Legal Research

On Death and Dying

Posted on January 24, 2011
Flipping through the most recent issue of the Columbia University alumni magazine, I noticed a brief article focusing on a former law professor of mine from Rutgers Law School--Newark, Norman Cantor. Professor Cantor's seminar, Death and Dying, was a course that was justifiably well regarded by Rutgers students...

Update on the Kennedy Library

Posted on January 24, 2011
We have previously blogged about the vast digitization project under way at the John F. Kennedy Library. President Kennedy's papers are being digitized to ensure their long-term and widespread availability to the public and to the scholarly community...

Resource for Display, Blog, Newsletter Ideas: Wonderopolis

Posted on January 19, 2011
Ha! It's really hard to come up with good ideas for blogs and newsletter columns, and themes for displays. I stumbled on a website that might be handy when I'm stumped: Wonderopolis.org. It's designed as an education website for kids in the K-6 (I'm guessing) age range, but it's full of cool posts that you could build off...

The STOP Act

Posted on January 19, 2011
Representative Christopher Lee (R-NY) introduced a bill in the 112th Congress, H.R. 292, known as The Stop the OverPrinting (STOP) Act, that would require the Public Printer to "make bills and resolutions available for the use of the House of Representatives and Senate only in an electronic format which is accessible through the Internet...

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How Colleges Are Failing Students

Posted on January 19, 2011
Because I am still in the process of paying college tuition, I was interested to read an article about the learning that goes on in college. The news isn't good. According to a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, written by two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 45 percent of 2,300 undergraduate students surveyed showed "no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years...

Mentorship Programs

Posted on January 18, 2011
State bar associations are reacting to the wave of unemployed law graduates hanging out their own shingles by instituting required mentorship programs. The National Law Journal (subscription required), ABA Journal, and Above the Law all report on Oregon as the latest state to jump on the bandwagon...

Lawsuit Lenders

Posted on January 17, 2011
The Boston Globe ran an article that led me to the New York Times, where the full article was originally published by Binyamin Appelbaum on the business and abuses of lawsuit lenders. The article is part of a series on the topic, which has been a collaboration between the Times and the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan, journalism non-profit in Washington, D...

Odd Scholarships

Posted on January 14, 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Ed offers a small list of odd-ball scholarships, niche offerings for a small population. They include such amazing items as Loyola University's (of Chicago) scholarship for Roman Catholics with the surname Zolp. The amount available each year depends on the number of eligible Zolps presenting themselves...

Beauty

Posted on January 12, 2011
Reverse discrimination is an interesting phenomenon. I am sure there are a lot of ways to express reverse discrimination. But I am thinking of plain people being snooty towards beauty. I hate to admit it, but I am quite guilty of this. I am periodically reminded of the fact...

Wikipedia's Second Decade

Posted on January 11, 2011
Reading "Wikipedia Comes of Age" in The Chronicle of Higher Education coincided with my turning in the grades for last semester's Advanced Legal Research course. The author, Casper Grathwohl, vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press, points out that Wikipedia, which is ten years old this month, has created an "an enormous paradigm shift" in how people conduct research...

WestlawNext Printing--April Fools?

Posted on January 04, 2011
We were early adopters of WestlawNext at Pace Law School, and I have only one real quibble. The students have taken to it without a lot of training, and the quality of their searches seems to have improved. I wish the content migration would go more quickly, but materials are available on traditional Westlaw and it's not a huge inconvenience to be directed back to the old platform occasionally...

Test

Posted on January 03, 2011
This is a test post.

Social Media Study Services

Posted on January 03, 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting article dated November 28, 2010, ?New Social Software Tries to Make Studying Feel Like Facebook.? Authors Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young survey a number of newer online study aids. They vary from forums for posting class notes to social learning sites with add-ons...

Prosecutorial Misconduct--Part 3

Posted on December 29, 2010
USA Today continues its series on prosecutorial misconduct with the latest article, "Prosecutor misconduct lets convicted off easy," published in today's edition. The first two articles highlighted innocent people who went to prison because of prosecutorial misconduct, and pointed out that few prosecutors get into trouble for these offenses...

A Poetry Break

Posted on December 28, 2010
My husband, who is a librarian at a public library, recently gave me a poem to read. Entitled "Library Days," it is part of Philip Levine's new collection, News of the World. The poem is copyrighted, but the most of the text, including this poem, is available at Google Books...

"Many Hands Make Light Work"

Posted on December 28, 2010
I'll never forget the first time I visited University College London and saw Jeremy Bentham's mummified remains on display in a large glass box in the main corridor. The head is not the original, but everything else is what's left of the great Enlightenment philosopher who died in 1832...

