Legal Research

Darnton on Digital Libraries

Posted on March 29, 2011
The New York Times Opinion pages of March 23, 2011 carried an essay from Robert Darnton, the Harvard Librarian, "A Digital Library Better Than Google's." In response to Judge Denny Chin's rejection of the Google Book Settlement, Darnton revisits the dream of Google Books - a vast digital library, which makes available freely to anyone with a computer and internet connection, the literature of the world...

Who Owns Sunlight?

Posted on March 29, 2011
I had never thought about who owns sunlight until I read an interview with Professor Stuart Banner of UCLA Law School. Professor Banner has recently published a book, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own, which, according to the publisher's blurb, is the "first comprehensive history of property in the United States...

Alternative to Google Books: Hathi Trust signs Summon as search engine -

Posted on March 28, 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that HathiTrust has made its large library of digital texts searchable by signing an agreement with Summon, a library-specific search engine produced by Serials Solutions. Indeed, if you click on the HathiTrust link, you will see that they now offer catalog and full text searches, as well as browsing on their site...

Google Book Settlement decision handed down

Posted on March 22, 2011
The Court has handed down its final order, and here is the short answer:Before the Court is plaintiffs' motion pursuant, to Rule23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for final approval ofthe proposed settlement of this class action on the terms setforth in the Amended Settlement Agreement (the "ASA")...

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Dog Law

Posted on March 17, 2011
Yale Law School Library has announced a three-day pilot program beginning March 28 which will enable students to check out a "certified library therapy dog." The dog's name is Monty, and he will be available for thirty-minute sessions with stressed-out students...

Law School Applications Down

Posted on March 17, 2011
I guess potential law students have gotten the message that going to law school might not be the best career path right now. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that law-school applications have declined 11.5% since last year. In fact, the total number of applicants "is the lowest since 2001 at this stage of the process...

The Times Paywall Finally Goes Up

Posted on March 17, 2011
The New York Times announced today that its new paywall has gone up for readers in Canada, and that the paywall for the United States and the rest of the world will go up on March 28. According to the email I got, the rollout in Canada will allow the company "to fine-tune the customer experience before [the] global launch...

The New York Times: Too Little, Too Late?

Posted on March 08, 2011
Like many other people, I have been waiting for The New York Times to announce when it would begin charging for access to its website. The silence has been deafening since the initial announcement fourteen months ago. Every so often, I would see news (sometimes no more than informed speculation) about the Times's plans on other news organizations' websites, but there was nothing from the Times itself...

Students and Being There

Posted on March 07, 2011
A challenging article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Actually Going to Class: How 20th Century, by Jeffrey R. Young, dated February 27, 2011. The first (and so far only) time I had students ask me about whether they actually had to attend class, it was not, thank heavens, in my own class...

Establishing Torture

Posted on March 06, 2011
According to an article in today's New York Times, the human rights program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York is playing a key role in establishing that asylum seekers were tortured in their home countries. Proof that individuals were tortured in the past can help establish that they have a well-founded fear of persecution should they return, which is the legal standard for being granted asylum in the United States...

New Clinic at Yale Law School

Posted on March 03, 2011
Thanks to Pace Law Library colleague Vicky Gannon for sending me this article from the Yale Daily News about a new clinic that has recently opened at the Yale Law School. According to the press release that announced the founding of the clinic, The Ethics Bureau at Yale will be open for business in the spring of 2011...

Vendor Neutral Citation is getting some traction

Posted on March 02, 2011
Well, besides Judge Posner's poison valentine, The Bluebook Blues, 120 Yale L.J. 850 (2011), there have been a number of blog posts recently reacting to the article. Judge Posner is a long-time Bluebook antagonist (see Posner, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 U...

Sold out! AALL sells us down the river

Posted on March 01, 2011
Well, thanks to Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog, Sarah Glassmeyer at SarahGlassmeyerDotCom, and Greg Lambert, of 3 Geeks and a Blog, we know that AALL has requested that nobody blog live during the AALL Vendor Colloquium. So, not only is it not Webcast for us members who are footing the bill, it is not blogged or Tweeted...

DrawCongress.org - What Non-partisan Congressional Redistricting Looks Like

Posted on March 01, 2011
Tip of the OOTJ hat to colleague Kent McKeever at Columbia. He passes along news of Columbia Law Professor Nathaniel Persily, who teaches a class in "Redistricting and Gerrymandering." His class project just came out with a website, DrawCongress.org...

About to move to Internet Protocol v. 6

Posted on February 28, 2011
Hiawatha Bray, writing in the Boston Globe Business section today, explains that the "Online Universe is About to Grow." He is talking about Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Basically, we are about to run out of Internet addresses in the current format, known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4)...

Watson on Jeopardy

Posted on February 26, 2011
Even people without televisions, like me, finally found out about the man versus machine competition on Jeopardy, with IBM's Watson. From this article in the Boston Globe, I had the mistaken notion that Watson already has voice recognition, but reading the PC World report on IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy, I understand now that Watson actually operates on text...

