Legal Research

Celebrate International Right to Know Day: Sept. 28!

Posted on September 28, 2010
FOIAdvocates.net is an international network of private individuals and organizations interested in freedom of information, transparency from governments: The Freedom of Information Advocates Network (FOIAnet)is an international information-sharing network of organizations and individuals working to promote the right of access to information...

Prosecutorial Misconduct

Posted on September 27, 2010
USA Today's article entitled "Prosecutors' Conduct Can Tip Justice Scales" makes for upsetting reading. The paper launched an investigation of "201 criminal cases ... in which judges determined that Justice Department prosecutors ... violated laws or ethics rules...

Jeffrey Toobin Analyzes Breyer's Impact on the Supreme Court

Posted on September 23, 2010
In the New Yorker for September 27, 2010, Jeffrey Toobin has a very lengthy essay on Stephen Breyer, considering his position on the newly reshuffled Supreme Court. Breyer has a new book out, Making Our Democracy Work. According to the blurb at the publisher's website, he surveys the history of the Supreme Court, looking at various times when the Court's rulings have been flouted or ignored, and then discusses what he believes the Court did to create public trust in its authority and what it must to do maintain that trust...

Federal Reserve Statement on the Economy & a Translation

Posted on September 22, 2010
The Federal Reserve has issued a Press Release stating that the "pace of the recovery ... has slowed in recent months. ... the pace of economic recovery is likely to be modest in the near term." And then they tell you what the Fed's Open Market Committee has voted to do about it, and who voted how...

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Lost Authors' Libraries

Posted on September 19, 2010
The Boston Globe Ideas section today features an interesting article on authors' libraries being dispersed, both during the authors' lifetimes, but most especially as part of estate settlement. Craig Fehrman writes, focusing largely on a recent case that came about most unusually...

Focus on Fonts

Posted on September 19, 2010
I first got interested in fonts when I took Professor Terry Belanger's course "History of the Printed Book" at Columbia University's School of Library Service in 1974. Professor Belanger devoted a large portion of the course to discussion of font design, and by the end of the semester, most of us could recognize the fonts used in early printed books and threw around technical terms such as "sans serif" with ease...

Calculate Government Costs - a hair-raising experiment

Posted on September 17, 2010
I tried out the MyGovCost.org calculator. It's sponsored by the non-partisan Independent Institute, which explains itself: The Independent Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, scholarly research and educational organization that sponsors in-depth studies of critical social and economic issues...

Constitution Day

Posted on September 17, 2010
Whoops! OOTJ nearly missed celebrating Constitution Day, 2010! Tip of the OOTJ hat to William Hein, actually, for their little e-mail alert! Here is the Federal Register Notice of Implementation of Constitution and Citizenship Day on September 17 each year, in 2005...

Fun with Paraprosdokianisms

Posted on September 16, 2010
Thanks to my youngest brother, I have been introduced to praprosdokianisms, or paraprosdokians. We all actually have run across them; we just didn't know the ten dollar word for these delightful little humor bits. A paraprosdokian (from Greek "????-", meaning "beyond" and "?????????", meaning "expectation") is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part...

GPO-Access Replacement Launching, and Authentication of Law

Posted on September 10, 2010
GPO-Access has had a great run as the portal for the Government Printing Office. It is still up through the end of this calendar year. But the replacement site is already up and running and it looks great. Introducing...... (drumroll, please).........

More on e-books

Posted on September 10, 2010
E-Books Summit: There is an e-books library summit coming up September 29, 2010! Co-sponsored by Library Journal and School Library Journal, it is aimed at Public Libraries, School Libraries and yes, Academic Libraries, too. It is a Virtual Conference which runs 10 AM - 6 PM EDT, with archives available October 1 - December 31, 2010...

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Posted on September 10, 2010
Well, it's not what you think.... I am being too poetical for my own good here. The Library at New Mexico State University is canceling hundreds of subscriptions due to a $600,000 budget cut, according to an article by Paige Chapman in the Chronicle of Higher Education (dated Sept...

End of the Print New York Times?

Posted on September 09, 2010
The New York Times is the "newspaper of record," probably the most respected and best known paper published in the United States today. Although it is the hometown newspaper for the New York City metropolitan area and a reliable source for stories of local interest, it is also national and international in the scope of its coverage...

Post-script to e-books developments

Posted on September 09, 2010
The University of Michigan Press is offering a short and medium term rental option for their academic titles. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus, Sept. 3, 2010, page A23 in print. I discover to my dismay that there does not seem to be a way to link to any archived version of a week-old "Wired Campus" article online...

Blogs in the Spotlight

Posted on September 07, 2010
The National Law Journal's supplement, Law Schools--A Special Report, highlights five "pioneers in law blogging," who are some of the best-known bloggers in legal academic--Professors Douglas Berman (Sentencing Law and Policy); Paul Caron (TaxProf Blog); Christine Hurt (The Conglomerate); Brian Leiter (Brian Leiter's Law School Reports); and Eugene Volokh (The Volokh Conspiracy)...

