Legal Research

Hints on Job Interviews

Posted on February 08, 2015
(with thanks to Nancy Scott Hanway, in an article ?A Foot in the Door at a Small Liberal-Arts College? at p. A23, in the Dec. 19 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I found many of her suggestions, tailored to applicants for faculty positions, to be applicable to general interviewees, and am picking up from her comments here...

Who put the damn wind up the doctors' offices?!

Posted on December 30, 2014
Have your doctors' offices gotten on the bandwagon yet? There is this new trend to have Patient Gateways. The gateway keeps increasing its security. Now, it's like trying to get into Fort Knox. 2-factor security, where I have to include not just a password, but also a security question...

Google Master Class MOOC

Posted on December 09, 2014
A while ago, Marie posted here about teaching her students better Google searching skills. I was looking at what Google makes available and was thrilled to locate the excellent MOOC they developed on Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching. Visit that one link to enter, and choose either course...

Exam Time Stress

Posted on December 09, 2014
Ah, to be a law student in December! (or April)Not.This is a terrible time of year for our students, and they need our compassion and kindness. Exam time is stressful for all kinds of students, but law students experience a special kind of stress. Most law school courses, even today, put all or nearly all of the course final grade into one final exam! This is pedagogical madness, of course...

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Obama and Net Neutrality, not necessarily a total win

Posted on November 16, 2014
I was so happy to see the headline about President Obama speaking out strongly in favor of Net Neutrality! It just made me glad.But a few days' digestion and articles are trickling out that the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had been working hard when I wasn't looking to develop a "hybrid proposal...

Isaac Asimov on Creativity

Posted on October 29, 2014
A new essay published many years after being written by Isaac Asimov, in this month's MIT Technology Review. Asimov had been invited to participate as part of a government funded effort to imagine the most creative approaches possible for a ballistic missile system (it was 1959)...

FDA pressuring ICANN over Internet Drug Websites

Posted on October 28, 2014
Oh, my! I don't know what to say. Wall Street Journal reports in depth about the U. S. Food and Drug Administration snarling and grumping (and more foreign regulatory snapping, too), about ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) refusing to clamp down harder on websites that are selling prescription drugs without prescriptions, or knock-off prescription drugs, or prescription drugs that are not pure...

EQUALITY - aka RESPECT

Posted on October 16, 2014
Massachusetts is struggling with a problem that keeps popping up in the news. And people keep being stunned and amazed.Women in this state make 70 cents for every dollar that men make.And that is in this bastion of education, liberalism, and progressivism...

Can you be a librarian without a library?

Posted on October 14, 2014
So, I have been teaching and nothing else for a while, and working on identity issues.Am I still a librarian?Hell, yeah.Always and forever, baby. I can't stop. I can't drop it.My students are my patrons now, I guess.Don't get me wrong. I am enjoying very much being able to focus on my teaching...

FCC says Conference Centers & Hotels May Not Block Visitors' Wi-Fi Hotspots

Posted on October 09, 2014
The FCC has reached an agreement with Marriott to pay a $60,000 penalty to resolve their investigation into a complaint that employees of a Marriott-managed conference center were sending de-authentication packets to prevent exhibitors and attendees from using their personal Wi-Fi hotspots...

Networking Flops and How to Fix Them

Posted on October 09, 2014
One of my fabulous Suffolk colleagues passed along the link to this helpful Mashable post, The 5 Worst Networking Flops and How to Recover from Them. We tell our students constantly that networking is the way to find jobs now... but we don't tell them enough about HOW to network, or how to avoid networking mistakes...

Free booklet from Stephen Pinker & Chronicle on Academic Writing

Posted on October 09, 2014
The Chronicle of Higher Education had a very popular article in their Review of Sept. 26, 2014 from Stephen Pinker, "Why Academics Stink at Writing." Following on this, they put together a free pamphlet on improving academic writing, Why Academics Stink at Writing -- and How to Fix it," that can be downloaded here...

New Ways to Think about Library Statistics

Posted on October 07, 2014
The Chronicle of Higher Education blog has a really interesting post proposing that libraries begin to make their user data (in anonymized form) available to researchers. In a post titled, "A Good, Dumb Way to Learn from Libraries" (really?! geez!), David Weinberger proposes that libraries 1...

I'll Just Google It

Posted on September 29, 2014
Everybody knows how to use Google to find information--right?  Wrong, according to Motoko Rich's article, "Academic Skills on Web Are Tied to Income Level," New York Times, Sept. 24, 2014, at A23.  A new study done by Donald J. Leu that appears in the current issue of Reading Research Quarterly (subscription required) showed "a general lack of online literacy among all students...

