Legal Research

Judge Sotomayor's 50 Most Important Opinions According to the PreCYdent Algorithm

Posted on June 12, 2009
USD Law prof Thomas Smith has used his PreCYdent SE algorithm to compile Judge Sotomayor's 50 most important opinions. [download from his post]. Smith is the driving force behind this sophisticated search engine. For a guide to web resources covering...

Maybe Westlaw thinks Scalia was wrong, but?

Posted on June 12, 2009
On May 26, 2009, the United States Supreme Court decided Montejo v. Louisiana, which overruled the Court?s 1986 decision, Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625 (1986). To be sure, Justice Scalia in his majority opinion in Montejo stated on page...

Martha Minow Appointed Dean of Harvard Law School

Posted on June 12, 2009
Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a member of the HLS faculty since 1981, has been named dean of the School effective July 1, 2009. Minow?s appointment follows the March confirmation of...

Simon & Schuster Will Sell Books Through Scribd

Posted on June 12, 2009
The market for e-books got slightly bigger today with news that Simon & Schuster will use Scribd as a distribution channel. The company will make about 5,000 titles available. They will be in a secure PDF format that can be...

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Twitter Usage Patterns: Peer-to-Peer Communications or One-Way Micro-Broadcasting Service?

Posted on June 11, 2009
A recent Harvard Business School study by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets, suggests that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets. On a...

JISC: Orphan Works Are Languishing Unused

Posted on June 11, 2009
JISC has released In from the Cold: An Assessment of the Scope of 'Orphan Works' and Its Impact on the Delivery of Services to the Public. A snip from the announcement: The scale and impact of Orphan Works across the...

Firefox Add-ons for Research, Communication and Current Awareness

Posted on June 11, 2009
Check out Bonnie Shucha's (Wisconsin) list of Firefox Add-ons which may be useful for the legal or library professional. Very helpful. [JH]

Slugfest in the Legal Blogosphere: Mr. "Legal Hitman" v. Mr. "Irresponsible Anonymous Blogger"

Posted on June 11, 2009
Over the past several weeks Ed Whelam who writes for Bench Memos, a blog published by the National Review Online, and an a pseudonymous blogger at Obsidian Wings known as ?Publius,? have been debating various issues related to SCOTUS nominee...

DOJ Said to Focus on Google in Book Settlement Investigation

Posted on June 11, 2009
News reports are percolating with the Department of Justice's latest look at the Google book settlement deal. That's not exactly fresh news. The whispers, however, from the publishers are that the information the DOJ is gathering focuses on Google rather...

LibGuides: the Future of Research Guides?

Posted on June 11, 2009
Chances are, you?ve heard of LibGuides, a platform for creating research guides from Springshare. For any readers exhausted by all the talk of web 2.0 and the latest tech fads, put the skepticism aside, LibGuides really does live up to...

SCOTUS Gives Chrysler Sale to Fiat Green Light; Deal Could Be Closed Today

Posted on June 10, 2009
A day after Justice Ginsburg temporarily halted the sale of the Chrysler?s assets as part of its bankruptcy proceedings, [LLB post] the Supreme Court unanimously denied the bid to block the sale to Fiat yesterday. The unsigned, 2-page per curiam...

The Next Frontier of Search

Posted on June 10, 2009
Developers are entering the "next frontier of search" by trying to add structure to the mass of unstructured electronic data. Computational search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared aim to construct a database of factual information based on user...

Should (When Will) Legal Research Skills Be Tested on the Bar Exam?

Posted on June 10, 2009
The idea that the bar exam should include a legal research skills component has been kicking around for quite awhile. The late Roy Mersky, Clair Germain (Cornell), Blair Kauffman (Yale), and others have been promoting the cause for years. The...

U.S. Tax Court Instructional Videos Now Available Online

Posted on June 10, 2009
Hat tip to Jacqueline Laínez (Memphis) for calling attention to the U.S. Tax Court's instructional videos on Clinical Law Prof Blog. The video series covers 1) Understanding the Process; 2) Introduction to the United States Tax Court; 3) Filing the...

