Legal Research

Workers Protected from Retaliation for Oral Complaints

Posted on March 28, 2011
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers are protected from retaliation when they make oral complaints about labor law violations, but do not formalize them with a written complaint. The case was Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp...

Have Ideas or Suggestions for Us?

Posted on March 23, 2011
The Coleman Karesh Law library wants to hear from you. If you have comments, criticism, suggestions, or problems that you have noticed in using the library or the library resources, please let us know.  We will also take compliments! We have installed a suggestion box on our website that allows you to share your comments...

Book Review Lawsuit Resolved in Defendant?s Favor

Posted on March 04, 2011
An author living and working in Israel brings criminal proceedings in France against a law professor and journal editor at NYU who refused to remove from his website a book review by a German professor. Sounds like fun? You bet! International law fans have been eagerly following Calvo-Goller v...

Free Speech Can Be Hurtful But It Is Still Protected

Posted on March 02, 2011
The United States Supreme Court is in session and announced  a new First Amendment decision today. The U.S. Supreme Court saying even hurtful speech is protected by the Constitution. The Court made this determination in its ruling that members of a Kansas church can?t be punished for staging an anti-homosexual demonstration at a military funeral...

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Supreme Court statistics

Posted on March 02, 2011
Ever wondered how many times Justice Kennedy has agreed with Justice Scalia in a minority opinion?  Or what the Court’s workload has been in the past few years?  Or how often Justice Ginsburg voted with the majority?  The  Scotusblog has been keeping statistics on the Court since 1995...

Addendum ? Trial Databases

Posted on February 25, 2011
As noted in the earlier post, Law Library Initiates Trial Database Page, we are promoting the use of databases that we are considering adding to our collection. The Coleman Karesh Law Library has just added 6 more databases from HeinOnline that we would like students and faculty to review...

Law Library Initiates Trial Database Page

Posted on February 18, 2011
The Law Library is constantly monitoring databases and sources of legal information to provide access to the law school faculty and students. In an attempt to have the most input and commentary on new databases prior to any purchase we have set up a trial database page for everyone to use proposed new databases...

Australian Parliamentary Documents Available on the Web

Posted on February 17, 2011
Attention, foreign law fans! Documents from the Australian Parliament are now available at no charge online. Documents are offered in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, and Word. Individual documents are not guaranteed to be offered in all formats...

Conventional Wisdom and Judicial Notice

Posted on February 15, 2011
Judicial notice is defined as “a court’s acceptance, for purposes of convenience and without requiring a party’s proof, of a well-known and indisputable fact; the court’s power to accept such a fact” Black’s Law Dictionary 923 (9th ed...

How do you cite an e-Book?

Posted on February 10, 2011
Scholars are wrestling with the concept that e-books are outselling regular texts.  This includes scholarly publications.  Citations experts are now confronted with the problem of how to cite an e-book.  This problem is also compounded by the various electronic formats of e-book readers...

Specialized Legal Blogs

Posted on January 31, 2011
I follow a number of websites that recommend blogs. Inter-alia is one of my favorites.  Here is a blog that Tom Mighell recommends and I like a lot.  I will be posting several of these blogs for you to watch for specialized areas of law. First, here is a blog of interest for those of [...

Judge Posner Doesn?t Like the Bluebook

Posted on January 27, 2011
In a recent Yale Law Journal article, Judge Richard Posner slaps around the latest edition of the venerable Bluebook.  “I don?t use The Bluebook or any other form book in either my judicial opinions or my academic writings.”*  Of course, he’s a big-time federal judge (and former president of the Harvard Law Review), so he [...

We are running out of email addresses!!!

Posted on January 25, 2011
Vint Cerf, known as a father of the Internet, announced that we would shortly be out of Internet addresses. 95% of the original 4.3 billion combinations have been used. The explosion of the internet and  electronic communications  have eaten up the possible combinations...

In Case You Were Wondering

Posted on January 21, 2011
Here’s another one from the Department of Things That Most of Us Don’t Have to Be Told: One cannot sue oneself. Find out who had to be told, and why, in Lee Publications, Inc. v. Dickinson School of Law, 848 A.2d 178 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2004)...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

Posted on January 17, 2011
Today our nation celebrates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his contributions toward securing the civil rights of all citizens of the United States.

Student loans equal lack of character & fitness for bar?

Posted on January 13, 2011
The Ohio Supreme Court has recently affirmed the recommendation of the Ohio Board of Commissioners on Character & Fitness that an applicant be denied permission to take the bar exam.  The applicant had $170,000 in student loans, $16,500 in credit card debts, and no plan to repay them...

