Legal Research
Out of the Jungle 
Thoughts on the present and future of legal information, legal research, and legal education.
Post Frequency: 1.6/day Last Entry: November 19, 2009 at 12:49:00 Recent Entries: 539
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Google enters the legal search engine fray
Posted on November 19, 2009See here to see a fascinating post on the Google Blog. The Google engineers are pioneering a new radio button on Google Scholar that allows the user to search by legal topics or by case names. They include a rather graceful statement about "standing on the shoulder of giants:" We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public...
Modified GoogleBooks Settlement Offered - Justice Department Considering
Posted on November 16, 2009The Wall Street Journal reports that the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google have re-submitted their revised Settlement Agreement for Google Books to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York. The Department of Justice, which had responded to the original Settlement with a list of concerns in a Statement of Interest, is reviewing the new revision...
Educational Entrepreneurship
Posted on November 16, 2009My husband pointed out this article in yesterday's New York Times. There are many teachers in his family, and he thought it was interesting to learn that [T]thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises ...
Verbatim Transcript?
Posted on November 16, 2009During my Advanced Legal Research class this morning, we were talking about the Congressional Record and the fact that members of Congress are allowed to edit and add to their remarks before they are published. One of the students mentioned that she had read a story in the New York Times over the weekend which described lobbyists for Genentech who managed to get statements they had written "printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress...
Second Life Advisors at Penn State
Posted on November 13, 2009The Wired Campus feature of the Chronicle of Higher Education dated November 9, 2009 carries a story about Penn State requiring faculty advisors to appear in Second Life to advise students. Penn State has had a campus presence in the virtual world of Second Life for some time, and decided to offer advising there, in addition (according to a comment at the online article) to office hours, e-mail, phone and Skype...
Kindle's Read-aloud Function Not Accessible for Blind Users : Maybe Kindle Is Not the Answer!
Posted on November 12, 2009The Boston Globe included a story yesterday about the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University in New York stating that they would not consider roll-outs of Kindle e-readers until Amazon addresses problems with accessibility for blind users...
Book Thieves, Rare Books, the Desire of the Book
Posted on November 08, 2009The Boston Globe Idea section today has an interview with author Allison Hoover Bartlett about her recent book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (Riverhead), about John Charles Gilkey...
"Google Mistrial"
Posted on November 06, 2009This editorial, published in today's Boston Globe, caught my eye because my husband is currently serving on a federal grand juror here in New York, where cell phones and other electronic devices are banned from the courthouse. The editorial discusses the growing phenomenon of "tweeting, texting, and obsessive e-mail checking" which now threatens the jury system...
Maine's Gay Marriage Repealed in Voter Referendum
Posted on November 04, 2009Time online reports on Maine's voters repealing gay marriage in that state. GLAD.org, the organization that has engineered most of the gay marriage legal and political efforts across New England and beyond has more information at their website. I consider gay marriage to be a civil right issue...
Extraordinary Rendition Decision Places Executive Branch Above the Law
Posted on November 03, 2009The New York Law Journal, in an excellent (and free!) article discusses an en banc decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen in 2002. Mark Fass writes The 7-4 majority held that the Canadian, Maher Arar, failed to state a claim under the Torture Victim Protection Act and that his remaining claims did not satisfy the test for "implied" constitutional causes of action under the 1971 U...
Professor Warren Takes on the Credit Industry
Posted on November 03, 2009I had the pleasure of serving as the library liaison to Professor Elizabeth Warren when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has since moved on to Harvard Law School, where she specializes in commercial law and bankruptcy law. Her treatises on bankruptcy have been very influential, drawing as they do on empirical methods to paint vivid portraits of real people caught in the web of debt...
Kindle Review
Posted on November 03, 2009A cogent review of the Kindle reader was published in today's Inside Higher Education. Written by Alex Golub, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the review discusses whether Kindle is appropriate for use by academics. He concludes that Kindle's current design is best suited to pleasure reading and not to reading of academic texts--"the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain--a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously...
Helping Our Students Bridge the Gap: Expert Legal Researchers
Posted on November 02, 2009I have spent a couple decades by now teaching legal research. I started with the optimistic idea that I could just pour the information into students' heads. Well, not quite that naive, but nearly. Early on, we lectured, and then gave our students worksheets, and reading assignments to introduce them to the various research tools...
Why Lexis and Westlaw Should NOT be Like Google
Posted on October 30, 2009For the first time, I had a student write in my Advanced Legal Research class that they wished that Lexis and Westlaw. I had heard other librarians moan about this but had just not run across it til now. It really gave me pause to have it in hand. And it made me think, it challenged me...
Berring on Free Legal Information Sites: Contretemps
Posted on October 30, 2009At Legal Currents, a blog by Thomson Reuters (West), Bob Berring is featured in a very thought-provoking and articulate video about the efforts by government agencies and volunteers (read GPO and PublicResource.org/Law.gov, and the Legal Information Institute) to make legal information freely available...
New GAO Report on Legal Education
Posted on October 27, 2009The GAO has released a new report on the cost of legal education, according to a news brief in Inside Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education also covers the new report in an article published yesterday. Some individuals and groups, notably ALDA, have blamed the ABA accreditation process for piling on "unnecessary requirements that discourage innovative practice (and stifle competition from new schools) and ...
Libraries Protect Intellectual Freedom
Posted on October 26, 2009I loved Marie's excellent post last week on Edmund S. Morgan, celebrator of libraries! The wonderful quotes she included made me consider for the first time libraries as storehouses of dangerous ideas, sort of boxes of the ingredients of weapons of mass destruction, just waiting for the right mind to wander in and see how to put it together! (here is the quote!) [T]here is no more insidious instrument of change than a library in which professors or students or people in general are allowed to read the books...
Multitasking Multitangle
Posted on October 26, 2009From the Boston Globe Health Science pages today, an article on how multitasking actually saps our efficiency. Tara Ballenger writes "MultiTangle: As we cram more tasks into less time, frustration grows, quality of work drops, and our brains take a hit...
Enough already!
Posted on October 26, 2009One of my favorite writers is Peggy Orenstein, who contributes regularly to the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Her insights about raising children and issues that affect women always seem to be right on target. Her latest column describes her efforts to stay off the Internet...
Password Security
Posted on October 22, 2009Newsweek has published an insightful discussion of passwords, which it calls "the weak link in computer security." The author, Nick Summers, reveals that he created a password a number of years ago and kept using it "as the requirements for passwords evolved ...
American Heroes
Posted on October 21, 2009The legendary Edmund S. Morgan, emeritus professor of history at Yale and authority on Colonial America, has published his eighteenth book, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America. The link is to a review of the book in the Washington Post...
Another View of the Google Book Settlement
Posted on October 21, 2009By now, reams have been written about the proposed Google Book Settlement. One of the most readable and lucid commentaries, especially on the subject of orphan works (works still in copyright whose copyright owner cannot be determined or located), was published in the New York Times Book Review on October 4...
Competition for Kindle?
Posted on October 21, 2009PCWorld has published an article touting Barnes & Noble's new Nook e-reader, which the author, David Coursey, feels will "convince e-book skeptics that this is the time to start moving from Gutenberg to gigabytes." Coursey lists the features he thinks will make the Nook a hit: color multi-touch screen; ease of purchasing e-books from the ubiquitous Barnes & Noble; openness to third-party applications; the ability to "loan" e-books to other Nook users and to users of other electronic devices...
Law.Gov and PublicResource.org: Alternative Gov Docs?
Posted on October 19, 2009Carl Malamud is posting at PublicResource.org/Law.gov, what he calls "America's Operating System, Open Source." He hopes to garner support, both legislative and monetary, for authenticating and hosting a centralized registry and repository for all primary legal materials...
Innocence Project Locks Horns with Prosecutors
Posted on October 19, 2009The Innocence Project of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University was founded in 1999 and "gives undergraduate students firsthand experience in investigating wrongful convictions under ... Professor David Protess, the Project's director...
Great Britain's Supreme Court
Posted on October 17, 2009Great Britain now has a 12-member Supreme Court that functions separately from the legislative branch. For hundreds of years, the highest court of appeals in England was the Law Lords, who were part of Parliament. No more; Part 3 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 establishes a Supreme Court as a separate branch of government...
Blog Action Day: Climate Change - Social Justice & A Matter of Survival
Posted on October 14, 2009IntroductionI won't be able to post on Blog Action Day itself, so I'm posting a day early. Climate Change is the issue du jour, and a timely one it is! With the United Nations meeting on Climate Change coming up in Copenhagen December 7-18, 2009, you can visit their official COP15 website...
Google Books Update
Posted on October 13, 2009Ben Hallman's article at American Lawyer, "Google Books: Scanning the Future," is a dandy update on the Google Books Project. Tip of the OOTJ hat to BeSpacific, for the tip! Hallman notes how many folks piled on criticism of the Google Books Project this summer, and yet remains optimistic that it will survive the re-examination of the Proposed Settlement...
China-U.S. Rare Book Digitization Project
Posted on October 10, 2009The Boston Globe reports today on an agreement between the Harvard-Yenching library and the National Library of China to work jointly to digitize the Harvard collection of rare books, manuscripts and scrolls. The Chinese government is paying most of the costs, while Harvard staff are performing the work of scanning the rare material, and any preservation and repair work necessary...
Could Google Wave Change How Librarians Cooperate?
Posted on October 09, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its Wired Campus column for Friday, October 9, 2009, wonders "Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems?" (also available in print). Jeff Young writes, in part, that while Google is touting its new Wave to replace e-mail, "...
Course Material Republishing Sites Or Plagiarism Resource?
Posted on October 07, 2009Inside Higher Education has a story, "Course Hero or Course Villain?" about a slew of new course material republishing sites that purport to be making life easier for students, like a gigantic study group. Aside from the parties and networking opportunities, one of the perennial perks of Greek Life has been the coveted ?test file? ? a collection of past exams and papers from various courses...
Supreme Court Video Game
Posted on October 05, 2009Another Washington Post article by Kashmir Hill and David Lat reports on video games promoted by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is hoping they help educate a public where children cannot name the three branches of government. The article names Supreme Decision as the better game, and continues the review: a middle school student has sued his school for preventing him from wearing a T-shirt featuring his favorite band...
New Access to the Federal Register: Data.gov
Posted on October 05, 2009The federal government just unveiled its new, improved interface for the Federal Register: Data.gov. The Washington Post ran an article by Ed O'Keefe today, "A More Web-Friendly Register With Federal Data in XML Form, Users Have New Options," that covers the switchover...
Google Books = Happy Publishers
Posted on October 04, 2009The Google Books Settlement remains controversial, especially because of the "orphan books" provisions governing titles that are probably still under copyright but for which the copyright holders are unknown. Concerns about these provisions led United States District Court Judge Denny Chin to postpone an upcoming hearing so that the agreement could renegotiated...
ABA Reviews Apps
Posted on October 02, 2009The October, 2009 issue of the ABA Journal (and online) has a great review of lots of great applications of interest to practitioners. "70 Sizzling Apps, for PC, PDA and SmartPhones," by G.M. Filisko does a nice job, talking to users. From librarians' point of view, the most interesting, of course, are the research and reference apps, and I've extracted that portion of the article, but there are lots of other apps, from document display, to productivity, accessibility, task management to maps, fun and games...
