good law, you can click on the link Update statutes with KeyCite to check on each statutes' current KeyCite status.
The emerging phenomenon of books published first in digital format; read more at: Library Journal, 5/15/2009
The South Carolina Supreme Court has issued an opinion and a writ of mandamus ordering Governor Mark Sanford to apply for stimulus money. This comes on the heels of the South Carolina legislature passing an act mandating that the Governor apply. The legislature has the sole authority to appropriate funds, including federal funds under the South Carolina Constitution. The case is Edwards and Williams v. State and SCASA v. Sanford (26662). The opinion is here.
The World Trade Organization has created an interactive map that depicts disputes between its member states. The web page display also includes hyperlinks to enable the user to access dispute documents, a chronological list of disputes, lists of disputes by country and by subject, and GATT disputes.
OpenJurist's database currently has approximately 647,000 opinions from the United States Supreme Court beginning in 1754 when it was known as the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and Federal Appellate Courts beginning in 1880 from the First, Second and Third series of Federal Reporter. The database is tied to a Google search engine.
Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Life After Prop 8, 14 NEXUS: Chap. J.L. Pol'y 101 (2008-2009).
Mark Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, in Philosophy of Law Classic and Contemporary Readings (Mays & Brown Eds.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Mark Drumbl, Immunities and Exceptions, in International Criminal Law, Vol. II Multilateral and Bilateral Enforcement Mechanisms (3rd Ed.) (Nijhoff, 2008)
Bob Ambrogi offers a head-to-head review of Casemaker and Fastcase in Law Technology News. He concludes that in terms of coverage of federal and state libraries and the relative strengths of their search tools, "neither stands out as significantly superior to the other. But in their intuitiveness and ease of use, Fastcase has the clear edge."
According to the PLI press release, there are currently 67 PLI titles available on Kindle, covering such areas as business, corporate and securities law, banking and commercial law, intellectual property law, estate and tax planning law, real estate law, insurance law, elder law, and litigation. By year-end, the Kindle line will expand to over 100 titles. See Amazon listing of available Kindled titles. "Our average book is easily over 1,000 pages, and a number are multivolume sets, so you're talking about a lot of information," said William Cubberley, who oversees the PLI's publishing program. "You'll be able to carry an entire law library on your Kindle." Quoting from the WSJ's Amazon's Kindle to Sell Law Books.Hard copy filing supplementation to PLI titles apparently will be replaced by the purchase of revised Kindled editions. "Users will be able to delete old versions of their texts and substitute new books," writes Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the WSJ article. No word on pricing for the updated Kindled titles but annual print supplements typically run about $125.
Timothy S. Jost,Health Care Reform Requires Law Reform
; available at Health Affairs.
Susan D. Franck, Development and Outcomes of Investment Treaty Arbitration, 50 Harv. Int'l L. Rev. 435 (2009).
Mark A. Drumbl, Book Review, 12 New Crim. L. Rev. 314 (2009) (reviewing Supranational Criminology: Towards A Criminology of International Crimes, Alette Smeulers & Roelof Haveman, Eds. Oxford 2008).
John Doyle, The Law Reviews: Do Their Paths of Glory Lead But to the Grave, 10 J. App. Prac & Process 179 (2009).
Hari M. Osofsky, Scaling "Local": The Implications of Greenhouse Gas Regulation in San Bernadino County, 30 Mich. J. Int'l L. 689 (2009).
Joshua Fairfield, The Cost of Consent: Optimal Standardization in the Law of Contract, 58 Emory L.J. 1401 (2009).
Mark Drumbl, The Push to Criminalize Aggression: Something Lost Amid the Gains?, 41 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 291 (2009).
The House has voted overwhelmingly in favor on a bill that would rename the Law Library of Congress as the National Law Library. The bill also establishes the William Orton Law Library Support Program, which allows the Library to accept donations in partnership with other organizations. Any money received is in addition to regular budgeted funds from Congress, and not meant to supplant appropriations to run the Library. The Librarian of Congress is directed to separate out the Law Libraries expenses and salaries as a line item in preparing budget requests. Is the National Law Library on the road to becoming its own agency? The bill is the William Orton Law Library Improvement and Modernization Act, H.R. 2728. It is now pending in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration.
Representatives Edward Markey (D-MA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA), introduced H.R. 3458, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, [Thomas, OpenCongress] on July 31 to protect network neutrality under the Communications Act, safeguard the future of the open Internet and protect
The Princeton Center for Information for Technology Policy has come up with a Firefox extention to bring PACER documents to the public for free. The Firefox extention is called RECAP.
