Legal Research

Thomson West: Epic PR Fail

Posted on August 24, 2009
One more time, West stumbles over its own feet in its haste to offend the librarian community... They came out with nifty little "cards" aimed at practitioners, "Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, you're spending too much time in the library...

Thomson Reuters Discriminates Against Puerto Rican Law Schools?

Posted on August 23, 2009
A colleague alerted me to the email below, sent to Thomson Reuters on August 21 by a professor at University of Puerto Rico School: Dear Thomson Reuters executives: The enclosed e-mail by ... is self-explanatory. In it, he objects to your discriminatory policy to discontinue providing the printers? service (complimentary printers and supplies), which were installed at the local Puerto Rico law school libraries...

When Settlements Remove Decisions from Lexis & Westlaw

Posted on August 21, 2009
Shannon Duffy, at Law.com reported on Aug. 19, that a settlement agreement in Klein v. Amtrak called for removing eight legally significant decisions from publication. Two trespassing teens were badly burned by electric catenary wires when they were horsing around on a parked train car...

i-AWFUL List: Internet Advocates' Watchlist for Ugly Laws

Posted on August 19, 2009
Click here for Netchoice.org's press release dated August 18, 2009, detailing the internet advocacy organization's list of the ten worst internet laws . In part: "The Internet is increasingly under attack as lawmakers seek to mandate technological behaviors, impose new taxes and otherwise restrict the free flow of information and commerce online," said Steve DelBianco, Executive Director of NetChoice, which maintains iAWFUL...

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Information Doesn't Always Want to Be Free

Posted on August 17, 2009
The Financial Times has been charging for online access since 2002. This made it an outlier in an environment in which most other papers (The Wall Street Journal being the major exception) were giving away online access to their content. Other media executives felt that charging for content was a prescription for financial disaster...

The End of Solitude

Posted on August 17, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education just re-ran the excellent essay from January, 2009, by William Deresiewicz, The End of Solitude. If you have a Chronicle subscription and password, you can read it in full at this link. I will attempt to summarize a bit of it here, but he makes complex arguments and ties into many writers and thinkers...

Work Life Balance

Posted on August 17, 2009
I thought about that article from last week about the best law firms for mothers or other J.D. folks who want a work-life balance. If you read the whole article, or paid attention to the parts I excerpted and read between the lines, you may have noticed that part-time for lawyers is a 40 hour week...

Fascinating Justification of Costs of CALR

Posted on August 14, 2009
Read the analysis of online research cost recovery by guest blogger Mark Gediman at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. He titles his post "Cost Recovery... Such a Deal." Gediman's analysis is nicely detailed. He relies on hourly billing at the full lawyer $300/hour rate at his firm for pulling a case, for instance to calculate that it saves money to download the case electronically compared to pulling it off the shelf and copying it, when you bill the client...

Working Mother on the Best Firms for Work Life Balance

Posted on August 14, 2009
Click on the title for this post to read a nice article at Working Mother on how the tanked economy is helping firms see the wisdom of work-life balance. Now male attorneys are starting to take advantage of family leave -- it's not just a mommy track thing any more...

Karl Rove and The Attorney General Firings in the W. Administration

Posted on August 13, 2009
With all the other stuff going on in the news, people may have lost track of the release of the transcripts of testimony and e-mails that showed that Karl Rove was very much behind the political firing of Attorneys General during the George W. Bush administration under Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General...

Typography for Lawyers

Posted on August 11, 2009
Click on the link for this post, or in this sentence to visit http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/. Many thanks to Meg Martin, who posted to RIPS-SIS blog about this fascinating website. The blog is maintained by a civil litigation attorney in Los Angeles, Matthew Butterick, who also has an art degree...

Follow up on Justice in Cambodia

Posted on August 10, 2009
Last week I blogged a story in GQ about the war crimes trials that recently got underway in Cambodia, thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended. The GQ article goes into some of the reasons it took so long to bring the perpetrators to justice. In an article in Sunday's Boston Globe, Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes thatThere is good reason to believe the tribunal will fail in its aims...

Just for Reference Purposes: AALL & West

Posted on August 07, 2009
Here are Statements referred to in previous post and explanations about Price Index, etc., for folks who might not already know about these things.AALL Statement: From: Kate Hagan To: law-lib@ucdavis.eduSent: Thursday, August 6, 2009 12:35:10 PMSubject: [LAW-LIB:59662] AALL Sponsorship PolicyThere was a recent posting on this listserv concerning the AALL sponsorship policy, so I thought it appropriate to provide you with accurate information on this issue...

AALL and Thomson-West

Posted on August 07, 2009
Well, by now, James Duggan, the immediate past president of AALL has made his official statement on Law-lib listserve. And Anne Ellis of Thomson-West has made a reply on the ALL-SIS list-serve. As I understand it, the membership of AALL is split in their sentiments over the leadership's response to West...

Bravo, AALL & James Duggan!