New Building for CUNY Law School
Posted on September 30, 2009The New York Law Journal is reporting that CUNY Law School will move into a new building in the fall of 2011. The story is below. As the story points out, the current facility at CUNY is notoriously hard to get to and has been inadequate since its founding...
Library Catalogs Getting Serious Upgrade
Posted on September 30, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a wonderful article in its Sept. 28, 2009 issue, Technology section and online here "After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software." ...traditional online library catalogs don't tend to order search results by ranked relevance, and they can befuddle users with clunky interfaces...
Withdrawing Print Titles
Posted on September 30, 2009Ithaka has issued a new report entitled What to Withdraw? Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Its goal is to help libraries that want to recapture the space made available when digitized journals are discarded. To quote from the executive summary, "this report addresses two key questions: which types of print journals can libraries withdraw responsibly today, and how can that set of materials be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility?" For journals with reliable digital access, retaining the print serves primarily a preservation function...
A Jail for Books
Posted on September 30, 2009I enjoyed reading this article from today's Boston Globe about Dunster House, the oldest dormitory on the Harvard campus, which is known for its "ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls [which] has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain...
How much have students really changed?
Posted on September 29, 2009I went today to our university's Center for Teaching Excellence for a book group meeting. Part of the conversation turned to the Kindle. The group leader said she had talked to her undergraduate students last night about the Kindle and asked how many had one...
Right to Know Day (FOIA and all that jazz)
Posted on September 27, 2009Monday, Sept. 28 is International Right to Know Day! International Right to Know Day was established by access to information advocates from around the globe. It was first celebrated on 28 September 2003, and 2009 will see the 7th International Right to Know Day...
Legal Jobs Outlook Roundup
Posted on September 25, 2009Putting together several ABA articles today, the legal jobs outlook is maybe not as grim as before. It depends on the geography and practice area, and the job hunter's credentials (which is always the case, I suppose). Here are the links & how I put them together in my crystal ball:Look first at Above the Law and "Last Week in Layoffs" for the real scoop on what's happening on the street the week of September 21, 2009...
Obama's Judges
Posted on September 24, 2009Jeffrey Toobin has written a trenchant analysis of President Obama's judicial-selection process in the September 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. Toobin discusses the difficulty of choosing candidates who will be successful in the confirmation process, and notes that "the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor...
Google Books Settlement Fairness Hearing Postponed (again!)
Posted on September 24, 2009Bookseller.com reports that U.S. Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have asked the court to once again postpone the Fairness Hearing in the Google Books Settlement in order for these parties to consider and respond to the points made by the Justice Department in their Statement of Interest...
Future of Academic Libraries?
Posted on September 24, 2009Librarians reacted "coolly" to a presentation by Daniel Greenstein, Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Programs at the University of California. The presentation was part of a meeting on sustainable scholarship sponsored by the Ithaka group. Greenstein's presentation was the subject of an article in Inside Higher Ed...
A follow-up to the story on the Cushing Academy Library Abandoning Books
Posted on September 22, 2009OOTJ readers saw the post from the Boston Globe, a few weeks ago, where the headmaster of the private school, the Cushing Academy, was proudly announcing that he was disposing of all the 20,000 books in the library and moving to a "bookless" model. Henceforward, the Cushing Academy would use only a handful of Kindles, a flat-screen TV, and $12,000 cappuccino machine where the books formerly stood...
Justice Dept. Weighs in on Google Book Settlement
Posted on September 22, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education alerts us that the Department of Justice issued a statement of interest about the Google Book Settlement last Friday, Sept. 18, 2009. The link takes you to the PDF of the full text post of the document as submitted to the Court...
Great Programming on the Supreme Court! C-SPAN!
Posted on September 20, 2009Starting Sunday, October 4, C-SPAN is offering law school's version of Sweep's Week! From their website: Beginning Sunday October 4 at 9pm and continuing through that entire week--each night at 9pm -- C-SPAN will present groundbreaking and unique programs on the Supreme Court...
Speak up! Learn how to be more effective
Posted on September 18, 2009Government information is something that nobody but librarians seems to care about. By the time members of the public know they need a piece of government info, it's too late for them to advocate for it to be made public. Librarians are the folks who see the need ahead of time, so it's up to us to speak up and protect the public interest...
Now for something completely different...
Posted on September 18, 2009My former colleague, Cheryl Conner, is interviewed on ABA Journal's series, "Legal Rebels." I have been kind of steamed about some of these so-called Legal Rebels, who often don't seem like much of a rebel to me. Or sometimes, I have a major bone to pick with the so-called rebellion, as with David Van Zandt's deanship at Northwestern...
Teaching Evaluations
Posted on September 18, 2009I truly love to teach. I have taught Advanced Legal Research at three different law schools starting in 1984--a quarter of a century! At first, it was a responsibility thrust upon me, but over the years, teaching has become one of the most rewarding things that I do...
Techno Rant
Posted on September 14, 2009I have frittered away most of a day trying to get some simple technology running. This is undoubtedly the most frustrating single thing about the frontiers of our our brave new world. I started to limit this to librarianship, but in my experience, you can waste hours out of your day trying to get new technology to work in any part of your life, so, hey! Time-wasting frustration -- It's not just for libraries any more!I am sure that once I either figure out what I am doing wrong -- (It's always USER ERROR, isn't it?) -- or break down and call for help, the wonders of the new technology will fulfill its promise and my life will be better in all ways...
Facebook and Litigation
Posted on September 11, 2009An article in the September 11, 2009 New York Law Journal, by Daniel L. Brown and Aimee R. Kahn on "The Perils of Facebook." (free with a trial registration) As a result of the explosion in popularity of social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where members "post" and share information about themselves as never before, attorneys, and particularly litigators, have begun to take note of the potential utility of this new medium...
Google Books Opposition & Support Summarized
Posted on September 11, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education today has an online article in its Publishing section that provides a very nice summary of the opposition and the support for the Google Books Project as we near the latest deadline for Judge Denny Chin to decide whether he will authorize the agreement...
The Next Step Beyond DRM... How would it affect libraries?
Posted on September 08, 2009Digital Rights Management, DRM, has been driving consumers crazy. The rights holders' attempt to protect their ownership interest in music, text, whatever, DRM has been a consumers' nightmare. If you have been foolish enough to sign up for Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, you have had a personal, up-close encounter with DRM...
The Florida Bar is Looking up Your YouTube Videos
Posted on September 07, 2009If you are applying for admission to the Florida Bar, you had better clean up your social networking sites. The Florida Bar News reports that the Florida Board of Bar Examiners Character and Fitness Commission recommended expanding its current review of personal websites to include social networking sites...
Bookless Library
Posted on September 04, 2009Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, has decided to dismantle its 20,000-volume library and replace it with a $500,000 learning center, the Boston Globe reports today. According to a statement on the library's website, the Academy is in the process of transforming our library into one that is virtually bookless by 2010...
Interviewing Hints for Lawyers & Librarians
Posted on September 03, 2009I am looking at the Brainstorm Column by Gina Barreca in Chronicle of Higher Education Ideas (What to do When You are Looking for a Job Part I, Sept. 1, 2009). She is writing specifically for English PhDs interviewing for faculty positions on faculties at colleges and universities...
League of Librarians Trading Cards
Posted on September 03, 2009Just for fun! Evidently, the idea was pioneered at Carleton College, but these trading cards were posted to Flickr by the librarians at the University of Rochester River Campus. They used the cards as an orientation welcome to new students. What a hoot! I am not sure all the cards actually give a recognizable photo of the librarian, but still, it's a terrific idea! Way up there with Super Librarian! Take a look, here...
Celebrate Knowledge Day
Posted on September 01, 2009This morning, I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers from one of my students. She was born and raised in Russia, and is a dedicated, committed student. She will make a great attorney. She explained to me that flowers are traditionally given to teachers on Knowledge Day, which is celebrated on September 1 in Russia and other former Soviet republics...
Why MLS Candidates Don't Get Calls for Clerical Positions in Libraries
Posted on September 01, 2009There was a thread on Law-Lib recently where an MLS who was laid off and looking for work bemoaned the fact that she was not getting calls for any of the clerical positions in libraries where she had applied. The discussion turned on why this should be...
Cyber Gender Harassment and the New Campus Gossip Sites
Posted on August 31, 2009University of Maryland law Professor Danielle Keats Citron has an interesting article on SSNR, "Law's Expressive Value in Combatting Cyber Gender Harassment." Also at vol. 108 Mich. L. Rev. (2009). (A nice coincidence that this pops up right after Marie's post about the new dean at U...
Justice Souter's Papers
Posted on August 28, 2009Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter has donated his papers, both personal and professional, to the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, of which he has been a member for many years. Read Tony Mauro's story in the National Law Journal here...
Ethics for Library Organizations
Posted on August 28, 2009Gee, this is tough. Karen Schnederman asks what position do I think AALL should take regarding news items such as Denver Public Library to consider hour cuts, closingsTo make up for a budget shortfall of nearly $5 million next year, Denver Public Library officials are considering cutting back service hours, closing branches, and even selling buildings...
Law Student Summer Job Blues
Posted on August 28, 2009The ABA Journal Weekly Newsletter has a group of stories that pull together to make a very bleak picture of summer jobs this year:Skadden Arps cuts their summer jobs by more than half here. For the summer of 2010, they plan to hire 100 (down from 225 this summer)...
Westlaw returning printers to Southern New England
Posted on August 28, 2009I got a voice mail from Spencer Clough at Southern New England School of Law today saying that West is returning the printers for their Westlaw. He credits pressure from stories such as the ones here at OOTJ, but also hard work from their own academic rep...
New Dean at Maryland
Posted on August 28, 2009I saw a posting about fellow alumna Phoebe Haddon in my Smith College alumnae newsletter. The posting linked to this story from the Baltimore Sun about Haddon, who is the new dean at the University of Maryland School of Law. I didn't have the pleasure of knowing Dean Haddon at Smith, which is a women's college; however, I was interested in her comments about the special insights women bring to the law: I think women bring new dimensions to thinking about the law, because we ask different questions ...
Stanley Kaplan's Legacy
Posted on August 27, 2009Stanley Kaplan died recently, the entrepreneur behind the Kaplan test preparation company. The link above takes the reader to a lengthy obituary in the New York Times from August 25. Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, and continued to live in the New York area to the end of his life, with homes in Manhattan and Boca Raton...
Tough Times for Job Seekers
Posted on August 26, 2009Today's New York Times features an article, "Downturn Dims Prospects Even at Top Law Schools," that makes clear just how tough the job market is this season. The dire situation is summarized in the opening paragraph: "This fall, law students are competing for half as many openings at big firms as they were last year in what is shaping up to be the most wrenching job search season in over 50 years...
Time to Change our Relation to Vendors? Johnny B's Call to Arms
Posted on August 26, 2009Over at Johnny B: Renaissance Man, John Beatty wrote a terrific call to arms (click on the title to this post to go read it in full). After reviewing the dismal recent events in West's relations with librarians (AALL sponsorship refused; pulling printers from Puerto Rican law schools and non-ABA accredited law schools; and finally the ad stating that knowing your librarian's first name was proof that you were spending too much time in the library), John recalls for his readers that West is no longer a family-owned business, but part of a multi-national mega-corporation...
