Legal Research

Update on Murdoch's Pay Wall

Posted on July 23, 2010
The Times of London went behind a paywall on June 15. In addition, the owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, blocked search engines from including Times stories in their search results. The authors must love this! This was covered at the Law Librarian Blog by Mark Giangrande, who also reported on the "steep decline in online viewers" since the changeover to the paywall...

Argentina Legalizes Same Sex Marriage

Posted on July 16, 2010
The Washington Post has a nice in-depth article and a link to video about Argentina's Senate voting Thursday morning to legalize same-sex marriage. The House had already passed the same bill, so this vote sent the bill to the President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who strongly supports it...

My Genes Made Me Do It

Posted on July 08, 2010
My daughter is starting graduate school in neuroscience this fall. She has always recoiled from the idea of attending law school, but seems fascinated by the intersection of neuroscience and the law. This often plays out in the area of legal responsibility for criminal behavior "as neuroscience makes inroads into the courtroom, and presents guilt and innocence--not in terms of black and white--but in shades of gray...

Federal District Court Judge Rules Federal DOMA Unconstitutional

Posted on July 08, 2010
The New York Times has an Associated Press story this afternoon, datelined 5 PM, that the federal district judge in Boston ruled the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional for infringing the right of Massachusetts to define who may marry...

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Progress Report on New UMass Law School

Posted on July 06, 2010
Things seem to be going well for the new public law school in Massachusetts, according to an article in the Boston Globe. The University of Massachusetts School of Law "formally assumed its new identity July 1." The new school came about when the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth took over the Southern New England School of Law, a very controversial move...

Now I Understand

Posted on July 06, 2010
In my Advanced Legal Research course, I have a reputation for being a hard grader (I prefer to think of myself as being fair rather than hard) and for assigning a lot of work. My students are asked to prepare a research guide on a discrete area of the law, and it does take a good bit of time to do this assignment well...

Criminal Background Checks for Students?

Posted on July 05, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article datelined June 30, 2010, reports on program at the annual conference of the National Association of College and University Attorneys. Speakers discussed the advisability of asking for criminal background checks on students, usually as part of the admissions process...

Declaration of Independence - Technology brings new insights

Posted on July 03, 2010
The Library of Congress released news yesterday of a discovery that new technology made possible on a draft of the Declaration of Independence. Here is a link to the Associated Press article as it appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. Using a high resolution digital camera that can separate layers of images, a researcher at the archives discovered an erasure in the document...

Clinic Triumphs

Posted on June 23, 2010
Law school clinics have come under criticism lately, so it is heartening to read about a clinic that has helped to do justice in a case that dated back to the civil rights era. An article in today's Boston Globe highlights the work of Northeastern University Law School's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project...

Law Schools' Efforts to Aid Students

Posted on June 22, 2010
The New York Times covered various law schools' efforts to aid their students in these difficult times in this article by Catherine Rampell dated June 21, 2010. It begins with the various schools that have inflated students' grades: Loyola Los Angeles, NYU, Georgetown, Golden Gate and Tulane, according to the article...

Change of Pace II

Posted on June 21, 2010
Well, it's over - yes, classes have ended at WCL's Turkish Summer Program. What a great experience. If you have summer programs and are asked to participate - SAY YES!It's been fun, challenging, different, mind-boggling, and the list of adjectives goes on...

Blind Students Get Free Access to Cambridge Univ. Press Books

Posted on June 14, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Cambridge University Press has reached a new agreement with Bookshare, an not for profit organization that converts books and journals into formats that can be read by blind people. The agreement adds about 10,000 titles from the Cambridge U...

ABA Journal Roundtable: Lowering The Stakes - How Law Schools Can Help Next Gen Lawyers Take the Gamble Out of Hefty Tuition

Posted on June 12, 2010
The ABA Journal Online has a terrific Podcast here , that also includes a handy transcript. They had a roundtable discussion with two law school deans and a law student, Kyle McEntee, who also co-founded Law School Transparency, a non-profit dedicated to improving access to law school employment information...

Librarians do Ga-Ga

Posted on June 01, 2010
The librarians at the I-School at University of Washington, made an AWESOME video, and posted it to YouTube, right here, based on a Lady Gaga video (apparently). It's a charmer and also has a great message. They are terrific! Tip of the OOTJ hat to Grace Mills, who sent the link to me (recovering at home from knee replacement surgery)...

Change of Pace

Posted on May 29, 2010
"Change of Pace" will be a few weeks of posts from Guest Blogger, Billie Jo Kaufman, Washington College of Law, at American University.Billie Jo headed out of DC, Wednesday with her first travel stop in Frankfurt, Germany. The importance of being a part of the alumni and development operations is becoming more of a part of our everyday life...