Scholarly E-books on the Way

Posted on September 07, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article at page A12 of its print issue for September 10, online if you have a subscription. "Publishers Join forces to Sell E-Books to Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, surveys several efforts by publishers to either set up consortia or otherwise get digital versions of scholarly monographs to academic libraries...

Student Loan Crisis

Posted on September 05, 2010
Kudos to my colleague, Marc Greenbaum, who alerted me to this fabulous graphic describing the terrible state of student loans, which he first saw at Above the Law, but which actually originates at www.CollegeScholarships.org courtesy of Jess.net. I wanted to include the image here, but it does not display well at OOTJ, because our window is too narrow and cuts off part...

30 Ways to Rate a College

Posted on September 01, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a short article that surveys the ways that different organizations rate colleges. Dated August 29, 2010, by Alex Richards and Ron Coddington, the article is mostly an interactive map, which lays out on the left six different publications which rate colleges...

Virginia Attorney General Rebuffed in Climate Research Inquiry

Posted on August 31, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education dated August 30, 2010 has an article by Paul Basken reporting that Judge Paul M. Peatross, Jr. ruled against Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli's two Civil Investigative Demands against the University of Virginia...

Another Sign of the Times

Posted on August 29, 2010
It is likely that the next edition of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED), will not be published in print. No date is scheduled for the release of the third edition, which is only about one quarter finished, but it will probably take a decade or more...

Developing Technology: How print shaped publishing

Posted on August 29, 2010
The Boston Globe Ideas section today had a wonderful interview with author Andrew Pettegree, about his book The Book in the Renaissance. Written by Tom Scocca, the Q&A style article discusses with Professor Pettegree his research about the birth of publishing, and what it reveals about our misperceptions of the earliest days of printing...

Happy Women's Equality Day!

Posted on August 26, 2010
August 26 is Women's Equality Day, to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This is the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States. After more than 70 years of ceaseless campaigning, our grandmothers (and a few of our grandfathers who supported them!) finally won for us the right to vote in public elections...

The Lonely Bibliographer; or musical chairs

Posted on August 24, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a heart-wrenching article, "The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books," by Jennifer Howard. It appears on the front page of the print version of July 16, 2010, vol. LVI, no. 40, but the link above will take you to the digital version if you have a subscription...

LinkRights - a possible alternative to newspaper paywalls

Posted on August 23, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article from August 8, 2010, by Dalton Conley, Dean of Social Sciences at NYU. "Linkrights and Wrongs," proposes something that Jim Milles discussed here some years ago as a model to compensate the originator of ideas and words on the Internet fairly...

The End of Lockstep?

Posted on August 06, 2010
Lockstep compensation systems may be on the way out, at least at several leading Boston law firms, according to an article in the Boston Globe. "Major law firms have traditionally hired junior lawyers at six-figure salaries and awarded annual increases based on the number of years at the firm, a system known as 'lockstep...

Federal Judge Overturns California Prop 8 Banning Gay Marriage

Posted on August 05, 2010
The Washington Post today carries the most in-depth article on Judge Vaughn R. Walker's decision on California's Proposition 8. In the Northern District of California Federal Court, the case of Perry, et al., v. Schwarzenegger, et al. (C 09-2292) has been decided for the plaintiffs, ruling that equal protection and due process under the federal Constitution require Judge Walker to find Proposition 8 unconstitutional...

Electoral College and the popular vote revisited

Posted on August 03, 2010
The Boston Globe ran another, and more informative story yesterday on the new bill that follows the National Popular Vote agenda. Stephanie Ebbert wrote a very clear and useful explanation of what the legislation means and how it will work. It was not clear to me earlier that nothing will change in our presidential voting until and unless enough other states join the compact to add enough Electoral College votes to make a majority: 270 votes of the 538 total...

Dropping out of the Electoral College, or, End Running the Constitution?

Posted on July 29, 2010
Massachusetts just became the latest state to drop out of the Electoral College. Oh, wow! The Boston Globe reported yesterday that our legislature had passed the bill, which will go to our governor, who has expressed support for it. All 12 of Massachusetts' electoral college votes will then be awarded to whichever presidential candidate garners the most popular votes nationwide...

Federal Register Relaunches New & Nicer Site

Posted on July 27, 2010
The good folks at the Federal Register are relaunching their new website, a much nicer interface than the old GPO website. Take a look at Regulations.gov, to see the new access. The Washington Post has an article covering the relaunch, noting it is part of the Obama administration efforts to make government information more available...

Justice Denied in Cambodia?

Posted on July 26, 2010
msnbc.com is reporting on the sentencing of Kaing Guek Eav, also known as "Duch," who headed Tuol Sleng, a prison in Cambodia reserved for enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime. OOTJ has published several posts on this subject. Duch is the first of the Khmer Rouge to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at a tribunal organized by the United Nations...

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