Change in Policy at Wikipedia
Posted on August 25, 2009Yahoo News is reporting that Wikipedia is "testing a new method for curbing false information in its entries as the online encyclopedia seeks a balance between credibility and openness." Wikipedia will continue to allow anyone to write and edit articles, but it is experimenting with requiring changes to be run past experienced Wikipedia editors before they show up on the site...
PACER - RECAP
Posted on August 25, 2009In an effort to jiggle loose the Justice Department's Pacer database, programmers from Harvard, Princeton and the Internet Archive have provided a Firefox Plug-in called RECAP (that's PACER spelled backwards). It tests the search you run in PACER against a database of already-retrieved documents that have been donated to a free "shadow" PACER database, RECAP...
Treasures at the Morgan Library
Posted on August 25, 2009The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan has mounted a show entitled "Pages of Gold" which showcases leaves that were separated from manuscripts and sold individually to collectors. The New York Times reviewed the show in June, but it took me awhile to get there...
Something's Rotten in Brooklyn
Posted on August 25, 2009The Washington Post ran an appalling story on August 9, 2009 about the Brooklyn Public Library, which hired a firm that specializes in coordinating layoffs to terminate thirteen employees. The firm, the Five O'Clock Club, coaches "businesses on how to execute mass downsizings and often visits companies on the designated day to help coordinate a layoff...
Library Chairs - the wood, the bad and the ugly
Posted on August 24, 2009Reprinted from my e-mail response on the directors' listserve, to a query about straight, 4 legged wooden chairs, which is what we have in my library: Here is what I learned the hard way about sturdiness of straight 4 legged wooden chairs. You MUST have stretchers between the legs, or the legs will split...
The Christopher Baldy Prizes at the University at Buffalo Law School
Posted on August 24, 2009The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York, is pleased to announce the establishment of three new prizes for innovation in the area of law and social science: Online Communication, New Scholarship and Distinguished Contribution...
Printing Reinstated in Puerto Rico
Posted on August 24, 2009I just received an email from Maria Otero, Director of the University of Puerto Rico Law Library. She shared with me the good news that Thomson Reuters has decided to reinstate support of standalone printing at law schools in Puerto Rico. "Dear all:After a very good and thoughtful telephone conversation with Mr...
Thomson West: Epic PR Fail
Posted on August 24, 2009One more time, West stumbles over its own feet in its haste to offend the librarian community... They came out with nifty little "cards" aimed at practitioners, "Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, you're spending too much time in the library...
Thomson Reuters Discriminates Against Puerto Rican Law Schools?
Posted on August 23, 2009A colleague alerted me to the email below, sent to Thomson Reuters on August 21 by a professor at University of Puerto Rico School: Dear Thomson Reuters executives: The enclosed e-mail by ... is self-explanatory. In it, he objects to your discriminatory policy to discontinue providing the printers? service (complimentary printers and supplies), which were installed at the local Puerto Rico law school libraries...
When Settlements Remove Decisions from Lexis & Westlaw
Posted on August 21, 2009Shannon Duffy, at Law.com reported on Aug. 19, that a settlement agreement in Klein v. Amtrak called for removing eight legally significant decisions from publication. Two trespassing teens were badly burned by electric catenary wires when they were horsing around on a parked train car...
i-AWFUL List: Internet Advocates' Watchlist for Ugly Laws
Posted on August 19, 2009Click here for Netchoice.org's press release dated August 18, 2009, detailing the internet advocacy organization's list of the ten worst internet laws . In part: "The Internet is increasingly under attack as lawmakers seek to mandate technological behaviors, impose new taxes and otherwise restrict the free flow of information and commerce online," said Steve DelBianco, Executive Director of NetChoice, which maintains iAWFUL...
Information Doesn't Always Want to Be Free
Posted on August 17, 2009The Financial Times has been charging for online access since 2002. This made it an outlier in an environment in which most other papers (The Wall Street Journal being the major exception) were giving away online access to their content. Other media executives felt that charging for content was a prescription for financial disaster...
The End of Solitude
Posted on August 17, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education just re-ran the excellent essay from January, 2009, by William Deresiewicz, The End of Solitude. If you have a Chronicle subscription and password, you can read it in full at this link. I will attempt to summarize a bit of it here, but he makes complex arguments and ties into many writers and thinkers...
Work Life Balance
Posted on August 17, 2009I thought about that article from last week about the best law firms for mothers or other J.D. folks who want a work-life balance. If you read the whole article, or paid attention to the parts I excerpted and read between the lines, you may have noticed that part-time for lawyers is a 40 hour week...
Fascinating Justification of Costs of CALR
Posted on August 14, 2009Read the analysis of online research cost recovery by guest blogger Mark Gediman at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. He titles his post "Cost Recovery... Such a Deal." Gediman's analysis is nicely detailed. He relies on hourly billing at the full lawyer $300/hour rate at his firm for pulling a case, for instance to calculate that it saves money to download the case electronically compared to pulling it off the shelf and copying it, when you bill the client...
Working Mother on the Best Firms for Work Life Balance
Posted on August 14, 2009Click on the title for this post to read a nice article at Working Mother on how the tanked economy is helping firms see the wisdom of work-life balance. Now male attorneys are starting to take advantage of family leave -- it's not just a mommy track thing any more...
Karl Rove and The Attorney General Firings in the W. Administration
Posted on August 13, 2009With all the other stuff going on in the news, people may have lost track of the release of the transcripts of testimony and e-mails that showed that Karl Rove was very much behind the political firing of Attorneys General during the George W. Bush administration under Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General...
Typography for Lawyers
Posted on August 11, 2009Click on the link for this post, or in this sentence to visit http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/. Many thanks to Meg Martin, who posted to RIPS-SIS blog about this fascinating website. The blog is maintained by a civil litigation attorney in Los Angeles, Matthew Butterick, who also has an art degree...
Follow up on Justice in Cambodia
Posted on August 10, 2009Last week I blogged a story in GQ about the war crimes trials that recently got underway in Cambodia, thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended. The GQ article goes into some of the reasons it took so long to bring the perpetrators to justice. In an article in Sunday's Boston Globe, Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes thatThere is good reason to believe the tribunal will fail in its aims...
Just for Reference Purposes: AALL & West
Posted on August 07, 2009Here are Statements referred to in previous post and explanations about Price Index, etc., for folks who might not already know about these things.AALL Statement: From: Kate Hagan To: law-lib@ucdavis.eduSent: Thursday, August 6, 2009 12:35:10 PMSubject: [LAW-LIB:59662] AALL Sponsorship PolicyThere was a recent posting on this listserv concerning the AALL sponsorship policy, so I thought it appropriate to provide you with accurate information on this issue...
AALL and Thomson-West
Posted on August 07, 2009Well, by now, James Duggan, the immediate past president of AALL has made his official statement on Law-lib listserve. And Anne Ellis of Thomson-West has made a reply on the ALL-SIS list-serve. As I understand it, the membership of AALL is split in their sentiments over the leadership's response to West...
Bravo, AALL & James Duggan!
Posted on August 05, 2009If you went to AALL, did you notice that Thomson-West was not listed as a sponsor at all? Did you also hear the rumor that it was because the AALL leadership finally faced West down about supplying price information for the Price Index? Click on the title for this post to visit the Law Librarian Blog (part of the Law Prof Blogs Network) to read the post by Joe Hodnicki about this story, dated August 5...
Justice in Cambodia
Posted on August 04, 2009There is a powerful and haunting article written by Michael Paterniti in the current issue of GQ. Paterniti describes visiting Cambodia in 2002 and then again more recently as the Special Tribunal for Cambodia was being convened. The first defendant to stand trial is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran the notorious S-21 torture center at a former school from 1975 to 1979, the years that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia...
Nicholson Baker on Kindle
Posted on August 03, 2009I would have been astonished if Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold and long-time library critic, had been a fan of Amazon's Kindle reader. Thus, his somewhat nasty article in the August 3 issue of The New Yorker reviewing the Kindle 2 e-book reader contained few surprises...
New Life for Old Books
Posted on August 03, 2009Cambridge University Press has announced a new digital initiative, according to an article in today's Inside Higher Ed. In a partnership with the Cambridge University Library, the Press, which has been operating since 1584, will scan and reprint original copies...
True Grit
Posted on August 02, 2009This article by Jonah Lehrer in today's Boston Globe really rang true for me. It discusses recent research by psychologists into the phenomenon of grit. "[T]he researchers are quick to point out that grit isn't simply about the willingness to work hard...
Ban on Electronic Devices in New York?
Posted on July 30, 2009New York Lawyer reported on July 22 that local attorneys are protesting interim rules that severely limit their ability to bring laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse located in lower Manhattan...
Google and Civil Rights
Posted on July 30, 2009Betsy's recent posts about the meeting convened at the Boston Public Library to discuss the Google Book Settlement were fascinating and whetted my appetite for more information on the topic. I was at AALL's annual meeting earlier this week and left on Tuesday...
More on Google Books Discussion at Boston Public Library
Posted on July 24, 2009Take 2: Hal Abelson:The notes I made the other day skipped over some major points of the discussion at the Boston Public Library on the Google Books Project and Settlement proposal. For instance, I did not cover Professor Hal Abelson, who, not being a librarian, had some pretty interesting things to say...
University of California Considers an 11th, Electronic Campus
Posted on July 23, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2009, reports in a story by Marc Beja, that the dean of the U.C., Berkeley, Law School, Christopher Edley, Jr., recommends opening a new, electronic campus for the University of California. Due to severe budget cuts, the system may not be able to enroll as many students as before...
The Google Book Project & Settlement Discussion at Boston Public Library
Posted on July 22, 2009I went to the program hosted at Boston Public Library last night, titled, ?Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement. Speakers: * Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Books (bio here) * John Palfrey, Henry N...
Government Web Sites
Posted on July 20, 2009NextGov has a nice graphic presentation entitled "Best Practices for Government Web Sites." It focuses on five agencies--NASA, the Library of Congress, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Social Security Administration, and the Transportation Security Administration--and presents their sites, pointing out ways in which they meet the needs of their users...
More on laptops in the classroom
Posted on July 20, 2009The Chronicle Online has a free article today about how much more engaged students are when laptops and computer presentations leave the classroom. In When Computers Leave the Classroom, So Does Boredom, Jeffrey R. Young covers removal of computers from classrooms at Meadows School of Arts at SMU...
For folks who need to find a lawyer, a new resource
Posted on July 18, 2009LegalMatch.com is a new free web service that offers a matching service for folks who need to find a lawyer. I get these from the home page: You, as the legal consumer send information about your legal problem and location. The system will send your notes to pre-screened attorneys who practice the type of law you need, in the area you need...
Sotomayor and Foreign Law
Posted on July 17, 2009I thought the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor were a bit of an anticlimax--did we really learn anything about her that we didn't know before? As has become typical of recent confirmation hearings, the purpose seemed to be to give the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee an opportunity to grandstand and to ask questions to which they already knew the answers or to which they knew the candidate could not or would not reply...
Confluence: Unemployment, Underprepared Workforce
Posted on July 15, 2009Looking at Sabrina Pacifici's BePacific.com today, I was struck by the confluence of several stories:1. Broad Unemployment Across the U.S.New York Times interactive graphic: Broad Unemployment Across the U.S. - "Under a broader definition of joblessness, some states have rates higher than 20 percent...