RECAP replicates PACER content and uploads it to a mirror site hosted by the Internet Archive. Of course, unlike the PACER site, the RECAP material will be available for free to the public. The Administrative Office of the United States Courts, and the GPO, charge the public eight cents a page for PACER documents. This fee is needed to fund ongoing maintenance of the system, personnel costs, and support needed bandwidth. There are arguments in support and against this fee, but even if the fee is necessary to fund PACER, crowdsourcing the documents makes perfect sense. It does not interfere with the doucment system created by the Administrative Office, and actually helps them make their public information available to the public. Assuming of course, that they consider this their mandate.
You might remember that Carl Malamud of PublicResources.org attempted to create a "mirror site" site of sorts last year, but was shut down by the Office of Court Administration.
It sounded easy.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York's counsel, Denley Chew, slapped down some $2 bills and challenged a room of lawyers and legal researchers with laptops and iPhones to find the authoritative text of the landmark Fugitive Slave Act online.
"Authoritative" was the catch. The money remained untouched.
Read more at ABA ANNUAL MEETING 2009
Both TIAS and U.S. Treaties and Other International Agreements will be available only electronically and are posted on the State Dept.'s Office of Treaty Affairs web site. The State Dept. remains behind in publication by several years and it is hoped the move will help close this publication gap.
David Millon, The Single Constituency Argument in the Economic Analysis of Business Law, 24 Research L. Econ.: J.Pol'y 43 (2009).
The GPO has added eight new collections into the Federal Digital System (FDsys).
Legislative Resources:
History of Bills (1983 to present)
Congressional Record Index (1993 to present)
Congressional Record (Bound) (1999 to 2001)(Authenticated digital signature)
United States Statutes at Large (2003 to 2006)(Authenticated digital signature)
Directories:
Congressional Directory (105th Congress to present)(Authenticated digital signature)
United States Government Manual (1995/1996 to present)(Authenticated digital signature)
Reports:
Economic Report of the President (1996 to present)
GAO Reports and Comptroller General Decisions (1994 to 2008)
[JH]
Lyman Johnson, Corporate Law Professors as Gatekeepers, 6 U. St. Thomas L.J. 447 (2009) available at Westlaw
The New York Times has a great article today about lawyers who have been subjected to ethics investigations due to material that they posted on blogs and Facebook. After attorney Sean Conway called a Florida judge an "Evil, Unfair Witch" on a blog, the Florida bar reprimanded him and levied a $1,200 fine. California attorney Frank R. Wilson blogged about a trial while serving as a juror; he ended up with a 45-day suspension and a $14,000 fine. This story comes on the heels of news reports that the Florida bar is examining Facebook and other social media profiles as part of its moral character investigations for bar applicants. The moral of the story? If you're a law student or a licensed attorney, watch what you say online!
A. Benjamin Spencer, Understanding Pleading Doctrine, 108 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (2009).
Timothy S. Jost, Health Insurance Exchanges: Legal Issues, 37 J.L. Med & Ethics 53 (2009) (Special Supp. Vol. 37).
Lyman P. Q. Johnson and Dennis Garvis, Are Corporate Officers Advised About Fiduciary Duties?, 64 Bus. Law. 1105 (2009).
Jeffrey Kahn, Douglas Kahn, Terrence Perris and Jeffrey Lehman, Corporate Income Taxation (West Thomson Reuters 2009).
Wednesday, October 7, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Thursday, October 8, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Friday, October 9, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, October 10, 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
Sunday, October 11, Regular Schedule Resumes
The Supreme Court begins the October 2009 term today. Here are some notable cases the Court disposed of yesterday:
The Court will not review a Fifth Circuit case involving a 1995 law that relieved oil companies from paying royalties on gulf oil leases. The law said payment would come when a specific amount of gas and oil was produced. The government appealed the ruling in favor of the oil companies in the case. The case is Department of the Interior v. Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas Corp., 09-54.
The Court declined to hear an appeal of a Florida case involving a law that requires public students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance unless their parents opt out. The case is Frazier v. Smith, 08-1351.
The Court will not hear a lower court ruling that refused to require the State of Illinois to issue "Choose Life" license plates. An anti-abortion group had sued Illinois to force the issuance. The case is Choose Life Illinois, Inc. v. White, Il. Secretary of State. 08-1283.
