Legal Research

Gay Marriage Vote in D.C. to go before Congress

Posted on April 09, 2009
The Boston Globe prints an Associated Press report that the Washington, D.C. city council voted unanimously to recognize gay marriages from states that have legalized them. This vote must then go before the Congress within 30 days for ratification. That opens the way for the new Congress seated after the fall, 2008 elections to reconsider the Defense of Marriage Act which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996...

Testing the Limits of the Fair Use Doctrine

Posted on April 09, 2009
Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School is defending a Boston University graduate student, Joel Tenenbaum, accused of downloading music illegally by the Recording Industry Association of America. Nesson is well known for his passion for technology...

Digital Publishing

Posted on April 08, 2009
Inside Higher Ed published an article by Scott McLemee today that summarizes an article by Sandy Thatcher in Against the Grain, a library newsletter that is not yet available online. McLemee says that Against the Grain isn't "well-known," but I don't think that's true, at least in my library...

Spanish Court Begins Criminal Investigation into Bush Torture Team

Posted on April 08, 2009
OMG! The April 13 issue of the New Yorker has a Talk of the Town brief article by Jane Mayer titled "The Bush Six." She focuses largely on the author, Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team (see also here) seems to have sparked a criminal investigation in Spain...

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Follow up on Debtors' Prison

Posted on April 07, 2009
The New York Times ran this story today about the growing phenomenon of courts imprisoning individuals because they cannot pay fees. It is a follow up to the editorial I posted yesterday.

Google Books Conversation

Posted on April 07, 2009
Picking up the Google Books conversation again, after Marie's excellent post, I have recently come across several other interesting criticisms of digitization projects. These are aspects I had not considered.1. Paul Duguid, at First Monday vol 12, no...

Vermont Legalizes Gay Marriage!

Posted on April 07, 2009
The first state to legalize gay marriage by legislative action, Vermont overrode governor Jim Douglas' veto with the minimum votes needed, about 40 minutes ago. The Associated Press, at this Boston Globe webpost, with a nice video feed reports the story...

Darien Statements on the Purpose of the Library and Librarians

Posted on April 07, 2009
Thanks to Jennifer Murray of RIPS-SIS for posting to the list-serve a pointer and link to the Darien Statements. These were formulated at a conference called, charmingly, "In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries." See link here...

Return of Debtors' Prison

Posted on April 06, 2009
Here is an editorial from the New York Times commenting on the return of a venerable institution to the United States--the debtors' prison. The editorial describes the case of Edwina Nowlin of Michigan who "was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son...

Happy Vesak! Happy Buddha Day!

Posted on April 06, 2009
This turns out to be the (or close to) the day on which Buddhists celebrate Buddha Day, which encompasses both his birthday, his enlightenment and his passing (per Wikipedia article here). The exact date seems to vary by the ethnicity and brand of Buddhism, somewhat, since the article explains that it may be the full moon of the 4th, 5th or 6th lunar month, depending on which calendar one is following...

As Libraries Become Key to Communities, There is a Dark Side

Posted on April 06, 2009
Several days ago, my sister sent me a link to a New York Times article (click the title to this post) from April 2, by Susan Saulny, "Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries." I had been getting lots of links from the Massachusetts Board of Libraries -- little articles from across the Commonwealth about how libraries in various communities are becoming much more important as they offer computers to newly jobless folks looking to create resumes, and free reading to folks looking to save money and free events to families who need cheap entertainment...

More on the Google Book Settlement

Posted on April 06, 2009
The New York Times reports on the growing opposition to the Google Book Settlement. Many of the concerns focus around so-called orphan works, out-of-print books that are still in copyright but whose authors are either unknown or cannot be found. Critics believe that the settlement may "grant the company too much power over orphan works ...

Perils of Social Media: Think Before You Post

Posted on April 06, 2009
Tip of the hat to my colleague, Prof. Andy Beckerman-Rodau: MySpace Musings Aren't Private, Appeals Court RulesMike McKee04-06-2009Hate rained down on Cynthia Moreno's family after her hometown newspaper in Coalinga, Calif., published her online rant about how much she despised the small Central Valley city in which she had grown up...

How do you use social media?

Posted on April 04, 2009
The term "social media" is subject to many different definitions and interpretations. To make it simple: for my purposes, if you're reading this blog, you're a user of social media. If you ever listen to podcasts, you use social media. If you're on Twitter, you're a social media user...

The Globe on the Ropes!

Posted on April 04, 2009
Lastly, on this Saturday, April 4, after using the Boston Globe, as so often in the past, to post to this blog, I am still in shock to tell OOTJ readers that the big headlines today are that the New York Times Company, which has ownership of the Globe, threatens to shut the Globe unless its many unions agree to $20 million in concessions...