And, Heeeere's the Bar Exam!
Posted on July 14, 2009Well, it's too late already for the helpful hints of yesteryear about prepping early for the bar, and pacing yourself and all that crap. Ooops. I mean, helpful information.It's either here, or looming on the horizon. Check here, at the National Conference of Bar Examiners for your favorite state bar exam date to see if OOPS! you missed it...
Job Search Tips from a Recruiter - Boston Globe
Posted on July 14, 2009The Boston Globe today offers a nice set of 8 tips for online job hunting here. It's a helpful little list, with sound advice including being careful with your e-mail address (don't use hotmama@yahoo.com!), scanning your social network sites BEFORE putting your resume out (remove all those wonderful pictures of you partying with friends), but also some that maybe won't have occurred to folks, like naming your online resume folder carefully (don't name it draft or with an older date!)...
Google vs. Microsoft?
Posted on July 13, 2009I ALWAYS read Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, so today's column about the new tangle between Google and Microsoft, "Heavyweights Trading Punches in Digital Faceoff," caught my eye. The two most powerful companies in digital technology are openly invading each other?s most lucrative markets: the office productivity software and computer operating systems Microsoft makes, and Internet search, which Google dominates...
Academic Women Suffer When They Have More Than 2 Children
Posted on July 10, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009, has a poignant article in the Workplace section, B16-19 (in print) titled, "Is Having More than 2 Children an Unspoken Taboo?" by Robin Wilson. Interviewing women in many different academic fields (but not librarians), Wilson finds ...
Time to put our money where our mouth is!
Posted on July 09, 2009Lt. Dan Choi, was dismissed from the Army... "After 10 years of service to our country - including leading combat patrols, rebuilding schools and translating Arabic in Iraq for 15 months - the Federal Recognition Board issued its recommendation on Tuesday that I be discharged from the Army for 'moral and professional dereliction' under the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy," he wrote...
Preserving Guatanamo's Records
Posted on July 08, 2009A dedicated law professor, librarian, and attorney are working together to create the Guatanamo Bay Detention Center archive, which will be a "repository of the records and first-person accounts of hundreds of defense lawyers who have worked on detainee cases...
Boston Public Library and Google Books Project
Posted on July 07, 2009presentsExpanding Access to Books:Implications of the Google Books Settlement AgreementWe'd like to invite you to the Boston Public Library for an informative panel about Google's efforts to make books more accessible, and explore what the Google Books settlement agreement means for the academic, library, and business communities...
A Ghost Story for Librarians
Posted on July 07, 2009My husband, also a librarian and a voracious reader, recently introduced me to M.R. James, a Victorian writer known for his elegant ghost stories. His work, in my husband's words, is "not big on fright, but remains treasured for its rich evocation of atmosphere...
Book Reviews--We Need More of Them
Posted on July 06, 2009Sanford Levinson has a wonderful article in the May 2009 Texas Law Review, "The Vanishing Book Review in Student-Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses." What he does not mention in his excellent article is how much a librarian like myself relies upon book reviews for collection development and reference...
I am still catching up on my reading
Posted on July 03, 2009I am still catching up on my reading after being on vacation. Last night, I read an article in the May 25 issue of New York magazine by Sam Anderson entitled "In Defense of Distraction." Anderson launches the article with a discussion of multitasking and its effects on attention...
New Delhi High Court Decriminalizes Gay Sexuality
Posted on July 03, 2009The New York Times reported yesterday that New Delhi's High Court overturned a colonial law from 1861 criminalizing homosexual behavior. Before that time, Indian law did not apparently address same sex behavior. ?The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognizing a role in society for everyone,? judges of the Delhi High Court wrote in a 105-page decision, India?s first to directly address rights for gay men and lesbians...
Rare New Copy of the Declaration of Independence
Posted on July 03, 2009Just in time for Independence Day, British researchers say they have found and verified a rare original copy of the American Declaration of Independence. It appears to be from the first printing, the Dunlap printing, which may only have numbered 200 or so, to be distributed to the leaders of the time for reading to the public...
The High Cost of Debt
Posted on July 02, 2009I found Betsy's blog post earlier today on the new rules for student loans to be particularly timely given an article in the New York Times about one would-be lawyer in New York State who has been barred from practicing law because of an unusually large amount of student debt and penalties--over $400,000...
New Student Loan Rules as of July 1!
Posted on July 02, 2009As of July 1, students with loans have new and better rates for repayment. And students who need to get loans have better deals and rates. Visit Studentaid.ed.gov to see lots of helpful information. Repayment plans includes several plans:1. A standard plan where you pay back in 10 years, which can reduce the amount of interest you pay;2...
LEND-A-HAND: Lexis-Nexis Provides More Support to Laid Off Attorneys
Posted on June 30, 2009Lexis-Nexis is supporting the battered legal community through another program, Lend-a-Hand, which is designed to help lawyers laid off from large law firms market themselves. See the Lend-a-Hand page here: http://www.lexisnexis.com/lendahandIn the recent economic crisis, law firm managers nationwide are currently faced with making difficult decisions and downsizing is one of the most popular outcomes we are seeing during this economic downturn...
A New Role for the Bookstore
Posted on June 29, 2009Today's Boston Globe has an article about the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, which looks like a classic bookstore, but has taken a big step into the future. Northshire has installed an Espresso Book Machine, dubbed "Lurch" by the staff, which prints books on demand for customers while they wait...
Back from France
Posted on June 26, 2009While Betsy was in China and Jim was holding down the fort at OOTJ, I was attending my daughter's college graduation and vacationing in France (two and a half weeks) as well as several days in Germany. The weather was mostly clear, but surprisingly cold for this time of year...
Online Law School Grad Passes the Bar
Posted on June 26, 2009The National Law Journal is reporting that Ross E. Mitchell, a graduate of the Concord Law School has passed the Massachusetts bar. I was interested to see that he has also passed the notoriously difficult California bar exam. As is reported below, Mitchell sued successfully to be allowed to sit for the Massachusetts bar exam...
Update on Westlaw Standalone Printer Removals
Posted on June 18, 2009After I posted yesterday about Westlaw removing standalone printers from the Puerto Rico law schools, I received an e-mail from Southern New England School of Law. This is a standalone law school which is not yet fully accredited by the A.B.A. They were told in March that Westlaw would be removing their standalone printers...
E-textbooks Experiences
Posted on June 18, 2009The Chronicle of Higher Education for June 12, 2009 carries this interesting story in the Information Technology Section (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39a01801.htm Link), in print at p. A18. ?6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks? discusses the experiences of Northwest Missouri State University in offering electronic textbooks widely on campus last year...
Why is Westlaw treating the Puerto Rican Law Schools differently?
Posted on June 17, 2009The only law schools that have received letters from Westlaw cancelling entirely the Westlaw standalone printer program are the schools in Puerto Rico. As far as OOTJ can tell, no other United States law school has received any letter cancelling their standalone printer program...
Sign the petition to improve Pacer!
Posted on June 17, 2009Sign the petition to improve Pacer and make it available free! Link here.
Back from Beijing, Blithered
Posted on June 16, 2009Well, I have finally stumbled back from the post-conference tour around China, and am in the office at last. Thank you, Jim, both for minding the blog, and for posting for me while I was in China. The great firewall of China would have stymied my attempts to blog and Twitter about the China-U...
Has the time for listservs passed?
Posted on June 01, 2009Greg Lambert asks (as reported by Joe Hodnick) on the Law Librarian Blog: "Is it time to retire listservs"?Not yet, according to Greg Lambert, library and records manager for King & Spalding LLP in Houston and blogger at one of my newest favorite blogs, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog...
China-US Conference wrap-up
Posted on June 01, 2009[Posted for Betsy McKenzie by Jim Milles.]Last night, the first China-US Conference on Legal Information and Law Libraries came to a close. An agreement was signed to continue holding these conferences every two years, alternately in China and the United States...
More News from the US China Conference
Posted on May 30, 2009[Posted for Betsy McKenzie by Jim Milles.]On the first day of the conference, a half-day, the visiting Americans sat with some of the Chinese librarians. The bulk of the Chinese librarians did not arrive until the next day, Friday. But on that first day, we had a welcoming address from Dr...
Blogging from the Miracle Conference
Posted on May 28, 2009[posted by Jim Milles for Betsy McKenzie]The China-US Conference on Legal Information and Law Libraries here in Beijing, opening today, is a miracle conference. First, the mere fact of it is a miracle. That librarians from the U.S. and China, (in fact, there are librarians here from other countries, too!), should put together a jointly planned conference, and gain support from China?s central education ministry for it is quite amazing...
AALL2Go
Posted on May 22, 2009I am waiting to see exactly how AALL2Go will work. It sounds like it might be a very nice thing for those whose travel budgets have been slashed. I had hoped it might include simultaneous access to AALL programming, but it actually sounds like it's more of a way to get the recordings quickly, maybe as MP3 files (for a fee, which is only fair)...
New Hampshire Gay Marriage Stumble & Regroup
Posted on May 22, 2009The Boston Globe reports today that the New Hampshire House rejected the bill Wednesday that would have legalized same-sex marriage, and met the condition set by Governor Lynch, that religious groups may opt out of performing services if they object. Both supporters and critics of gay marriage were stunned by the outcome...
Downturn in the legal market: temporary blip or end of an era?
Posted on May 21, 2009An article in last week's Wall Street Journal Blog featured an interview with legal consultant Peter Zeughauser, who predicted a grim outlook for law firm hiring for the next few years:It?s not going to be over before the end of the year. I think you?re going to see dramatically reduced offers to summer associates at the end of this summer, and dramatically reduced offers for people to come in as summers in 2010...
So, have I missed anything?
Posted on May 21, 2009Jim Milles here--founder and absentee landlord of this blog. Marie and Betsy are travelling over the next week, so this is as good a time as any for me to suit up and start blogging here again.When I started this blog, I was Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at University at Buffalo Law School...
White House Office of Administration not subject to FOIA
Posted on May 20, 2009The best news story I could find, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, here about the Appeals Court in the D.C. Circuit ruling that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to FOIA requests, means that White House e-mails from the Bush administration are not required to be made public...
More on the Mother's Day Rant!
Posted on May 19, 2009Well, I have gone on thinking about why I and so many other women I know have spent our married lives buying cards, flowers and other presents for our mothers in law. Despite all the talks we have with our husbands about equal sharing in the marriage, and rational-sounding statements while dating about equal rights for women, guys really are BAD about getting mother's day gifts (and Christmas, and birthday, and Hanukkah, and whatever other gifts) for their mothers...
Copyright Bullies
Posted on May 18, 2009Singer songwriter Billy Bragg, writes in the Guardian.co.uk that he and other musical artists doubt that the big recording companies are representing the best interests of the artists when they try to persuade governments to pass legislation requiring ISPs to shut off users who persistently download unauthorized copyrighted material...
Sotomayor Video
Posted on May 18, 2009The Pace Law Library has posted on YouTube a video of Judge Sonia Sotomayor speaking at the Law School's commencement in 2003. Click here to access it. Because of the size of the file, it had to be posted in two parts. Also, it was impossible to synchronize the audio and the video...