New Directions at Harvard

Posted on May 24, 2010
It's been a tough year for library budgets. I don't know of any library whose acquisitions budget has kept pace with the inflation in the cost of materials, both print and digital. The budgetary situation has led to my announcing a new policy--we add no new Thomson Reuters titles in print because of what I consider to be the outrageous costs of supplementation, barring exceptional circumstances...

Building a Career, Not Finding a Job

Posted on May 24, 2010
A really interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kathryn Masterson, dated May 16, 2010: = Finished College. Now What?Wake Forest aids the aimless graduate with a road map for meaningful workWhat do you plan to do after graduation?For thousands of college students accepting diplomas this spring, it's a question loaded with expectations and pressure to make good use of a costly degree...

Tell Interior & MMS what you think about the oil spill

Posted on May 18, 2010
The terrible oil spill off Louisiana has shone a spotlight on some pretty unsavory regulatory practices at Minerals Management Services (MMS), a branch of the Department of the Interior that offers drilling permitting (who knew?). The New York Times has a strong article about just how lax the MMS had been: The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species ? and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf...

Barney Frank on Transgender Rights

Posted on May 14, 2010
Congressman Barney Frank, long a courageous advocate for gay and lesbian rights after coming out himself, is taking a firm stand on his current bill in the House. Despite grumblings and rumblings from moderate and right wing allies and opponents, Frank is determined to keep in the bill on employment discrimination a section protecting transpeople...

Prof. Pennywise tells how to get out debt

Posted on May 13, 2010
At Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Pennywise offers a terrific column, "In Debt to Your Degree". It is very possible that you may not be able to access the column linked here without a Chronicle password. So, I am going to snip some of her best bits of advice here...

Defense of Marriage Act Challenge Argued May 6

Posted on May 08, 2010
GLAD is representing plaintiffs challenging the DOMA (federal Defense of Marriage Act) in the federal district court in Boston, the case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management. See here for a press conference (kind of hard to hear -- there is a lot of traffic and wind noise)...

Google to Sell Digital Books

Posted on May 06, 2010
Google has announced that it will start selling digital copies of books this summer, according to an article in the Telegraph. What makes this news significant is that these digital editions will not be tied to individual devices; rather, they will be available wherever and however a user accesses his Google account...

Book Recommended

Posted on May 06, 2010
One of my faculty colleagues recently presented me with a personally-inscribed copy of a new book written by a friend of his, who happens to live in the same county where I live. The book (the publisher's blurb is linked to from the title of this post) is entitled This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, and the author is Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book explored the writing of obituaries...

The Future of Libraries

Posted on May 04, 2010
This trenchant article, "Toward a New Alexandria," published in The New Republic is a call to arms. The author, Lisbet Rausing, a historian of science, envisions a [N]ew Library of Alexandria ... an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West--our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data--as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world's civilizations, and many of the world's most significant archives and specialist collections...

Missouri moves to universal bar exam

Posted on May 02, 2010
Lex Universal alerts us that Missouri has decided to begin using a universal bar exam. St. Louis Today has a bit more detail. The first uniform test will be administered in February. Though Missouri is the only state so far to accept the uniform test, several other states are considering adopting it: LexUniversal lists Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Washington, D...

Book Review Libel?

Posted on April 29, 2010
As somebody who writes the occasional book review, my attention was caught be the article in the current Chronicle of Higher Education, "Libel Case, Prompted by Academic Book Review, Has Scholars Worried."(subscription required). Me too, maybe. Author of the book reviewed, Karin N...

Law Firm Mandates Associate Westlaw Training to Improve Efficiency

Posted on April 28, 2010
Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog writes a great post about one national law firm that finally got tired of inefficient Westlaw searching eating away at their bottom line. They mandated "best practices" in Westlaw searching and a training lunch for all litigation associates, and any other associates who might use Westlaw...

Two Facebook Stories

Posted on April 28, 2010
The Boston Globe today carried two stories about Facebook. One was about a host of stolen and fake Facebook accounts being sold on the blackmarket. Apparently accounts are stolen through phishing schemes that lure unsuspecting Facebook users into revealing their passwords, or else, malware loaded onto users' machines that track keystrokes reveals their passwords...

Multitasking

Posted on April 21, 2010
There has been a lot of discussion at OOTJ and elsewhere about multitasking. Like many parents, I questioned my teenagers' ability to do homework while checking email, instant messaging, and watching television. I simply didn't understand how all tasks could be performed equally well...

Magna Carta Held Over in New York

Posted on April 21, 2010
The volcanic eruptions in Iceland may have paralyzed air traffic to and from Europe and cost the world economy billions of dollars, but there has been at least one good result, at least for visitors to New York--a precious copy of Magna Carta will be on display at the Morgan Library through the end of May rather than going back to its home at Oxford's Bodleian Library...

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