Google Algorithms Modified to Sift out Dreck

Posted on February 26, 2011
Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms, hundreds of times a year, but most changes are so subtle that users cannot notice any changes. About 4 or 5 times a year, there will be a change that is large enough that users might notice. And this current change is actually being announced...

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Signs Executive Order Barring Discrimination Based on Sexual Identity and Expression

Posted on February 25, 2011
The Boston Globe reported a few days ago that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed two executive orders which prohibit discrimination based on sexual identity or sexual expression in state employment. Link here for(Executive Order 526, barring third party vendors from such actions and Executive Order 527, which deals with state government itself...

Fascinating Essay on the Future, History and Business, of Books

Posted on February 25, 2011
I will read (or listen) to anything by Paul Duguid. I stumbled on an excellent review essay by him the the Times (of London) Review of Books. Titled, "Do You Love Books? Jacques Bonnet does, (he can't stop buying them) -- but what's the future for the book business," the essay reviews three books...

Fantasy Scotus!

Posted on February 24, 2011
Tip of the OOTJ hat to Suffolk 2-L law student and our student newspaper, Dicta for alerting me to Fantasy SCOTUS. Apparently, I am way behind the pack on this, which was formed in 2009, but it looks like a delight. Especially for those who really, really follow the Supremes anyway, this should be their thing! Pass it along to the con law scholars on your faculty (and students) and start cheering for them to win! The motto is "Play as the 10th Justice...

Obama Administration Will No Longer Defend DOMA

Posted on February 24, 2011
The Boston Globe reported this morning that President Obama announced that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) against suits challenging its constitutionality. The administration will continue to enforce the law, but Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr...

Why Vendor Relations are a Sore Topic with Librarians!

Posted on February 23, 2011
Well, tip of the OOTJ hat to CRIV Chair Rob Myers at Case Western Reserve School of Law (CRIV, for those who might not know, stands for the American Association of Law Libraries'(AALL's) Committee on Relation with Information Vendors). He sent this following note, with more details, to a number of librarian listservs: A fellow law librarian just reported that West is sending our sets of the the state court rules to subscribers of state statutes (and charging for them), regardless of whether they already subscribe to the set as a separate subscription...

Are Lawyers Sponges?

Posted on February 18, 2011
Andy Kessler writes in today's Wall Street Journal that lawyers are "sponges," members of a profession that "earned their jobs by passing a test meant to limit supply," i.e., the bar exam. Other "sponges" are "cosmetologists, real estate brokers, [and] doctors," all of whom "need government certification...

Oh, the dangers of the traveling deans!

Posted on February 11, 2011
My, oh, my! ABA Journal online reports that the dean of Texas Wesleyan law school Frederic White has come out with what purports to be a work of fiction. It is based on his "firsthand observations of needy students, eccentric faculty members, power-hungry alums, manipulative trustees and cheating spouses...

Title 51 US Code and beyond: Unintended Consequences

Posted on February 04, 2011
Tip of the OOTJ hat to Grace Mills at Hamline, who alerted me, and to Brian Huddleston of Loyola, New Orleans, who alerted the rest of the world that the U.S. Code now has 51 Titles. In December President Obama signed Pub. L. 111-314, which took sections from titles 15, 42 and 49 to create a new title, "National and Commercial Space Programs...

Innovation at Brooklyn Law School

Posted on February 03, 2011
One of my colleagues forwarded me this feature from the Huffington Post. It discusses an innovative clinic at Brooklyn Law School that "represents Internet, new media, communications and other tech entrepreneurs and innovators on both business and policy advocacy...

Constitution Worship

Posted on February 01, 2011
The Constitution of the United States has been much in the news of late. Members of the Tea Party movement express reverence for the original language and meaning of the document, while others look upon the Constitution as a document intended by the Founders to adapt to meet the changing times...

Cats in the Library

Posted on January 31, 2011
I am the most frustrated of cat lovers because I am violently allergic to cats. Growing up, my family always had at least two and sometimes three cats (as well as birds of various types, frogs, turtles, and whatever else turned up), but as an adult, I developed serious allergies to them which made it impossible for me to have even one cat...

Ooh! Ooh! Don't lose out! Try new OED free by Feb. 5

Posted on January 28, 2011
Oof! I almost missed it! Don't you, too. You can try the New Oxford English Dictionary online for free until February 5. Go to oed.com and use the log-in and password trynewoed (that's try new oed all run together). The New OED is re conceptualized to really take advantage of its digital nature in a way that its online predecessor has never done...

What do they do with all that snow? Snow Farms

Posted on January 26, 2011
What happens to the snow that gets plowed and shoveled and carted away after a big snowstorm? Up in Boston, anyway, there are designated lots for the snow, called, "snow farms." They have to be governmentally approved, too, which I hope, at least, means that they meet some standards...

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