Charming Story
Posted on May 16, 2009I found this article from the Amherst Bulletin to be charming. Sarah McKee, a newly-elected trustee of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, recently discovered a book on her shelves, Alvin M. Josephy's The Patriot Chiefs, that she had borrowed from a public library in Arlington, Virginia in 1978...
Gay Marriage Updates: NewHampshire, Wisconsin
Posted on May 15, 2009The Boston Globe's Eric Moskowitz reports that New Hampshire governor John Lynch announced that he would sign the bill making same-sex marriage legal in the state providing that religious groups objecting to such unions would not be forced to perform ceremonies...
Bathroom Breaks at Syracuse Law
Posted on May 13, 2009In order to crack down on cheating during exams, Syracuse Law School has instituted a new policy that limits the number of visits to the restroom that students can make during finals. According to the article in The Post-Standard, Syracuse Law School now limits first-year students to one bathroom break during exams, even during exams lasting as long as four hours...
Lexis-Nexis offering passwords to deferred students
Posted on May 12, 2009There has been a lot in the listserves lately about Lexis-Nexis offering passwords to law students who have had the employment offers deferred. The deal with deferral is that the students do public service work on a volunteer basis, while the employer pays the student a much-reduced stipend (but still a pretty nice deal and certainly better than zippo!)...
Gun Control?
Posted on May 08, 2009A local library here in Westchester County, the Pelham Public Library, made news this week by calling the local high school when an 11th-grade student visited the library and asked for a book on gun carry and concealment laws. The student was interviewed by the police, who concluded that the student posed no danger and had broken no laws...
New York Law School's Google Book Settlement Web Site
Posted on May 07, 2009Publisher's Weekly writes that New York Law School is planning a web site both to cover changes to and to affect the Google Book Settlement. Interestingly, it is funded by Microsoft. will include discussion forums, a comprehensive archive of settlement documents and related commentary, and a tool for users to insert their own analyses and commentary on individual paragraphs of the proposed settlement...
Maine OK's Gay Marriage
Posted on May 07, 2009The Globe article here (by Jenna Russell and Eric Moskowitz) has a nice, in-depth coverage not only of Maine's governor signing same sex marriage into law there, but also the status of New Hampshire's bill (voted through the legislature and nobody knows what the gov...
New Version of Kindle
Posted on May 07, 2009Inside Higher Ed reports today on the new version of the Kindle reader that is "specifically designed to be friendlier to books and newspapers than other digital devices are." The new Kindle is larger and PDF enabled, making it more textbook friendly...
The Language of the Court
Posted on May 07, 2009Our colleague Fred Shapiro, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, is quoted in Adam Liptak's article in The New York Times on possible picks to replace retiring Justice David Souter. Mr. Shapiro "asked constitutional law scholars for memorable quotations from ...
Washington, D.C. City Council Votes to Recognize Gay Marriages
Posted on May 06, 2009The Washington Post has an in-depth article about the D.C. city council voting to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere. This is both a little step (they are not authorizing gay marriage in the district), and a big step, because now Congress and the President have to deal with the issue...
New Search Engines: Wolfram Alpha & Google Public Data
Posted on May 05, 2009The Boston Globe today has a story by Hiawatha Bray, "A hungry little number cruncher," featuring mainly Wolfram Alpha. Computers can't think, but they can count.That's the idea behind Wolfram Alpha, a new search service that could be as much of a game-changer as Wikipedia or Google...
Feminist Broodings as Mother's Day Approaches
Posted on May 05, 2009How come it is that all the most progressive and stand-up women I know still have to go out in the rain to buy cards to send to their mothers in law? After how many decades of working on equal rights and making progress for women in the workplace and equal sharing in home duties, we still end up guilt-tripped into buying the cards and flowers for our husband's mother...
Check out the new look at GPO
Posted on May 05, 2009The U.S. Government Printing Office has launched its new website with a slick new look. I have not explored it thoroughly yet, but it looks very nice. At a quick glance, though, it appears that it's no longer the one stop for government documents online that it once was...
Google Book Settlement - A terrific analysis
Posted on May 04, 2009Tip of the OOTJ hat to Kathleen Vanden Heuvel for pointing us to a wonderful and powerful analysis of what is wrong with the Google Book Settlement. Professor Pamela Samuelson (the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and an advisor to the Samuelson High Technology Law & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall), writes as a guest blogger at Radar O'Reilly...
RSS Feeds from the Library Congress: Thomas & More
Posted on May 04, 2009You can now keep up with federal legislation through the Congressional Record Daily Digest on an RSS feed from Thomas! See the Library of Congress list of RSS feeds available here. Besides the Thomas feed here are some that will probably be faves for the OOTJ crowd:Copyright Office:Legislative DevelopmentsFederal Register NoticesNewsNet (deadlines for comments, hearings, etc...
Handy Bookmarklet!
Posted on May 04, 2009Just a cool little tool to make the web nicer and more readable: Readability from Arc90 Lab. A bookmarklet is a little piece of script that tells the computer how to do something additional. In this case, you can control how the font appears and how large; you control the size of the margins as well...
A Different Take on Supreme Court Appointments
Posted on May 04, 2009Rumors are swirling about possible picks for the Supreme Court seat about to be vacated by Justice David Souter. Conventional wisdom says that the pick will probably be a woman, given the Court's blatant lack of gender diversity. The pick will probably also have served as a federal appellate judge since that has been the career path of most recent appointees...
Google Maps' Historic Maps of Japan Stir Up Trouble
Posted on May 03, 2009The Boston Globe has an A.P. story by Jay Alabaster here about Google Maps. They posted a set of wood cut maps of feudal Japan, already available on other websites. But somehow, being on Google maps, as a layer feature, seems different. The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place...
Scalia and Privacy
Posted on May 02, 2009Wow! Justice Scalia does not do humor, does he? Or irony, either. See a delicious collection of links and dish at Above the Law here. Justice Scalia had spoken at a privacy conference hosted by the Institute of American and Talmudic Law, and reported at Concurring Opinions here...
Justice Souter announces retirement
Posted on May 01, 2009The A.P. article, The Best Job in the Worst City, by Michelle Salcedo, is a nice, short profile, and was one of the earliest filed reports on Justice Souter's announcement that he is retiring. From Boston.com, Political Intelligence column, a nice bit of speculation on the replacement by Foon Rhee here...
Google Books Settlement May be Hitting Trouble
Posted on May 01, 2009The New York Times reported here yesterday that the Google Books settlement has attracted interest from the Justice Department, who are starting to wonder whether it violates antitrust principles. (you think?) It also reports that the judge, Denny Chin, has ordered the settlement will be delayed another four months at the request of authors, who want more time to consider the terms of the settlement...
Slap on the Wrist
Posted on April 30, 2009Click here for an article from the New York Law Journal on the use of "slipshod search terms" to retrieve electronically stored information. In a case decided March 19, 2009, William A. Gross Construction Associates v. American Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Company, U...
Nice Article on Twitter
Posted on April 30, 2009Hiawatha Bray, the Globe's excellent tech reporter, has a wonderful article on Twitter with a review of a number of Twitter Tools, here. Bray admits to originally finding Twitter boring and pretty lame. Interestingly, he says the Nielsen ratings service says 60% of new Twitter users have the same reaction...
New Hampshire Gay Marriage Update
Posted on April 30, 2009The Boston Globe offers this update to the story of the bill legalizing gay marriage in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Senate voted yesterday to allow same-sex couples to marry, setting the state in motion to become the fifth in the country to legalize same-sex marriage...
More on Google Books Project
Posted on April 28, 2009Click here for an entertaining blog entry at the Fiction Circus from Miracle who interviews Prof. Grimmelman at New York Law about the Google Books Project. The interview covers wide ranging issues including orphan books & a proposed rights auction (proposed by Fiction Circus, that is)...
Kudos to Steve Matthews' Twitter How To
Posted on April 27, 2009Steve Matthews in his SLAW post, Lawyer Twitter Practices: 29 Dos and Don'ts, lays out the How To for using Twitter to build a law firm practice. Steve does not want to call them "best practices," but offers pointers based on his own experiences of what works and does not work...
Twitter Job Search?
Posted on April 27, 2009Twitter 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, 2009The 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, 2009A 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, 2009I 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...
CIA & MilitaryTorture in Afghanistan & Iraq - It's back & it's worse
Posted on April 25, 2009A 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, 2009Illustrator 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, 2009The 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, 2009From 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, 2009Most 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, 2009When 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, 2009The 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, 2009The 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, 2009Earth 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, 2009Courts, 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, 2009When 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, 2009Follow 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, 2009The 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, 2009Thanks 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, 2009It'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, 2009Law.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, 2009This 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, 2009The 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, 2009Click 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, 2009Did 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, 2009Librarians 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, 2009Reading 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, 2009I 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, 2009Yay! 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, 2009Click 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...
Gay Marriage Vote in D.C. to go before Congress
Posted on April 09, 2009The Boston Globe prints an Associated Press report that the Washington, D.C. city council voted unanimously to recognize gay marriages from states that have legalized them. This vote must then go before the Congress within 30 days for ratification. That opens the way for the new Congress seated after the fall, 2008 elections to reconsider the Defense of Marriage Act which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996...
Testing the Limits of the Fair Use Doctrine
Posted on April 09, 2009Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School is defending a Boston University graduate student, Joel Tenenbaum, accused of downloading music illegally by the Recording Industry Association of America. Nesson is well known for his passion for technology...
Digital Publishing
Posted on April 08, 2009Inside Higher Ed published an article by Scott McLemee today that summarizes an article by Sandy Thatcher in Against the Grain, a library newsletter that is not yet available online. McLemee says that Against the Grain isn't "well-known," but I don't think that's true, at least in my library...
Spanish Court Begins Criminal Investigation into Bush Torture Team
Posted on April 08, 2009OMG! The April 13 issue of the New Yorker has a Talk of the Town brief article by Jane Mayer titled "The Bush Six." She focuses largely on the author, Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team (see also here) seems to have sparked a criminal investigation in Spain...
Follow up on Debtors' Prison
Posted on April 07, 2009The New York Times ran this story today about the growing phenomenon of courts imprisoning individuals because they cannot pay fees. It is a follow up to the editorial I posted yesterday.
Google Books Conversation
Posted on April 07, 2009Picking up the Google Books conversation again, after Marie's excellent post, I have recently come across several other interesting criticisms of digitization projects. These are aspects I had not considered.1. Paul Duguid, at First Monday vol 12, no...
Vermont Legalizes Gay Marriage!
Posted on April 07, 2009The first state to legalize gay marriage by legislative action, Vermont overrode governor Jim Douglas' veto with the minimum votes needed, about 40 minutes ago. The Associated Press, at this Boston Globe webpost, with a nice video feed reports the story...
Darien Statements on the Purpose of the Library and Librarians
Posted on April 07, 2009Thanks to Jennifer Murray of RIPS-SIS for posting to the list-serve a pointer and link to the Darien Statements. These were formulated at a conference called, charmingly, "In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries." See link here...
Return of Debtors' Prison
Posted on April 06, 2009Here is an editorial from the New York Times commenting on the return of a venerable institution to the United States--the debtors' prison. The editorial describes the case of Edwina Nowlin of Michigan who "was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son...
Happy Vesak! Happy Buddha Day!