U. Mass to Digitize W.E.B. Du Bois Archives

Posted on April 04, 2009
Peter Schworm writes in the April 4 issue of the Boston Globe that the University of Massachusetts W.E.B. Du Bois Library in Amherst plans to digitize its collection of the black scholar and activist's papers. More than 100,000 documents, from diaries, to photographs, to letters and speeches are being digitized and posted on the Internet for public access...

The Perfect Search

Posted on April 03, 2009
The ABA Journal April, 2009 issue has a fascinating article about a group trying to improve search protocols and technology for electronic discovery. As a few high profile examples like the Microsoft e-mails, and Big Tobacco e-mails provided exquisite "gotcha" moments on the stand, lawyers began to see more than ever the value of mining the huge data dumps of electronic discovery...

Iowa Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage!

Posted on April 03, 2009
The Associated Press here reports that the Iowas Supreme Court today released an opinion finding that state's DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) unconstitutional. The third state in the nation, and the first in the mid-west, Iowa's legalization of gay marriage is seen as "mainstreaming" the institution...

Top 100 Twitter Feeds for Law Students

Posted on April 03, 2009
Well, according to www.onlinebestcolleges.com, anyway. Blush, Jim Milles is listed in his new guise as a law prof and yours truly is listed as a law librarian. Click on the title to this post.

Clickers in the Early Grades

Posted on April 02, 2009
Regular readers of OOTJ may recall prior blogs about use of clickers in my Advanced Legal Research class. I used them extensively during the first semester, but found that they took a lot of class time. The students loved the exercises, but I was unsure how much bang I was actually getting for the buck...

Academic Earth

Posted on April 02, 2009
Check out this website (linked to from the title of this post). It is making available "full video courses and lectures from the world's leading scholars." A number of disciplines are represented, including law. At the moment, only two courses are linked to from the law site: Introduction to Copyright Law by Professor Keith Winstein from MIT, and Climate Change: Law and Policy by Professor William Collins of the University of California at Berkeley...

Is it AI or is it April Fools?

Posted on April 01, 2009
Wow! It's April 1, and the most intriguing post on Slashdot is this, about Google launching an A.I., "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ...

Tax Deniers and Tax Defiers

Posted on March 31, 2009
Having just reviewed my 2009 tax returns, I was in an appropriate frame of mind to enjoy this article from the New York Times Magazine (March 29, 2009) about the tax-denial movement. Nobody likes paying taxes, but some people take this emotion to extremes, including one man who went so far as to send a firebomb to the I...

New Frontiers in Government Documents!

Posted on March 31, 2009
The Government Services Administration has signed deals for government agencies to use a number of different new social media to get their messages out to the public. Nextgov.com reports here: After nine months of negotiations, the General Services Administration signed agreements with four video-sharing and social networking sites: Flickr, Vimeo, blip...

Encyclopaedia Britannica Reinvents Itself

Posted on March 31, 2009
The print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica occupied a hallowed place in my girlhood home. My father, a hematologist, was a contributor (he wrote the article on purpura, an important symptom which can indicate a serious underlying disorder) and he received a certificate attesting to this accomplishment...

Getting Tough for Library Students

Posted on March 28, 2009
After I looked over the post yesterday, I realized that it focused entirely on networking for law students. What, you may well ask, about library students? Well, there are lots of networking opportunities there, too. Librarians are nothing if not collegial! Law librarians have national, regional and occasionally, city organizations...

When the going gets tough...

Posted on March 27, 2009
Well, I can't claim to know it all, but here are some thoughts that might help find a job in a tough economy...* Network, network, network! Go to events, join organizations, shake hands & hand out business cards. As a student, membership in most professional organizations is much less expensive...

The Current Law Firm Toll & Affects on Students

Posted on March 27, 2009
The ABA Journal online has an article here summarizing the toll of layoffs in firms during February and March, 2009. Martha Neil writes It appears that the worst might possibly be over, both for the struggling global economy and the ever-increasing number of major law firms that have been laying off support staff, associates--and even partners--in record numbers...

Ada Lovelace Day revisited

Posted on March 26, 2009
Had I but known! On the very day of the Ada Lovelace blogfest, the women who cracked the German Enigma code had their reunion! Here is an article in the Boston Globe from March 25, by Gregory Katz, about the ladies. When you read about the code breakers, they never stress that the group is mostly (all?) female...

Alumnae

Posted on March 25, 2009
Yesterday evening, I went to the Suffolk National Women Law Students' Association Inaugural Alumnae Networking Reception. That's a mouthful! But it was a terrific event. Suffolk actually has quite a few well-placed women graduates, many in the area still, as judges, and a surprising number as partners in firms or working in government agencies...

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