Legal Research

The End of Free Content?

Posted on January 08, 2010
This time of year, predictions abound, but most of them turn out to be wide of the mark. However, this prediction, from Newsweek's Techtonic Shifts Blog, has the ring of truth about it. In his post, Barrett Sheridan states that "Many of the startups and media sites that define the e-commerce ecosystem are, at long last, making serious plans to make serious money...

New Survey on Law Student Engagement

Posted on January 07, 2010
The 2009 Law School Survey of Student Engagement was just published. The report, which has been issued annually for the last five years, is based on input from over 26,000 law students at 82 different law schools. Not surprisingly, the economy figures prominently in the survey...

New Electronic Reader from Kurzweil - Blio

Posted on January 05, 2010
Wired.com reported on Dec. 28 that Ray Kurzweil has reinvented the electronic book as a platform that sits on any type of device, from a PC to an I-pod to a cell phone or PDA or one of the newly developed tablet devices. SingularityHub has another story on the same product with some more detail...

Death Penalty Undermined

Posted on January 04, 2010
The New York Times is reporting "a tectonic shift in legal theory"--the American Law Institute's announcement that it is abandoning the framework it created in 1962 in an "effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary." Section 210.6 of the Model Penal Code, which created the "intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system, has been withdrawn by the ALI "in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment...

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Limited Representation--An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Posted on January 03, 2010
This New York Times editorial, written by New Hampshire Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr. and California Chief Justice Ronald M. George, makes a cogent argument for closing the "justice gap" by unbundling legal services. Observing that many litigants can no longer afford legal representation, the two justices voice their support for so-called limited scope representation which allows attorneys to "take only part of a case, a cost-saving practice ...

The Old Brain

Posted on January 03, 2010
There has been a lot of information published about how students in their teens and twenties learn as well as strategies that instructors can adopt to increase their pedagogical effectiveness. Certainly this is important information--I know how much I have benefited as a teacher from these insights...

CyberStalking program at AALS

Posted on December 30, 2009
I was excited to get an announcement from the Section on Women in Legal Education announcing a couple of programs they are sponsoring at AALS. The one that really got me going is the program on CyberStalking, which OOTJ readers may have seen me blogging about here and here and here before...

LexisNexis' New Years Charity

Posted on December 27, 2009
I don't know how many other law school libraries have opened the e-mail from Lexis-Nexis yet. I urge you to open it and read it. And look at the video card. It may be a gimmick, and it is certainly P.R. on their part, but you are invited to select a charity to which Lexis-Nexis will donate (an unspecified) amount on your school's behalf...

Time for Charities

Posted on December 27, 2009
As we roll down to the end of the calendar year, it's also the time for many people to consider making charitable donations. Partly because it's the holidays, and part of the holidays is giving, but also because it's the last chance to move taxable income out of the reach of the IRS by donating it to charities...

Merry, Merry!

Posted on December 24, 2009
Merry Christmas to all the OOTJers who celebrate it. If you are recovering from Hannukah, I hope it was a happy one. If you celebrate something else, I hope you had or will have a wonderful one. I think all the religions of the world have some kind of celebration sometime around this time of year, and that's because it's the solstice...

Mexico City Votes to Legalize Gay Marriage

Posted on December 22, 2009
The BBC reports here on the vote by Mexico City's leftist city legislature to legalize gay marriage. The mayor is widely expected to sign the bill. The language changes the definition of marriage from a relationship between a man and woman to "the free uniting of two people"...

Google Book Project Settlement News

Posted on December 19, 2009
Library Journal reports that the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries have joined in writing a letter to the Antitrust Division of the DOJ, in which they ask that department to actively supervise the Google Book settlement...

Using Technology to Do Justice in Cambodia

Posted on December 17, 2009
Back in August, I blogged about the Special Tribunal for Cambodia, which is trying several leaders of the infamous Khmer Rouge for crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions. (This link is to the Avalon Project at Yale, which provides the full text of all of the Geneva Conventions)...

Public Libraries Editorial from Massachusetts

Posted on December 17, 2009
Here is a link to a terrific little video and editorial from the Patriot Ledger, a multi-community newspaper on the South Shore of Massachusetts. It's looking at the decision that Norwell has to make about renovating or rebuilding its public library, and reviews the fabulous job that a number of nearby communities, including my home town of Milton, have done with their public libraries...

Open Access Encyclopedias

Posted on December 14, 2009
Having been involved in an open access database here at Pace Law School, I know from experience how difficult it is to keep it going. Funding is available for start-up ventures, but harder to get for established programs. Even though a database is extremely valuable, users are reluctant to pay for it, especially if it's been free for awhile and they have never paid for it...

Cornell's Legal Research Search Engine!