The Court also declined to stop the release of documents generated during lawsuits against priests in Connecticut for sex abuse. The diocese of Bridgeport wanted to keep the 12,000 papers under seal. Connecticut courts had ruled that the papers were presumed to be public. Justice Ginsberg declined to issue a stay in the case on August 25th. The case is Rosado v. Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp. et al.
The Court declined to hear an appeal by a prosecutor in a defamation case against the Chicago Tribune. The case involved a news story about prosecutorial (mis)conduct in the handling of a child murder case in DuPage County, Illinois. The prosecutor in question filed suit and the case went to the jury, which sided with the paper. The case is Knight v. Chicago Tribune Co. et al., 08-1337
According to the latest survey of more than 1,400 U.S. companies, more than half (54 percent) said they prohibit employees from visiting sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace while on the clock. The survey, by Robert Half Technology, a provider of information technology staffing services, was based on telephone interviews with U.S. companies of 100 or more employees.
Another recent survey delivered even graver news for the social media world. According to an August survey by ScanSafe, a Web security provider, 76 percent of companies are now choosing to block employees' use of social networking -- up 20 percent from February -- which is now a more popular category of sites to block than those involving shopping, weapons, sports or alcohol.
. . . .Law firms have also joined in the trend. Indianapolis-based Barnes & Thornburg has blocked all access to Facebook. Twitter is still available, however. Gunster Yoakley & Stewart of West Palm Beach, Fla., blocks Facebook and Twitter for all its support staff, including secretaries and legal assistants, but lets lawyers use the social media tools. London's Allen & Overy tried to ban Facebook in 2007, but then lifted the ban after associate backlash.
Lawyers say the bans are due to a number of factors, including loss of productivity, data theft fears, liability risks if online comments turn up in lawsuits and corporate image concerns.
"I think what's happening is social media is starting to simmer, and the lawyers and the PR teams, the HR teams and marketing teams are realizing there are all these problems," said Gaida Zirkelbach, an associate at Gunster who focuses on technology and the Internet.
But Zirkelbach herself is skeptical of the bans. "I don't know if that's going to work ultimately," she said, suggesting that employees will likely ignore the rules. "It's better to have a policy, just like with everything else," she said.
ALI-ABA and ACLEA are conducting a summit on critical issues facing continuing legal education providers, law schools, and the legal profession in equipping today's legal practitioners Oct. 15 through 17. Called Equipping Our Lawyers: Law School Education, Continuing Legal Education, and Legal Practice in the 21st Century, the summit will focus on issues in six key areas related to lawyer training and development: law school, bar admissions, continuing legal education, minimum requirements for CLE, in-house professional development, and differing generational learning styles. Among the issues to be discussed in this framework
How is legal practice changing and what do those changes mean for lawyers' professional education?
How is the role of law schools changing?
What models are emerging in CLE and in-house professional development?
What's next for technology and its application to legal practice and professional education?
What's next for technology and its application to legal practice and professional education?
What new approaches can be taken to admission to the profession?
How well does today's MCLE system set standards and meet needs?
What implications do generational differences have for law practice and lawyer professional development?
Webcast information here
Hari Osofsky & William C.G. Burns, eds.,Ajudicating Climate Change: Stat, National and International Approaches(Cambridgebridge University Press 2009).
The European Union announced the availability of all official EU publications since 1952 in digital format. News articles mention 12 million scanned pages and 110,000 publications available free of charge in the EU Bookshop Digital Library. The press release indicates the availability this way:
You will access them by selecting the option "Digital Library" in the search pages. Enjoy the reading!
The search feature at the Bookstore site is a tad confusing. Select the Advance Search option from the main page and the Digital Library option appears as a radio button selection near the bottom of the page. Publications are available in a wide variety of language. As they say, happy reading. Other reports indicate the archive will also be available at some point on Europeana, Europe's digital library of cultural materials.
The University of Virginia's government documents department has developed a web site that provides access to agency documents (including decisions) available on the Internet. This includes agency guidance documents, interpretation letters, as well as links to agencies' e-FOIA reading rooms.
Organized by agency and subject this site provides a wealth of information in a cost-effective manner. The subject search is particularly helpful when you are not aware of which agency might possibly regulate in the area you're researching.
Black's Law Dictionary and "Get Cases and Shepardize" are both new Apps for iPhones.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Law Library in the What's New category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
Spotlight is the previous category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.