Legal Research

Some Computer Security Folks Rethinking the Insanity

Posted on April 12, 2010
Yesterday's Boston Globe, in an article in the Ideas section titled "Please do not change your password," by Mark Pothier, reports on a guy who is perhaps going to change the way computer security wonks do their analysis. I certainly hope so! The subtitle of the article is: "You were right: It?s a waste of your time...

Justice Stevens Retires!

Posted on April 09, 2010
The New York Times article on Justice Stevens' announcing his retirement from the Supreme Court. Here is his letter to President Obama, stating he has "concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court?s next term? in October...

Google Grants Program to Use the Google Digitized Books

Posted on April 08, 2010
Google has opened a grants program to use its digitized books. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a March 31, 2010 article in Technology by Marc Parry, ... The company is creating a "collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus," according to a call for proposals obtained by The Chronicle...

Who Would Have Thought It?

Posted on April 07, 2010
When I think of Keith Richards, long-time lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, the first word that springs to mind is not bookworm. And yet that is what he claims to be in his forthcoming autobiography due to be published in October. This article from the Times Online describes Richards's childhood in the "post-war-austerity of 1950s London" when he "found refuge in books before he discovered the blues...

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FCC Cannot Enforce Net Neutrality

Posted on April 07, 2010
In Comcast v. FCC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled unanimously that the FCC lacks the authority to block internet providers from controlling content. Here is the full text of the case, docket number 08-1291. The Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray has an article in today's issue...

Loyola Marymount raises all law student grades

Posted on April 02, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Loyola Law School Los Angeles (aka Loyola Marymount) is modifying their grading system to help their students be more competitive and better reflect the quality of their students. That means they are raising all the student grades by a third of a grade point, magically transforming A into A+, B- into B, and so forth...

West pokes itself in the eye again

Posted on March 30, 2010
Thomson Reuters has done it again! Another black eye in librarian relations.They have announced that they will be changing their invoice system for West materials. The Technical Services listserv has been buzzing with this recently. Apparently, monthly invoices have been turned into a select benefit available ONLY to those libraries willing to accept the LMA contract...

First Look at WestlawNext

Posted on March 29, 2010
I finally got a first look at WestlawNext today. I think our students are going to love it because it looks and acts a lot like Google. It will probably be hard for some faculty members to make the transition to WestlawNext, and we librarians will have to do a lot of individualized hand holding and training...

Boston Public Library Branch Closures Protest Continues

Posted on March 29, 2010
The Boston Globe reports today on quiet protests at the Boston Public Library (BPL)main branch of the continuing plans to close community branches of the Boston Public Library. The article reports that about a hundred protesters picketed the main branch at Copley Square, making a point of respecting the library's quiet as they entered the building...

Well the SCOTUS Student Loan Bankruptcy Excitement is Over

Posted on March 28, 2010
United Student Aid Funds v. Espinosa, showed up first with some breathless headlines:Supreme Court Rules for Student Seeking Discharge of Loan Debt shouted the ABA Journal. Actually what showed up in my e-mail alerts was: "Student Wins SCOTUS Approval for Loan Discharge...

National Jurist ranks law school libraries

Posted on March 26, 2010
The National Jurist ranks the best law school libraries. In a brief intro that warms my heart, even as we all will instantly begin to quibble over their criteria, they begin, Many thought that the digital age would render brick-and-mortar libraries obsolete...

Public Online Information Act (POIA)

Posted on March 23, 2010
The Public Online Information Act (POIA) HR 4858, has been introduced into the House of Representatives by Congressman Steve Israel of the second district of New York. If you follow the link for POIA above, it will take you to an excellent links page provided by the Sunlight Foundation, which describes itself as "a non-partisan, non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that focuses on the digitization of government data and the creation of tools and Web sites to make that data easily accessible for all citizens...

FCC Takes Public Comments on Future of Media & Information Needs of Communities in the Information Age

Posted on March 22, 2010
The FCC is taking public comments on the Future of Media & the Information Needs of Communities in the Information Age! That means libraries, as well as newspapers, blogs, the Internet, and all kinds of other information resources. The deadline has been extended to May 7...

Judge Walks Out Mid-Argument in Proposition 8 Case

Posted on March 19, 2010
Dan Levine at LegalPad reports (March 16) that Chief Judge Vaughn Walker stood up and walked out on Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe partner Stephen Bomse in mid-sentence as Bomse continued an argument opposing a discovery motion in the Proposition 8 case in California (Perry v...

Obama, WHAT are you THINKING!?

Posted on March 19, 2010
from the ABA Grassroots Newsletter:USA PATRIOT ACT: President Obama signed legislation Feb. 27 that extends the ?library,? ?lone wolf? and roving wiretaps? anti-terrorism provisions under the USA PATRIOT ACT through Feb. 28, 2011. Enactment of the new law, P...