New ABA Law School Accreditation Standards

Posted on September 28, 2014
The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has released their most recent modifications to the standards for accrediting law schools. Here is a link to their handy Explanations PDF. I found it easier to read and more useful for understanding the changes than their Overview document...

Blog Action Day Coming Right up

Posted on September 21, 2014
Woo Hoo! Blog Action Day is coming up in October. This year the theme is inequality.I guess everybody has something to say about that.I'll be brooding upon the theme but e-mail me if you have brilliant insights to contribute:emckenzi54@gmail.com

Two interesting articles on reading

Posted on September 17, 2014
Two interesting articles on reading showed up yesterday. I couldn't resist. The New York Times ran an article by Alexandra Alter, "Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly." Readers (or writers) of poetry know that poems have a structure that matters...

Why do the vendors roll out new versions in September??!!

Posted on September 07, 2014
This year, Lexis has chosen to roll out a new version of Lexis Advance on September 8! Why thank you guys!Isn't that just the most thoughtful thing?Librarians and teachers around the world are just loving having a brand new version that they need to scramble and get comfortable with just as their students are arriving...

Regulatory Activism

Posted on September 05, 2014
The public is commenting on proposed federal rules in record numbers, according to a story entitled "Federal Agencies Are Flooded by Comments on New Rules," published in the Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2014.  For instance, the State Department has received over 2...

Kindle and Reading

Posted on August 27, 2014
I've got a Kindle, but use it mostly when I'm travelling so that I can have access to reading material without having to haul around lots of books in my suitcase.  I hate running out of books. During more than one foreign vacation, I have been forced to track down bookstores that stock English-language titles and then pay exorbitant prices for them...

Amazon versus Hatchette, round 3 or 4

Posted on August 11, 2014
Wow. The gloves are off! It was reported a while ago that the trade press Hachette was negotiating with Amazon on pricing. This happens each year as contracts come up for renewal. But this year is being different. According to some observers, Amazon is pressing harder for more profitability (due to shareholder pressures?)...

Purge? WTF?! Yet another form of cyberbullying

Posted on July 28, 2014
Wow! Social media has spawned a new form of cyberbullying, and surprise, surprise, it tends to focus on females. Purge happened worldwide on Facebook between July 17 and 19, with supposedly anonymous posts saying whatever folks liked about anybody they wanted, tagging and posting images...

Facebook, Secret Experiments and the Belmont Report

Posted on July 03, 2014
Facebook is eating some crow. Again.Most OOTJ readers will have read about Facebook's data scientist, Adam D.I. Kramer and two academic partner running an experiment using Facebook users. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS), "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks...

Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathi Trust

Posted on June 14, 2014
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a ruling in the case of Authors Guild v. Hathi Trust. See Justia for full text of ALL pleadings including the decision. See Assn. of Research Libraries' posting here for some partisan explanation and hyperlinks to amicus briefs...

Heartbleed 2 only affects Android users - but it's a wake-up call

Posted on June 07, 2014
I don't know if OOTJ readers saw the news about the new problems spotted in OpenSSL code. Dubbed at first, Heartbleed 2, it has later been called the Handshake Bug, because it affects how your computer performs the "handshake" protocol when it contacts a server...

The Sorry State of Academic Publishing

Posted on April 01, 2011
The article, "Libraries, Publishers, and a Plea for Shotgun Weddings," by Bryn Geffert, the librarian at Amherst College, really struck a chord with me. Geffert decries the sorry state of academic publishing which is exemplified by a book he was recently asked to review...

Printing from WestlawNext Enabled

Posted on April 01, 2011
This is not an April Fool's Day joke--I tried to print this morning from WestlawNext to our standalone printers, and it worked. Hallelujah! I can't wait to let our students know. I had heard through the grapevine that April 1 was to be the big day, but didn't believe it until I tried it myself...

New App for Shelfreading

Posted on March 31, 2011
Shelfreading is like dusting--no one wants to do it, but it has to be done. Now, however, a new Android app may make shelfreading a breeze. The brainchild of the Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group, the app "'reads' a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced...

The Criminal Justice System Gone Awry

Posted on March 30, 2011
Professor Brandon L. Garrett's sobering article, "Getting guilty right," published in the Boston Globe on March 28, presents the results of his study of 250 erroneous convictions using court records and archives housed at the Innocence Project. Garrett's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, will be published in April, and expands on the conclusions he reaches in his Globe article...

Bentham Project Revisited

Posted on March 29, 2011
In a blog post last December, I discussed the University College London's Transcribe Bentham Project, an experiment in crowdsourcing whose goal was transcription of the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. All the work was going to be done by volunteers, with their submissions being vetted by paid research associates...

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