Posted on April 06, 2009This turns out to be the (or close to) the day on which Buddhists celebrate Buddha Day, which encompasses both his birthday, his enlightenment and his passing (per Wikipedia article here). The exact date seems to vary by the ethnicity and brand of Buddhism, somewhat, since the article explains that it may be the full moon of the 4th, 5th or 6th lunar month, depending on which calendar one is following...
As Libraries Become Key to Communities, There is a Dark Side
Posted on April 06, 2009Several days ago, my sister sent me a link to a New York Times article (click the title to this post) from April 2, by Susan Saulny, "Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries." I had been getting lots of links from the Massachusetts Board of Libraries -- little articles from across the Commonwealth about how libraries in various communities are becoming much more important as they offer computers to newly jobless folks looking to create resumes, and free reading to folks looking to save money and free events to families who need cheap entertainment...
More on the Google Book Settlement
Posted on April 06, 2009The New York Times reports on the growing opposition to the Google Book Settlement. Many of the concerns focus around so-called orphan works, out-of-print books that are still in copyright but whose authors are either unknown or cannot be found. Critics believe that the settlement may "grant the company too much power over orphan works ...
Perils of Social Media: Think Before You Post
Posted on April 06, 2009Tip of the hat to my colleague, Prof. Andy Beckerman-Rodau: MySpace Musings Aren't Private, Appeals Court RulesMike McKee04-06-2009Hate rained down on Cynthia Moreno's family after her hometown newspaper in Coalinga, Calif., published her online rant about how much she despised the small Central Valley city in which she had grown up...
How do you use social media?
Posted on April 04, 2009The term "social media" is subject to many different definitions and interpretations. To make it simple: for my purposes, if you're reading this blog, you're a user of social media. If you ever listen to podcasts, you use social media. If you're on Twitter, you're a social media user...
The Globe on the Ropes!
Posted on April 04, 2009Lastly, on this Saturday, April 4, after using the Boston Globe, as so often in the past, to post to this blog, I am still in shock to tell OOTJ readers that the big headlines today are that the New York Times Company, which has ownership of the Globe, threatens to shut the Globe unless its many unions agree to $20 million in concessions...
U. Mass to Digitize W.E.B. Du Bois Archives
Posted on April 04, 2009Peter Schworm writes in the April 4 issue of the Boston Globe that the University of Massachusetts W.E.B. Du Bois Library in Amherst plans to digitize its collection of the black scholar and activist's papers. More than 100,000 documents, from diaries, to photographs, to letters and speeches are being digitized and posted on the Internet for public access...
The Perfect Search
Posted on April 03, 2009The ABA Journal April, 2009 issue has a fascinating article about a group trying to improve search protocols and technology for electronic discovery. As a few high profile examples like the Microsoft e-mails, and Big Tobacco e-mails provided exquisite "gotcha" moments on the stand, lawyers began to see more than ever the value of mining the huge data dumps of electronic discovery...
Iowa Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage!
Posted on April 03, 2009The Associated Press here reports that the Iowas Supreme Court today released an opinion finding that state's DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) unconstitutional. The third state in the nation, and the first in the mid-west, Iowa's legalization of gay marriage is seen as "mainstreaming" the institution...
Top 100 Twitter Feeds for Law Students
Posted on April 03, 2009Well, according to www.onlinebestcolleges.com, anyway. Blush, Jim Milles is listed in his new guise as a law prof and yours truly is listed as a law librarian. Click on the title to this post.
Clickers in the Early Grades
Posted on April 02, 2009Regular readers of OOTJ may recall prior blogs about use of clickers in my Advanced Legal Research class. I used them extensively during the first semester, but found that they took a lot of class time. The students loved the exercises, but I was unsure how much bang I was actually getting for the buck...
Academic Earth
Posted on April 02, 2009Check out this website (linked to from the title of this post). It is making available "full video courses and lectures from the world's leading scholars." A number of disciplines are represented, including law. At the moment, only two courses are linked to from the law site: Introduction to Copyright Law by Professor Keith Winstein from MIT, and Climate Change: Law and Policy by Professor William Collins of the University of California at Berkeley...
Is it AI or is it April Fools?
Posted on April 01, 2009Wow! It's April 1, and the most intriguing post on Slashdot is this, about Google launching an A.I., "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ...
Tax Deniers and Tax Defiers
Posted on March 31, 2009Having just reviewed my 2009 tax returns, I was in an appropriate frame of mind to enjoy this article from the New York Times Magazine (March 29, 2009) about the tax-denial movement. Nobody likes paying taxes, but some people take this emotion to extremes, including one man who went so far as to send a firebomb to the I...
New Frontiers in Government Documents!
Posted on March 31, 2009The Government Services Administration has signed deals for government agencies to use a number of different new social media to get their messages out to the public. Nextgov.com reports here: After nine months of negotiations, the General Services Administration signed agreements with four video-sharing and social networking sites: Flickr, Vimeo, blip...
Encyclopaedia Britannica Reinvents Itself
Posted on March 31, 2009The print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica occupied a hallowed place in my girlhood home. My father, a hematologist, was a contributor (he wrote the article on purpura, an important symptom which can indicate a serious underlying disorder) and he received a certificate attesting to this accomplishment...
Getting Tough for Library Students
Posted on March 28, 2009After I looked over the post yesterday, I realized that it focused entirely on networking for law students. What, you may well ask, about library students? Well, there are lots of networking opportunities there, too. Librarians are nothing if not collegial! Law librarians have national, regional and occasionally, city organizations...
When the going gets tough...
Posted on March 27, 2009Well, I can't claim to know it all, but here are some thoughts that might help find a job in a tough economy...* Network, network, network! Go to events, join organizations, shake hands & hand out business cards. As a student, membership in most professional organizations is much less expensive...
The Current Law Firm Toll & Affects on Students
Posted on March 27, 2009The ABA Journal online has an article here summarizing the toll of layoffs in firms during February and March, 2009. Martha Neil writes It appears that the worst might possibly be over, both for the struggling global economy and the ever-increasing number of major law firms that have been laying off support staff, associates--and even partners--in record numbers...
Ada Lovelace Day revisited
Posted on March 26, 2009Had I but known! On the very day of the Ada Lovelace blogfest, the women who cracked the German Enigma code had their reunion! Here is an article in the Boston Globe from March 25, by Gregory Katz, about the ladies. When you read about the code breakers, they never stress that the group is mostly (all?) female...
Alumnae
Posted on March 25, 2009Yesterday evening, I went to the Suffolk National Women Law Students' Association Inaugural Alumnae Networking Reception. That's a mouthful! But it was a terrific event. Suffolk actually has quite a few well-placed women graduates, many in the area still, as judges, and a surprising number as partners in firms or working in government agencies...
Recession Reference
Posted on March 24, 2009Last week, I got two questions that I only get during recessions. The first: how do I become a process server? What are the laws on service? I felt so bad for the young man standing in front of me. He was a good kid and should have better opportunities than risking his life...
Ada B. Lovelace Day: Women in Technology
Posted on March 24, 2009Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day set up here to encourage bloggers and twitterers to talk about women in technology. Ada B. Lovelace was a friend of Charles Babbage, and actually wrote the first computer program for Babbage's proto-computer. The idea is that women need to see role models for themselves in technology, and this is one way to help that happen...
Gay Marriage Advancing in Vermont & Other New England States
Posted on March 24, 2009The Boston Globefeatures this story today about the Vermont Senate voting 26-4 in favor of the bill allowing gay marriage in the state. The story also looks at bills coming along in New Hampshire, next week and in Maine, next month. "One of the advantages of New England is that we share geography and media markets, so folks in other states have seen marriage in Massachusetts for five years and can see the good," said Lee Swislow, executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, who has called for New England to be a "marriage equality zone...
Gay Marriage Advancing in Vermont
Posted on March 23, 2009Here is a very good report from www.365gay.com, a gay-interest blog, on the legislation in Vermont to change their first-in-the-nation civil union statute to gay marriage. The Boston Globe reported here on May 18, about a special senate committee that held hearings on the matter, drawing more than 500 demonstrators for both sides to the Vermont state house in Montpelier...
Social Security Administration pioneers standardized digital health data exchange
Posted on March 23, 2009Click on the title to this post to link to an article at ComputerWorld.com, "Social Security goes live with first federal e-health information exchange," dated March 20, 2009. The Social Security Administration uses health records to decide disability claims...
Changes Coming in Scholarly Publishing
Posted on March 23, 2009Inside Higher Ed is reporting today the University of Michigan Press decision to move its "traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital." It is no secret that university presses have been struggling for some time. The article points to the University of Missouri Press and the State University of New York Press, which have had to lay off staff recently, and to the Utah State University Press which may lose all university support...
Invisible Children
Posted on March 22, 2009Page four of the Winter 2009 SCCLL Newsletter has my review of a book written by Judge Gilmore and Dr. Beal for the children of incarcerated parents. This population of at-risk children is well known to courthouses. This booklet can help laypeople working with these children...
Phishing Scams
Posted on March 21, 2009I ran across a very helpful article in the December, 2008 issue of Scientific American, link here, on how to avoid phishing scams. By Lorrie Faith Cranor, "How to Foil 'Phishing' Scams; Understanding the human factors that make people vulnerable to criminals can improve both security training and technology...
A New Research Paradigm
Posted on March 20, 2009Sarah Kubik, an associate faculty member in visual communications and design at Indiana University-Purdue University, writes in today's Inside Higher Ed about the use of online research sources. She is of two minds--on the one hand, she loves print for the same reasons most librarians do...
Women and Land
Posted on March 19, 2009I had never made the connection between hunger and African women's ability to own land until I read this column in the Boston Globe. Author Liesl Gerntholtz, who is director of the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, points out that [W]omen and their children are the most likely to lack food and go hungry...
Book Cart Drill Teams!
Posted on March 17, 2009When things get too grim, it's time to have some fun! Here is a link to a collection of YouTube favorite videos of library book cart drill teams. The quality of the videos varies a good bit, but it's fun to poke around. Who knew these were being saved? There are strict rules for competing: Five minutes to decorate the carts -- magnets are apparently the secret; Four minute routines; No more than twelve carts...
Law Firm Meltdown -- Partner Firings
Posted on March 16, 2009Click on the title to this post to read an entry from the ABA Journal online about U.S. and U.K. partner firings on an upswing as the economy heads downward. The article quotes consultants speculating that the cuts are to bring the partner/associate ratio back into line after slashing the population of associates, or that the move shows that firms are estimating that the recession will last into late 2010...
New Texas Law School(s)?
Posted on March 16, 2009University of North Texas seems on the verge of getting its law school authorized, according to rumors. Click on the title to this post to read an article from the Daily Texan (University of Texas (the flagship campus at Austin for those of us without Longhorn connections) newspaper about a bill pushing for the UNT law school...
Garner on finding examples of good legal writing
Posted on March 16, 2009Click on the title to this post to read a terrific entry at the ABA Blog, by Brian Garner. He writes on Finding Models of Good Writing. First, he points out that the most important way to learn how to write well, for any kind of writing, is to see and read good examples...
Judges
Posted on March 14, 2009Click on the link in the title to this post to read a thoroughly charming Globe report by Brian Ballou on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's appearance at New England Boston Law School's centennial Law Day celebration. The justice gave a lovely talk and answered questions from a lottery-chosen group of students...