Library of Congress Chooses LII for Legislative Information Reorganization

Posted on January 07, 2011
The Library of Congress is updating and reorganizing the way it stores and supplies Congressional legislative information and materials digitally.  The US Library of Congress has selected the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University (LII) to help develop new methods to preserve, analyze, organize, and present Congressional legislative information and materials digitally...

Happy New Year! Party Cautiously.

Posted on December 31, 2010
A nightclub patron assumed the risk of injury when she slipped and fell on confetti dropped on a dance floor during a New Year’s Eve celebration. She had been on the dance floor for approximately 30 minutes prior to the fall, and had noted a slippery sensation for most of that time...

Online Library Reference Desk

Posted on December 20, 2010
Looking for general or specific information online. You can have Google and more! The answer is Refdesk.(http://www.refdesk.com/) This is a general all purpose site for your use. It has Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines. It also has Wikipedia search, Refdesk search, You tube video search,  and many online encyclopedias and dictionaries that are fully [...

4th Amendment Protection for Emails

Posted on December 16, 2010
The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled on December 14 that emails are protected under the 4th Amendment.  The court held in United States v. Warshak that the defendant, Warshak, “enjoyed a reasonable expectation of privacy in his emails vis-a-vis NuVox, his Internet Service Provider” and that the government “violated his [...

FTC Asking for New Online Privacy Regulations

Posted on December 02, 2010
The internet is subject to the abuse of sharing and trading personal information. The Federal Trade Commission has finally acted to stop some of the problems by proposing new regulations on online privacy. The FTC in its report proposed  implementation of  a  ?Do Not Track? mechanism...

?Friendship? by trickery

Posted on November 30, 2010
Whether a lawyer may use trickery to “friend” an adverse party or witness in order to gain access to information has been considered by several local bar organizations.  A recent ABA Journal article discusses those cases (several mentioned in earlier posts on this blog)...

Cancun Climate Change Conference Begins Today Nov. 29th

Posted on November 29, 2010
Nations from around the world meet today through December 10th in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss changes to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  The meeting in Cancun is the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP).  The text of the Framework Convention is located here:  http://unfccc...

Kentucky may regulate lawyers? use of social media

Posted on November 19, 2010
The magic 8-ball has spoken.  It’s the wave of the future.  Lawyers will use social media to solicit potential clients.  Bar associations will seek to regulate the content of social media solicitations just as they regulate advertising elsewhere...

Baggy Pants Blues: Fashion Fad Immortalized in Reporter System

Posted on November 15, 2010
Consider the officers who, while investigating a suspected drug deal, order a suspect from a vehicle, only to have the suspect’s saggy pants fall down. What to do? Should the officers tell the suspect to pull up his pants, and risk giving him access to a weapon if the pants contain one? Should they ignore [...

Online scheduler ? an online tool for your conferences

Posted on November 01, 2010
Everyone has busy schedules these days. It seems that  it is impossible to coordinate meetings.  If you are trying to schedule a phone conference or meeting with several people from different parts of the country or different cities, then consider using an online conference scheduler...

Just in time for Halloween ? No Child Poisoned by Halloween Candy. Ever.

Posted on October 28, 2010
Remember when Halloween was an adult-free zone?  The neighborhood teemed with costumed children, racing against the clock to collect free treats from their kindly neighbors.  I do.  That was my childhood, not necessarily that of my own children.  In the last several decades, parents have been subjected to a steady drumbeat of warnings about all [...

Creepy, Crawly Cause of Action. Or Not.

Posted on October 28, 2010
A customer who was injured by a spider while trying on pants was unable to prevail on a claim against the retailer and supplier of the pants of breach of implied warranty of merchantability [Flippo v. Mode O'Day Frock Shops of Hollywood, 449 S.W.2d 692 (Ark...

Halloween Insurance

Posted on October 27, 2010
It is getting strange out there. The Insurance Journal notes that, ?To ward off greedy lawyer vampires, the Center for Consumer Freedom offers a Halloween ?Trick-Or-Treat Liability and Indemnification Agreement?.” The agreement can be downloaded at, www...

Things That Go ?Bump!? in the Court

Posted on October 20, 2010
The Undead get a bad rap in the US judicial system. For example, not only is there a Vampire Nation (which appears to contain no actual vampires), but it?s been taken to court for a variety of white-collar crimes (U.S. v. Vampire Nation, 451 F.3d 189 (3rd Circ...

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