Fonts on Display

Posted on December 28, 2010
Ever since taking a two-semester course on the History of the Printed Book in library school, I have been fascinated with fonts. MIT Musem's Compton Gallery is hosting a show, "Types We Can Make," that highlights new fonts created by Swiss designers from the University of Art and Design in Lausanne...

Prison Libraries' True Value Lies Beyond the Reading Material

Posted on December 26, 2010
A very good essay in the Boston Globe Ideas section today by Avi Steinberg, who recently came out with the memoir, Running the Books about his stint as a prison librarian in the Boston area Suffolk County House of Correction. He writes about the periodic, well, probably ongoing, attacks on prison libraries, from well-meaning reformers who fear that the books will undermine the principle of punishment or might encourage prisoners to consider making a break for it or more fruitless appeals...

West Publishing Stung with $5M Damages to 2 Authors

Posted on December 22, 2010
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Dec. 21 that a jury in U.S. District Court awarded David Rudovsky and Leonard N. Sosnov each $2.5 million as punitive damages in a suit claiming that West defamed them. West listed the professors as authors of the 2008 supplement to the treatise on Pennsylvania criminal procedure after both had refused to be associated with the update because it contained virtually no new material! The Inquirer identifies Rudovsky as a "senior fellow" at Penn and a prominent civil liberties and civil rights attorney...

Blind & Visually Disabled Students Challenge Universities

Posted on December 22, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a news story dated December 12, by Marc Parry, reports that as colleges and universities create more social media-based services and "hubs" for students, there is an increasing problem with visually disabled students lacking access...

Law in Virtual Worlds and How it Intersects Reality

Posted on December 20, 2010
Another article in today's Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, "Virtual World Order," by Rachel Nolan, interviews law professor Greg Lastowka, of Rutgers, Camden, Law School's Institute for Information Policy and Law. Prof. Lastowka has written a book,Virtual Justice, the new laws of online worlds, published by Yale University Press...

Defending Against Hacker Attacks

Posted on December 20, 2010
Another interesting article in the Boston Globe, by the wonderful Hiawatha Bray, about companies whose business is defending against distributed denial of service attacks, as well as other internet attacks. Denial of Service attacks (DDS attacks) essentially seek to overwhelm the victim's resources by sending so many requests simultaneously that the victim's computers cannot respond to legitimate requests, and crash, or simply slow too much to be useful...

Don't Ask Don't Tell Passes Both Houses of Congress

Posted on December 19, 2010
The Boston Globe reported today on the Senate vote that finally passed the end of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy that affected so many gay and lesbian members of the military in recent decades. It was a lousy compromise policy when it was promulgated during the Clinton presidency, and has remained a terrible policy since...

A Moveable Feast

Posted on December 18, 2010
I enjoy reading the Library Babel Fish blog, which is written by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College and appears regularly on Inside Higher Ed. The most recent post, "Finals: An All-Consuming Ritual," hit home for me. Fister describes the "binging and purging" that are as much a part of exam preparation at her school as cramming and last-minute writing of papers...

New Study Using Google Books

Posted on December 17, 2010
The Boston Globe reports on a fascinating cooperative effort where GoogleBooks has created a new tool, the Google Books Ngram Viewer which allows a researcher to sift through the materials scanned into the Google Books project, and automatically calculate the frequency of a word and watch it change over time...

Taking a Hammer to a Mosquito

Posted on December 16, 2010
When dealing with students, it is usually better not to overreact. Although this is true all year long, it is especially true during final exams, when tension levels rise. Right now, my library is literally packed with students, and it is becoming difficult to find a place to study...

Overseas Parental Kidnapping Difficult Problem In Japan & India

Posted on December 07, 2010
The Boston Globe has a brief article about the problems parents face retrieving children when their estranged spouses or partners take children and leave the country. Some countries, like Japan and India are particularly difficult to deal with in getting these children back...

Massachusetts adding cameras to courtrooms

Posted on November 30, 2010
The Boston Globe reports today that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced proposed new rules about cameras in courtrooms at all levels of the judicial system. The rules are not final yet, and comments are encouraged; the article tells interested readers where to send comments...

Digitization at the Kennedy Library

Posted on November 29, 2010
Perhaps because I was born and raised in Boston, I have always been very interested in President John F. Kennedy. His election is the first I remember--I will never forget it. We watched every minute of the Inauguration on television, and were moved by the inaugural address...

Iceland rewrites its constitution: radical democracy

Posted on November 29, 2010
Iceland has a current Constitution conveniently posted to the Internet in English by its government. It is a pretty good looking document to my untutored eye, with 79 Articles in seven roman numeral sections. The Constitution sets Iceland up as a Republic, with a democratically elected government...

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