Law Library of Congress Web Page Highlights

Posted on June 10, 2009
I hadn't been to the web site for the Law Library of Congressin quite some time, but I found myself visiting yesterday looking for some primary constitutional law documents. They were there, in a newly reorganized form that brought all...

Kudos to Vicenc Feliu

Posted on June 10, 2009
Vicenç Feliú has been appointed Law Library Director of the Law Library at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law effective July 1st. Vicenç Feliú comes to UDC from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana...

SCOTUS Calls Time Out for Chrysler Sale to Fiat

Posted on June 09, 2009
In a one-sentence order, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the rulings of the bankruptcy judge allowing the Chrysler sale ?are stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the court.? According to published reports, SCOTUS delayed the sale...

Can You Copyright a Tweet?

Posted on June 09, 2009
When I first read this question in Mark Cuban?s blog maverick, my first reaction was: Why would you? On second consideration I thought, well, because you can, at least theoretically. After all, I never thought people could or would copyright...

e-Course Management Systems Critiqued

Posted on June 09, 2009
Blackboard?s e?learning system dominates the online learning software market except in law schools where TWEN is the major player, much to the chagrin of LexisNexis law school reps. In A Critical Examination of Blackboard?s e-Learning Environment (First Monday, June 2009)...

GPO Annual Report Released

Posted on June 09, 2009
The theme of the GPO's annual report this year is energy conservation. Here's a snip about FDsys from GPO Sustainable Environmental Stewardship - Good Business, Good Government - Annual Report 2008: While developing FDsys, GPO has focused on building an...

Stefanie Lindquist: Sotomayor Is Not an Activist Judge

Posted on June 09, 2009
Stefanie Lindquist (Texas), co-author of Measuring Judicial Activism (Oxford UP, 2009)(with Frank Cross (Texas)), applied the political science tools and activism classifications used in her book to SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor's published majority opinions since January 2001...

UK For-Profit Law School Operator BPP Acquired by US Interests

Posted on June 09, 2009
BPP Holdings, the parent company of for-profit UK law school BPP Law School, announced on June 8 that it had agreed to be acquired for £303.5 million ($485.11 million) by Apollo Global according to Jeremy Hodges at LegalWeek.com. Apollo Global...

Open Access Marches On

Posted on June 08, 2009
Signatories to Open Access Statement The statement is signed by the directors of the University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of...

Internet Use Triples in Decade, Census Bureau Reports

Posted on June 08, 2009
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2007 Internet and Computer Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey show that 62 percent of households reported using Internet access in the home in 2007, an increase from 18 percent in 1997,...

ALA TechSource's New Website Now Online

Posted on June 08, 2009
ALA TechSource has launched www.alatechsource.org, a new electronic archive and delivery platform for Library Technology Reports (LTR) and Smart Libraries Newsletter (SLN). For more, check out the announcement post on ALA TechSource Blog. [JH]

CPE's Solicits More Input on the AALL Competencies of Law Librarianship

Posted on June 08, 2009
Are the Competencies still relevant? (Yes) Are modifications needed. (Hell yes) Following the Continuing Professional Education Committee's moderated listserv discussion in April, CPE is now giving members the opportunity to continue the Compentiencies discussion on the AALL's Tool for Success...

Monday Action by the Supreme Court

Posted on June 08, 2009
The Supreme Court issued five opinions this morning. The first is Republic of Iraq v. Beaty (07-1090). The issue in this case is whether claims against Iraq are authorized under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA). That act...

Suit Over Bib Sotware Dismissed

Posted on June 08, 2009
Ars Technica is reporting that Thomson Reuters lawsuit against George Mason University over Zotero has been dismissed. Zotero is an open source alternative (implemented as a Firefox plug-in) to TR's EndNote. The suit was based on GMUs participation in the...

UN Launches World's First Tuition-Free Online University

Posted on June 07, 2009
The UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) has announced the launch of the University of the People, a non-profit institution offering higher education worldwide using open-source technology, open course materials, e-learning methods and peer-to-peer teaching...

Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo

Posted on June 06, 2009
PC World compares features of Bing, Google, and Yahoo, mostly via sceenshots of each. [JH]

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