To Make Magic Happen: Deans' Job Description
Posted on March 12, 2009I just spent a few days hanging out with a surprising number of deans. I was on an ABA inspection team that consisted of 3 deans and a vice-dean, plus the president of a small state college. Then me, and a federal district attorney. It actually was an amazingly nice time...
Use of Signing Statements Curtailed
Posted on March 10, 2009Today's New York Times features an article by Charlie Savage on President Obama's ordering "executive officials to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before relying on [any of President Bush's signing statements] to bypass a statute." Savage is well known for his columns on signing statements, for which he won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize...
Have You Gotten Your Westlaw Pricing Letter?
Posted on March 10, 2009I just opened the letter from Brian Cahill, Director, Marketing Law School Libraries for Thomson Reuters. It announced an increase of a little over $4 per FTE for academic year 2009-2010. For my school, that amounts to an increase of several thousand dollars...
Results of Laptop Bans
Posted on March 06, 2009Reproduced below is an article commenting on the results of banning laptops in several law school classrooms. I can't say I'm surprised to learn that students felt that banning laptops had improved their concentration. Laptops can turn students into scribes more intent on taking down every word than into active learners who mentally process the information...
Law Firm Layoffs dominate the ABA Journal Coverage
Posted on March 06, 2009The headline in the ABA Journal online edition is March Mayhem: Law Firm Layoffs in One Week Total Nearly 1,500. Click on the title to this post to read the full article, which echoes the drumbeat of the online blogs I linked to below. They list the big firms and number the layoffs -- focusing always on the lawyer layoffs, rather than staff, of course...
Lieberman Grills Federal Judiciary About Pacer
Posted on March 06, 2009This article from the National Law Journal discusses Senator Joseph Lieberman's questioning the Rules Committee of the Judicial Conference about why "it continues to charge the public and lawyers for access to electronically filed documents and whether enough is being done to protect the personal data collected by courts...
United Kingdom moves ahead with Open Source
Posted on February 25, 2009BBC News reports that the U.K. government will adopt an open source software action plan. This goes much farther than simply selecting open source software when it is the best buy. Tom Watson, M.P., Minister for Digital Engagement (I will pass on that title) says the plan is to put open source software on an even playing field with Microsoft Windows and other proprietary software...
Presidential Libraries
Posted on February 23, 2009The presidential library has become institutionalized. Every president since Herbert Hoover has one (the controversial George W. Bush Library is in the works). However, according to a trenchant article in today's Boston Globe, presidential libraries are "undemocratic and unnecessary ...
Articles that apply to reference
Posted on February 21, 2009Articles found in my building?s re-cycle bin. They could all help interactions at the reference desk.?Unmasking ?racial microaggressions.? ? Tori DeAngelis. 40(2) Monitor on Psychology 42-46 (Feb. 2009).Racist actions can be sosubtle that the perpetrator may not be aware of his bias, but the minority individual will pick-up the discrimination...
Facebook Retreats from Digital Rights Grab
Posted on February 20, 2009The New York Times reported on Feb. 18 that Facebook is backing off an apparent revision of their terms of service. Click on the title of this post to read the full article. Spokesmen for Facebook, claimed that their revised terms of service, which appeared to claim rights forever in any material posted on the site, even after a user removed it, were merely clumsily drafted efforts to simplify
Wait, don't count on Open Access yet!
Posted on February 20, 2009Peter Suber, at Earlham College, and Open Access News, raises the alarm that there is a bill reintroduced to Congress to stop federal agencies from maintaining an open access policy, forcing them to push their research out through third party vendors...
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship
Posted on February 20, 2009Dick Danner posted this to the Law Lib Directors' list following a discussion on law journals -- whether libraries have been canceling them, should they be kept in some "analog" format in addition to the Hein/Westlaw/Lexis digital formats, etc.. This is an interesting development...
Tobacco Company Loses Jury Trial
Posted on February 19, 2009The Chicago Tribune prints a full Associated Press report here of the jury trial in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Elaine Hess, the widow of long-time chain smoker Stuart Hess, sued Philip Morris after her husband died of lung cancer. The jury deliberated for two days before awarding $3 million compensatory damages and $5 million punitive damages...
Update on Ave Maria
Posted on February 19, 2009The ABA has given embattled Ave Maria School of Law permission to relocate to Florida. See the story below.Embattled Law School Wins Approval for Controversial MoveNew York LawyerFebruary 19, 2009By Karen SloanThe National Law JournalEmbattled Ave Maria School of Law has won approval from the American Bar Association to relocate to Florida...
Students and Grades
Posted on February 19, 2009This article from today's New York Times deals specifically with the issue of undergraduate students and their expectations about grades, and does not mention law schools. However, the grades students got as undergraduates definitely affect their perceptions of the grades they get in law school...
Book Pirates Strike Again!
Posted on February 18, 2009While I am a strong advocate of open access to scholarly literature (see post below), I also believe in respecting copyright. This article from Inside Higher Ed describes the problem of "pre-publication digital editions [from university presses] ... ending up on ...
Another Victory for Open Access
Posted on February 18, 2009Boston University has announced that "research by ... faculty and staff will soon be freely available in an online archive, bypassing the conventional and restrictive route of publishing papers in academic journals ..." What makes this announcement particularly noteworthy is that all of BU's schools and college have endorsed the new policy...
The Death of Penmanship
Posted on February 18, 2009When I read this Newsweek article, entitled "The Curse of Cursive," it triggered a lot of very strong reactions in me. In the article, the author, Jessica Bennett, complains that there is no purpose served anymore by requiring children to learn how to write in script...
Courts in crisis
Posted on February 17, 2009Click on the title to this post to read a Boston Globe article detailing a speech by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to the ABA meeting in Boston. "I shall be blunt: Our state courts are in crisis," Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret H...
Khmer Rouge Trial Begins
Posted on February 17, 2009On Tuesday, the first trial of a high-ranking member of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge began in Phnom Penh. This article from today's New York Times discusses the first defendant, Kaing Guek Eav, who ran the Tuol Sleng prison and torture house. There are four additional Khmer Rouge officials who are set to stand trial, but their trials may not begin until next year...
Rearranging the Deck Chairs
Posted on February 17, 2009From the always provocative Steven J. Bell comes this article on library portals. Bell is a well-known commentator about libraries and librarianship, and blogs at The Kept-Up Academic Librarian. Bell argues that library portals are moribund because neither faculty nor students use them to access electronic content; rather, they find their own ways to get to the content they use often.
In Praise of School Librarians
Posted on February 16, 2009All of us who work with law students know how difficult it is to wean them away from quick-and-dirty Google searches and teach them to use more focused research methods and resources. At the beginning of this semester, I did a diagnostic quiz (using clicker technology) in my Advanced Legal Research class to try to get a sense of what level the class was at...
Black History Month in the Court Law Library
Posted on February 15, 2009The Brooklyn Supreme Court Law Library is participating in the Court's Black History Month celebrations by demonstrating the value of the Library's collection. We assembled a book truck with historical print materials and print outs from HeinOnline's historical slavery treatises...
Valentine's Day in Brooklyn
Posted on February 15, 2009Court House libraries deal with a lot of paternity cases, especially in counties where the DAs aggressively collect child support. All the sad stories came back to me yesterday when I was walking down Flatbush and saw a van with this advertisement painted on its rear window: "Does he really have his father's eyes? Call 4DNA...
Information Wants to be Free
Posted on February 13, 2009One of my heroes is Carl Malamud, the founder of Public.Resource.org, whose website makes available government information at no cost. I have to say I find the website somewhat hard to use (it's not particularly user friendly), but I applaud the intent behind it--the dissemination of legal information whose creation was funded by taxpayer dollars...
CILP Rolls back prices to 2005
Posted on February 13, 2009This just in: Penny Hazelton, for the Current Index to Legal Periodicals says, I know we are all worried about how to maintain the quality of our collections and services in light of our uncertain economy.We have decided to roll back our price for electronic CILP to 2005 levels or $696 for the coming year...
Microsoft sets a bounty on the guys that created the Conficker Worm
Posted on February 13, 2009The Conficker worm, also known at the Downadup, Downup, or Kido virus which targets Windows computers, has become such a significant threat that Microsoft has set a bounty on whomever created the virus. Click on the title to this post to read a full report at Network World (you may have to click past an ad to get to the article)...
Geez. Boycott Nordstroms
Posted on February 10, 2009If this story from Cato Institute, related at Information Week's Global CIO's Weblog is true, people should simply make a point of boycotting Nordstrom and tell them why:Witness the story of Beckons, an organic yoga and lifestyle clothing business founded in 2006 by two women in Colorado...
Invisible
Posted on February 09, 2009A few days ago, I had an interesting experience. I carried a cane to work with me. There has been a good deal of ice and snow and slush. I carried the cane more as a preventive measure ? to prevent a fall, than because I actually have a bad leg right now...
Follow animal rights law suit on Twitter
Posted on February 05, 2009You can follow news of an animal rights law suit, on behalf of elephants in Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circuses, on Twitter, by following BornFreeUSA. You can link by clicking on the title to this post. If you are already registered in Twitter, log in, and then click on the link or search for BornFreeUSA and choose to follow...
State Tax vs. Commerce Clause in Massachusetts
Posted on February 03, 2009The Boston Globe reports this morning that a case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will test whether the state can pursue sales tax on large appliance and tires sold to Massachusetts residence who cross the border into nearby states like New Hampshire to avoid state sales tax...
Deconstructing the Rankings
Posted on February 03, 2009"Using Foucault to Deconstruct Rankings," an article published today in Inside Higher Ed, highlights a new study published in the American Sociological Review. The article, entitled "The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Couplings and Organizational Change," "demonstrates the value of [philosopher Michel] Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings...
Print Law Reviews
Posted on February 02, 2009Many law libraries are having to confront serious budget issues as a result of the economic recession. I don't know any library that is totally immune from financial pressures. Some libraries have dropped subscriptions to print law reviews, knowing that they are made available fairly quickly through LexisNexis and Westlaw, and are eventually available through HeinOnline as well...
Sign of the Times?
Posted on January 30, 2009Evan R. Chesler, presiding partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, believes that "This is the time to get rid of the billable hour," according to an article in today's New York Times. Because of the economic downturn, some budget-conscious clients have persuaded firms to move away from the iconic billable hour in favor of "flat fees for handling transactions and success fees for positive outcomes,
Verification of Digital Records
Posted on January 28, 2009One of the most vexing problems with digital information is how to verify its authenticity. As John Markoff points out in his article in yesterday's New York Times, it is "possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear...
Google as Monopoly
Posted on January 25, 2009Robert Darnton, who has been director of libraries at Harvard since July 2007, has written a provocative article in the February 12 issue of The New York Review of Books. Darnton has a compelling insight about the recent settlement of the Google Book Search lawsuit...
Interesting post on legal billing in Germany
Posted on January 21, 2009Houston law librarian Saskia has a blog, Saskia's Spin. On January 18, she begins a two-part series (not yet completed) in which she explains how German lawyers bill clients. Saskia is a German lawyer, as well as an American law librarian, and brings her fascinating experience to bear as she compares the billing practices of the two countries legal professions...