Posted on August 05, 2009
If you went to AALL, did you notice that Thomson-West was not listed as a sponsor at all? Did you also hear the rumor that it was because the AALL leadership finally faced West down about supplying price information for the Price Index? Click on the title for this post to visit the Law Librarian Blog (part of the Law Prof Blogs Network) to read the post by Joe Hodnicki about this story, dated August 5...

Justice in Cambodia

Posted on August 04, 2009
There is a powerful and haunting article written by Michael Paterniti in the current issue of GQ. Paterniti describes visiting Cambodia in 2002 and then again more recently as the Special Tribunal for Cambodia was being convened. The first defendant to stand trial is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran the notorious S-21 torture center at a former school from 1975 to 1979, the years that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia...

Nicholson Baker on Kindle

Posted on August 03, 2009
I would have been astonished if Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold and long-time library critic, had been a fan of Amazon's Kindle reader. Thus, his somewhat nasty article in the August 3 issue of The New Yorker reviewing the Kindle 2 e-book reader contained few surprises...

New Life for Old Books

Posted on August 03, 2009
Cambridge University Press has announced a new digital initiative, according to an article in today's Inside Higher Ed. In a partnership with the Cambridge University Library, the Press, which has been operating since 1584, will scan and reprint original copies...

True Grit

Posted on August 02, 2009
This article by Jonah Lehrer in today's Boston Globe really rang true for me. It discusses recent research by psychologists into the phenomenon of grit. "[T]he researchers are quick to point out that grit isn't simply about the willingness to work hard...

Ban on Electronic Devices in New York?

Posted on July 30, 2009
New York Lawyer reported on July 22 that local attorneys are protesting interim rules that severely limit their ability to bring laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse located in lower Manhattan...

Google and Civil Rights

Posted on July 30, 2009
Betsy's recent posts about the meeting convened at the Boston Public Library to discuss the Google Book Settlement were fascinating and whetted my appetite for more information on the topic. I was at AALL's annual meeting earlier this week and left on Tuesday...

More on Google Books Discussion at Boston Public Library

Posted on July 24, 2009
Take 2: Hal Abelson:The notes I made the other day skipped over some major points of the discussion at the Boston Public Library on the Google Books Project and Settlement proposal. For instance, I did not cover Professor Hal Abelson, who, not being a librarian, had some pretty interesting things to say...

University of California Considers an 11th, Electronic Campus

Posted on July 23, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2009, reports in a story by Marc Beja, that the dean of the U.C., Berkeley, Law School, Christopher Edley, Jr., recommends opening a new, electronic campus for the University of California. Due to severe budget cuts, the system may not be able to enroll as many students as before...

The Google Book Project & Settlement Discussion at Boston Public Library

Posted on July 22, 2009
I went to the program hosted at Boston Public Library last night, titled, ?Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement. Speakers: * Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Books (bio here) * John Palfrey, Henry N...

Government Web Sites

Posted on July 20, 2009
NextGov has a nice graphic presentation entitled "Best Practices for Government Web Sites." It focuses on five agencies--NASA, the Library of Congress, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Social Security Administration, and the Transportation Security Administration--and presents their sites, pointing out ways in which they meet the needs of their users...

More on laptops in the classroom

Posted on July 20, 2009
The Chronicle Online has a free article today about how much more engaged students are when laptops and computer presentations leave the classroom. In When Computers Leave the Classroom, So Does Boredom, Jeffrey R. Young covers removal of computers from classrooms at Meadows School of Arts at SMU...

For folks who need to find a lawyer, a new resource

Posted on July 18, 2009
LegalMatch.com is a new free web service that offers a matching service for folks who need to find a lawyer. I get these from the home page: You, as the legal consumer send information about your legal problem and location. The system will send your notes to pre-screened attorneys who practice the type of law you need, in the area you need...

Sotomayor and Foreign Law

Posted on July 17, 2009
I thought the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor were a bit of an anticlimax--did we really learn anything about her that we didn't know before? As has become typical of recent confirmation hearings, the purpose seemed to be to give the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee an opportunity to grandstand and to ask questions to which they already knew the answers or to which they knew the candidate could not or would not reply...

Confluence: Unemployment, Underprepared Workforce

Posted on July 15, 2009
Looking at Sabrina Pacifici's BePacific.com today, I was struck by the confluence of several stories:1. Broad Unemployment Across the U.S.New York Times interactive graphic: Broad Unemployment Across the U.S. - "Under a broader definition of joblessness, some states have rates higher than 20 percent...

And, Heeeere's the Bar Exam!

Posted on July 14, 2009
Well, it's too late already for the helpful hints of yesteryear about prepping early for the bar, and pacing yourself and all that crap. Ooops. I mean, helpful information.It's either here, or looming on the horizon. Check here, at the National Conference of Bar Examiners for your favorite state bar exam date to see if OOPS! you missed it...

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