Posted on December 13, 2009
Wow! Cornell has teamed up with Google to offer something a bit different from the new Google Scholar legal search radio button. The Cornell Legal Research Search Engine allows users to do Google-powered searches of* Legal Research Guides (prepared, usually by law libraries, to help explain how to do legal research in a particular area)* The Legal Internet (this is a broad area that can include anything from law firms' websites that can be information rich or poor,depending on how focused they are on marketing; non-profit organization and government sites, and non-governmental organizations websites all of which tend to be quite information-rich; education institutions which again can be rich sources of information; corporations and private entities, private individuals and miscellaneous sponsors of websites...

A Nuanced View of Multi-tasking

Posted on December 11, 2009
Mark Bauerlein, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog, has some interesting and nuanced things to say in the ongoing conversation about multi-tasking and the toll it may be taking on our ability to concentrate. Life in the Tech Lane is the name of his very nice essay, which you can link to without a special password...

Criticism of the Nook

Posted on December 11, 2009
Barnes & Noble's new electronic book reader, the Nook, is not ready for prime time. So says David Pogue in his product review in the The New York Times. The Nook is modeled after Amazon's Kindle reader, but falls short of the Kindle in several respects according to Pogue...

New Google Service

Posted on December 09, 2009
The New York Times has an article in the Technology section describing Google's new Living Stories project. This "new approach to presenting news online by topic [was] developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post," and will be offered to all newspaper publishers if it proves to be a success...

Blast from the Past

Posted on December 09, 2009
The best course I took at Columbia Library School was History of the Printed Book with Professor Terry Belanger. Starting with incunabula, Profesor Belanger took us through five and a half centuries of changes in how books were manufactured. The course covered more than the history of the book--Professor Belanger taught us social history, literary history (with an emphasis on British literature), the history of technology, art history, copyright, business history, all as reflected in the printed book, and made it fascinating...

RIAA: They can make him pay, but they can't make him go away

Posted on December 08, 2009
According to Wired.com, Judge Nancy Gertner declined the RIAA request to censor Tenenbaum?s Twitter commentary criticizing the RIAA and, according the the RIAA, inciting his followers to piracy. "Although plaintiffs are entitled to statutory damages, they have no right to silence defendant?s criticism of the statutory regime under which he is obligated to pay those damages,? Gertner wrote...

Legal Rebel Carl Malamud

Posted on December 08, 2009
It was good to see this laudatory profile in the Legal Rebels series that has been running in the ABA Journal. It celebrates Carl Malamud, who, although not a lawyer himself, has led a crusade "to make public-domain legal materials actually accessible to the public...

The End of the Computer Lab?

Posted on December 08, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education for December 11 has a front-page story entitled, "Computer Labs Get Rebooted as Lounges." The gist of the article is that a number of universities are "taking a hard look at those brightly lit rooms with row of networked computers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain...

Rupert Murdoch Takes a Stand

Posted on December 03, 2009
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, owner of the Wall Street Journal and The Times, among other newspapers, is a vocal critic of Google. He accuses Google of stealing content from newspapers and making it available through its search engine without any payment to the publisher...

Public School of Law in Massachusetts Questioned

Posted on December 03, 2009
Turns out I'm not the only person wondering what kind of math those Trustees at the University of Massachusetts are using to figure that they can pick up Southern New England School of Law (SNESL), and expand it, keep the tuition to $23,500, offer about half the student body scholarships that cut their tuition in half, and still achieve ABA accreditation by 2012, all without costing the taxpayers of Massachusetts or the University a dime...

Where is AALL's Leadership? GPO's Digitization of Legacy Documents

Posted on December 01, 2009
Last spring, ALA and ARL together issued a letter to the co-chairs of the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing, Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Robert Brady. Here is the letter: On behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association ofResearch Libraries (ARL), we are writing to express our strong support for a project that will digitize our nation?s historical public domain government works and make these broadly available to the American public...

Self Revealing

Posted on November 30, 2009
There was a very powerful story in the Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated November 25, 2009, under Advice, "Mental Illness in Academe," by Elyn R. Saks. The title is rather bland, actually, and does not begin to describe the dynamite within the short essay...

More on the Budget Crunch: Academic Libraries Turn Crisis into Opportunity

Posted on November 29, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article November 22 (I'm catching up on my reading!), Libraries Explore Big Ideas to Overcome Small Budgets, by Jennifer Howard. To read the article online, you need a password, but if you have access to the paper in print, it can be found in the News section...

State Courts in Crisis

Posted on November 29, 2009
The New York Times ran an editorial on November 25 featuring a speech by Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall to the City Bar of New York. It will not come as a surprise to many readers of OOTJ that state courts have had their budgets slashed, but the editorial does an admirable job of surveying the nation, drawing a grim picture, indeed, of what state budget cuts have done...

tiny Thom.as: God Bless Us Every One!

Posted on November 23, 2009
Well, it's not really like in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and Tiny Tim is certainly different from tinyThom.As, but I just like the name so much, I couldn't resist. tinyThom.as is a new feature from Library of Congress. If, like me, you have ever tried to create a link to Thomas, their wonderful database of Congressional bills and public laws, you have been frustrated to discover that Thomas cannot create a permanent link...

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