Legal Research

White House Office of Administration not subject to FOIA

Posted on May 20, 2009
The 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, 2009
Well, 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, 2009
Singer 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, 2009
The 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...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Charming Story

Posted on May 16, 2009
I 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
There 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Publisher'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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Inside 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, 2009
Our 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
How 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Tip 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, 2009
You 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, 2009
Just 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, 2009
Rumors 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Wow! 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Click 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, 2009
Hiawatha 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Click 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, 2009
Steve 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...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.