Vice-President Records may go missing
Posted on January 20, 2009Apparently Vice-President Cheney is moving boxes of records into his house, and hurt his back. Look for him today in a wheel chair at the inauguration. The Boston Globe reports A federal judge ruled yesterday that Vice President Dick Cheney has broad discretion in determining what records created during his eight-year tenure must be preserved...
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2009
Posted on January 19, 2009What an interesting year to reflect on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! In this year, the people of the United Stated elected the first black President. Many people are considering that Barack Obama is the fulfillment of the dream that King announced in his landmark speech...
Twitter & Legal Writing
Posted on January 19, 2009Interesting blog by pseudonymous law student Rex Gradeless, Social Media Law Student, offers an interesting post on Usint Twitter to become a better legal writer. You can reach that post by clicking on the title to this post. Basically, Rex points out that the 140-character limit of Twitter forces the writer to be succinct and clear, which are strong benefits in legal writing...
Judge allows webcam of high profile music case
Posted on January 15, 2009Click on the title of this post to read an article in Boston Globe about Judge Nancy Gertner allowing a webcam in the courtroom for the high profile case of Boston University graduate student Joel Tennenbaum for illegally downloading music. Tennenbaum's attorney, Prof...
Follow-up on New Research Course
Posted on January 14, 2009Back on December 10, I blogged about a new course that Pace Law Library was offering during the intersession between semesters. The two-credit course was entitled Advanced Research Skills for Health, Disability, and Elder Law, and was taught by Margaret Moreland, one of our reference librarians...
How mad am I?
Posted on January 13, 2009What do we owe our profession? What do we owe those who follow after us? I happen to think we owe our profession a great deal. We owe those who follow after us a very great deal. We owe them at least as good a situation as we found, and preferrably, a better situation...
Interview with Professor Lessig
Posted on January 11, 2009Click here for an interview with Professor Lawrence Lessig, currently a professor at Stanford Law School, where he has earned a reputation as a leading expert on intellectual property. Professor Lessig is moving to Harvard Law School where he will lead the University's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics...
Update on Clickers in the Classroom
Posted on January 10, 2009Reading the story reproduced below from the Chronicle of Higher Education reminded me that I was going to report on my experience with using clicker technology in my Advanced Legal Research class during the fall 2008 semester. According to the author of the article, Ruth Hammond, "College students who use wireless handheld devices called 'clickers' to register answer to instructors' questions
Tweeting versus Blogging
Posted on January 09, 2009I've been pretty absent from OOTJ for a while. Some of that has been illness or family illness. And I am so grateful to Marie and other co-bloggers for soldiering on while I have just gone missing. But some of my recent absence has also been due to a time of experimenting with Twitter and Facebook and the new social media explosion that has been going on...
NY Times Meltdown at AALS
Posted on January 08, 2009Wow! Anybody who has read the obituaries for print newspapers would have been as taken aback as I was to watch the hysteria at AALS this week. Law professors from across the country are having meltdowns when they cannot get their print New York Times here in San Diego! I happened to go down to the Marriott gift shop this morning and blundered into the anxious crowd waiting for the shop to open.
New blog on workplace issues
Posted on January 08, 2009My Suffolk colleague, Prof. David Yamada has started up a fascinating blog on workplace issues. His core interest area is abusive and bullying behavior, but the blog extends beyond that. It is an excellent resource, and should be worth bookmarking for librarians, (quite aside from your own interests, which I hope are not personally involved!), since he includes links to helpful resources, legal
Discouraging News About Legal Writing
Posted on January 07, 2009The 2008 results of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) were released today, according to an article in today's Inside Higher Ed. According to the article, "Law schools have to be responsive to the ever-changing legal world to keep their curriculums relevant and meaningful, but the latest findings of a national survey suggest that they should also be focusing more on the basics...
Bargain Hunting on the Internet
Posted on December 30, 2008My husband pointed out to me this piece from Sunday's New York Times by David Streitfeld about the demise of traditional bookstores--new and secondhand--in the Internet age. Because books can be purchased extremely cheaply (in some cases) from online sellers, most of whom are individuals who are seeking to unload books they no longer want or need, there is less demand for bricks-and-mortar
E-Books Taking Off?
Posted on December 24, 2008According to an article in today's New York Times, the answer is "yes." The Kindle device, which is sold by Amazon, is out of stock (not good holiday planning) and not expected to be available again until February. Amazon's failure to predict the demand for its e-book reader has created an opening for Sony, which is marketing a competitor, the Reader...
Merry Christmas
Posted on December 21, 2008Long time OOTJ readers might recognize the drawing from a rant I posted in December, 2005, at the height of the "War on Christmas." As right-wing Christian pundits claimed that folks who asked for multi-cultural sensitivity were marginalizing Christians, I thought they missed the real war on Christmas -- the long-term siege by Mammon...
PS, Accel is Bailing Facebook?!
Posted on December 17, 2008Tip of the OOTJ hat to Jo Giammattei for sending me to read the post at Fortune on CNN money online. Apparently Facebook's money squeeze is being relieved a bit by venture capitalist firm Accel Partners. Accel Partners helped Facebook start up and apparently is still willing to kick in a bit more...
CALI does the right thing
Posted on December 17, 2008Kudos to CALI for stepping up and arranging for recycling of their leftover disks. For some years now, they have been shipping hundreds of CDs to all the schools in spite of the fact that most of the students I know strongly prefer to access CALI on the Web...
Sad Situation at the State Department
Posted on December 15, 2008I was dismayed but not surprised to read this article from today's Inside Higher Ed. The article discussed the controversy surrounding the State Department's publication of the Foreign Relations of the United States, an indispensable series for those researching United States customary law...
Not too late for Finals & Just in time for the Bar!
Posted on December 14, 2008It's LOLCats for the Bar Exam on Facebook! Yes! Longtime fans of LOLcats may not know that there is a Facebook group dedicated to those poor schmoes studying for the bar. To solace them, there are LOLcats ready to say, o hai, and bring their special brand of humor...
New Course
Posted on December 10, 2008We are really excited at the Pace Law Library because this morning the faculty voted to approve a new course to be offered by one of the reference librarians during the upcoming intersession. This course is entitled "Advanced Research Skills: Health, Disability, and Elder Law," and will be taught by Margaret Moreland...
New Music Industry Muscle Ploy
Posted on December 09, 2008Click on the title to this post to read a story from Techdirt about Warner Music's plan to charge universities (and I suppose, everybody) a blanket license fee to cover file sharing. It's another form of extortion if you want to think of it that way: you pay the "blanket license fee" and we won't sue you...
Librarians & new faculty services
Posted on December 08, 2008AALL has been hosting discussions online about new faculty services. It has not really gone very far yet, but it should be interesting to watch. In the meantime, I was struck by an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, Nov...
Friday Fun
Posted on December 05, 2008Law students are now in the depths of final exams at U.S. law schools. It's not a fun time for them. Just think, though. You could be a medical student, and be required to dismember a corpse as part of your schooling! Cheer up! Holidays are coming soon, and you'll have a break...
Twitter as a Power Marketing Tool
Posted on December 05, 2008Click on the title to this post to visit a blog called "How to Change the World" for a post about using Twitter as a major marketing tool. The blogger is Guy Kawasaki and came to my attention as one of the people at the Social Media Museum. SoMeMe is a hoot, and I was alerted to the blog post by a post on Twitter, so it all goes in a circle, round and round...
The Law in the Books Isn't Always the Law
Posted on December 02, 2008From PrawfsBlawg, a teachable moment about the limitations of traditional legal research, whether print or online: The Silent Constitutional Crisis? I recently wrapped up my Con Law II (civil liberties) course here at Georgia. We ended the semester by spending a couple of days discussing the religion in schools cases including Lee v...
Technology in Government -- the Dream
Posted on December 01, 2008Quantum of Solace is great fun. The new Bond is edgier, haunted -- and has fewer gadgets! His cell phone tethers him to M! He still drives a fast car, but no nifty gadgets to avoid fights. He gets pummeled. M has the gadgets! She has a table top computer that has a beautiful display...
Is Google Evil?
Posted on November 07, 2008The September 2008 ABA Journal Business of Law section has an interesting article on the perils of internet marketing and search engines. Not only does the a searcher have to worry about domain parking and cyberscams, it turns out that Google?s and Yahoo?s search algorithms add unspecified terms to queries...
Professors' Influence Overstated
Posted on November 04, 2008According to an article in today's New York Times, professors have very little influence over their students' political beliefs. In fact, according to Jeremy D. Mayer, one of the authors of the new book, Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities, "'it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15 ...
Boston Tea Party Deja Vu!
Posted on October 08, 2008Up here, in the land of the Boston Tea Party, the anti-tax activists are pushing a measure that would remove income tax in our state. Talk about an item that would impact libraries! Mass Libraries Association is pushing hard against it (here). Public libraries, school libraries and libraries in state colleges and universities would all be impacted in a major way...
Magic and Science
Posted on August 04, 2008Click on the title to this post to read a fascinating article from the Boston Globe's Ideas section Sunday, August 3, 2008. Title: "How magicians control your mind: Magic isn't just a bag of tricks - it's a finely-tuned technology for shaping what we see...
Whoa, St. Louis!
Posted on July 25, 2008I have been watching in shock and dismay as Belgian behemoth InBev gobbled up Anheuser-Busch in a pretty hostile-sounding take-over. (the first link is to a St. Louis Business Journal article which starts "Anxiety. Excitement. Disgust." The second link is to the WSJ Deal Journal article which almost sounds admiring when it describes the "...
Digital Preservation
Posted on July 23, 2008There is a good summary of the issues relating to the preservation of digital information in today's Inside Higher Education. As the article points out, many individuals and institutions are racing against the clock to preserve digital data and to tackle a whole host of problems that so far have no satisfactory solution...
National Do Not Call Registry Update
Posted on May 29, 2008Dear OOTJ folks, I received an e-mail from an old friend alerting a long list of people that cell phones were about to be assaulted with telemarketer calls, but that you could register with the Do Not Call Registry. The e-mail ended with a recommendation that you send it along to all the people you know, which does make me wonder when I see such things...
Shame on the National Archives!
Posted on April 11, 2008From govwatch comes this article about the National Archives and Records Administration's decision not to record snapshots of Executive Branch websites at the end of each presidential administration. Much as I would like to forget that the current administration ever existed, I have to question NARA's priorities...
Back from the Moot
Posted on March 24, 2008I just returned from a week spent in Vienna, Austria at the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot. This is the premier international moot in this field, and it was thrilling to be a part of it. The Vis Moot truly is an international event...
Clarence Thomas Interview
Posted on March 24, 2008There is a very flattering article about Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in the online Wall Street Journal. The article is based on an interview with Justice Thomas, who repeats many of the themes that he developed more fully in his autobiography, My Grandfather's Son...
Mukasey and BC Law School
Posted on March 05, 2008The Boston Globe is reporting that Boston College Law School has decided not to award the Founder's Medal, its highest honor, to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey when he speaks at its May commencement ceremony. The decision was announced on Tuesday by Dean John Garvey at a meeting with graduating students...
Commercial Law on the Internet ? Is Integrity Sustainable in Cyberspace?
Posted on February 24, 2008Head to Head Comparison: Westlaw's WebPlus with LII's Legal Research Engine
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