Legal Research

SLA 2008 - Legal Division Open House (Sunday, June 15)

By emma wood

Christina, Kathy, and I hit up the Legal Division Open House, where we met a bunch of cool people: librarians from Alaska, Washington, DC, Texas, and China, and a hilarious vendor who, when we mocked him about his company’s orange lanyards, helped us coin the company slogan “Not quite as awful as the other guys”. It’s great when people can make fun of themselves. I tried to get the American librarians to explain the different levels of court and they (I think!) succeeded in clarifying for me the levels of federal court (districts, circuits, Supreme Court) — state courts are a whole other ballgame (maybe I’ll figure those out next year?). No wonder West’s graphical case representation is so useful for US caselaw!

For fun, I asked if “all y’all” is the plural of “y’all” and the Washington librarian said yes, that she’d learned that from her college roommate who was from Louisiana. The others thought “y’all” works for singular or plural. That’s the other awesome thing about going to a conference with people from all other the place: the accents and the dialect variations are just fascinating!

Full post as published by Ballad in Plain E on June 21, 2008 (boomark / email).