States' Rights Resurgence

Posted on March 18, 2010
The New York Times ran an article, "States' Rights is Rallying Cry for Lawmakers" on March 16, 2010 (I saw it in the Boston Globe). Kirk Johnson wrote: Whether it?s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights ? or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing ? are on a roll...

Good News from PACER

Posted on March 17, 2010
The United States Judicial Conference voted on March 16 to increase the number of free documents that the public can retrieve from PACER. Currently, users can get $10 of free pages per year; in the future, users will get $10 of free pages per quarter--a significant increase and one worth cheering...

Franklin Pierce to Merge

Posted on March 17, 2010
Inside Higher Education is reporting a proposed merger between the University of New Hampshire and Franklin Pierce Law Center, the only law school in the state. Franklin Pierce would be known as the University of New Hampshire School of Law, but would remain in Concord for the time being, at least...

Watch out for foursquare!

Posted on March 16, 2010
And you thought foursquare was just a cool little social media tagging tool. Well, it is. You use your cell phone to add a metadata tag to anyplace, and you can set up a game. "Earn badges!" urges the website, "Unlock your city." Or your campus. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the game is taking off at campuses, in an article titled, "Will Your College Be Covered in Virtual Graffiti?" by Marc Parry...

New bill to track metals in electronics

Posted on March 15, 2010
The Boston Globe has a story today by Emily Sweeney focusing on the misery in Congolese mines, which are the source for so many minerals used in consumer electronics. Many of the mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where minerals such as tantalum lie close to the surface of the earth, are controlled by rogue military groups illegally mining to buy military weapons...

Boston Public Library Branch Closings Debate is Passionate

Posted on March 10, 2010
The Boston Globe's Andrew Ryan reports on a passionate and raucous meeting at the central Boston Public Library. Nearly 400 people packed a lecture hall in the beautiful Copley branch. When City Council President Michael Ross stepped to the microphone at one point, the crowd roared, and people shouted: "The public goes first!" and "Let the people speak!" And speak they did! The city council, Mayor Menino and the Trustees of the Public Library got quite an earful from the people of Boston...

Fake Restitution site - Beware

Posted on March 10, 2010
The Boston Globe reports that con artists have set up a website that mimics the website run by the Securities Investor Protection Corp, SIPC.org. The fake website, I-SIPC.com when I looked is "temporarily closed." I don't know if it will re-open at this URL or will move...

Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid & Pew Research

Posted on March 08, 2010
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a very provocative article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. While he loves the wonderful access the Internet gives him as a writer to all kinds of information, Carr has noticed that it seems to have changed how he reads the materials he gets online: For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind...

You Can't Believe Everything You Hear!

Posted on March 08, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Ed passes along a story from Above the Law, "The Backstory of the John Roberts Retirement Rumor." Datelined October 4, 2010, ATL explains that there were thousands of erroneous e-mails, blogposts and text messages flying around that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was on the verge of announcing his retirement for health reasons...

Copyright for Fashion?

Posted on March 07, 2010
The Globe also reports on Harvard Professor and Guggenheim fellow Jeannie Suk's argument that fashion designers need a tailored (ahem!) copyright provision covering their designs. Professor Suk's article, The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion, in vol...

Sixth-Grader Organizes Reading Marathon in Support of Library

Posted on March 07, 2010
The Boston Globe has a story today about Calliope Pina Parker, an eleven year old student in Hull, Massachusetts who is a heavy library user. She was appalled when the local library funding was slashed so deeply that it cost the town its state certification last month...

Afghanistan backs away from attempted ban on media coverage of the war

Posted on March 06, 2010
It began last October with a ban by the U.S. military on embedded press photographing or filming soldiers killed in action. The story is here at the National Press Photographers Association website in an article by Donald R. Winslow dated October 14, 2009 for the News Photographer magazine...

March Madness: Decision Tree for Google Books Project

Posted on March 05, 2010
Wow! That's all I can say about the loving job somebody did on this amazing decision tree, or flow chart, depicting the possible futures for the Google Book Project. It's beautifully done from the LibraryCopyrightAlliance.org, and you need to enlarge it when you go there, so you can read all the various possibilities...

Class Action over Google Buzz

Posted on March 05, 2010
Google Buzz, the new attempt by Google to bootstrap its Gmail accounts into a Facebook-like social media effort, has already generated two law suits over privacy issues. The earliest class action was filed in San Francisco in front of the Federal Trade Commission...

SSRN Question

Posted on March 04, 2010
My school is contemplating subscribing to SSRN's Research Paper Series (RPS). We already have a significant number of articles by faculty members on SSRN, but an RPS would allow us to "brand" our scholarship and create our own working papers series as well as take advantage of other features we can't use now...

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