Hunter's Query

Professor Cheryl Preston has recently published her article "All Knowledge is Not Equal: Facilitating Children's Access to Knowledge by Making the Internet Safer" in the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy.  She has also posted it to SSRN and it is available for download here.

The legal research blogosphere was full of discussion today about Google Scholar's addition of free legal content.  Here's the announcement from the Google Blog.  When you head to Google Scholar you'll notice you can restrict your search to "Legal opinions and journals."  The Advanced Scholar Search will allow you to restrict your search by jurisdiction.  Internet For Lawyers reports that the coverage of court opinions is as follows:

- 1 US 1 (pre 1776-)

- 1 F 2d 1 (1924-)

- F Supp Cases

- US State Cases (1950-)

This is certainly not as sophisticated a tool as Lexis or Westlaw, but it is free and is a welcome addition to the legal research world.

Check out some other blog posts at Wisblawg, Goodson Blogson, and Resource Shelf.

The Law Library has a number of print study aids that can be quite useful to you as you study for finals.  Many of these books provide outlines, explanations, and sample essay and multiple choice questions that can help you get ready.  Recently we have moved a number of these upstairs into the 3d floor collection to give you better access to them.  The most current study aids remain in the Reserve Library.  Here is a list of some of some of the popular study aid series titles we own.  Clicking on the title will show you what we have.

Examples and Explanations 

Black Letter Outlines 

Understanding Series 

Exam Pro 

Gilbert Law Summaries 

Concise Hornbook 

Emanuel Law Outlines 

PMBR 

Bar/Bri 

Questions and Answers 

Legalines 

Once you've clicked any of the above links, you can limit by topic by typing in your subject in the keyword search box at the bottom of the screen.  Simply type it in after the name of the series which will already appear in the box, like this:

Study aids that the catalog says are in the "Hunter Law Library Study Guides" location are found in the Reserve Library.

Tomorrow, November 14, we celebrate the birthday of Howard W. Hunter for whom the Law Library was named.  After having a distinguished career as an attorney in California, President Hunter served in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then later as President of the Church.  He passed away in 1995.  The Law Library was named in his honor at its rededication in 1997.  You can read more about the naming and rededication of the library here.

Oral argument in Kucana v. Holder, the case in which Professor RonNell Andersen Jones acted as co-counsel, was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday.  BYU Law students assisted Professor Jones with the brief and BYU hosted the moot for the case.  Professor Amanda C. Leiter argued the case before the court.

Supreme Court oral argument transcripts are available on the Supreme Court's website the day they are argued.  You can read the Kucana transcript here.  Eventually the audio of the oral argument will be available on Oyez, which is a great website.

Professor Margaret Tarkington has recently posted her newest article, "A Free Speech Right to Impugn Judicial Integrity in Court Proceedings," to SSRN.  Download it here.  Professor Tarkington's article has been accepted for publication in the Boston College Law Review.  Here's the abstract:

"Throughout the United States, state and federal courts discipline and sanction attorneys who make disparaging remarks about the judiciary and thereby impugn judicial integrity. In so doing, courts have almost universally rejected the constitutional standard established in New York Times v. Sullivan for punishing speech regarding government officials. While courts have imposed severe sanctions regardless of the forum where the speech has occurred, many of the cases involve speech made by attorneys in court proceedings. The existing scholarly literature generally supports the denial of First Amendment protection in such cases, indicating that attorney speech when made in court proceedings is entitled to little, if any, constitutional protection.

In A Free Speech Right to Impugn Judicial Integrity in Court Proceedings, Professor Tarkington examines why a free speech right to impugn judicial integrity must be recognized for attorneys - even, and perhaps especially, when acting as officers of the court and making statements in court proceedings. Such a right is necessary to protect the constitutional and other rights of litigants to an unbiased and competent judiciary. Further, the recognition of such a right in the attorney preserves litigants’ access to courts and due process rights. These rights belonging to litigants are all but lost where attorneys are punished for or chilled from asserting them in court proceedings. Previous scholarly arguments - which are based on analogies to other areas of limited First Amendment protection - fail to account for the protection of the underlying rights of litigants, the role of attorneys in our adversary system, and the constitutionally-required role of the judicial branch. Importantly, the judiciary does not need to punish attorney speech impugning judicial integrity in order to protect its legitimate interests in the just adjudication of cases. In fact, by curbing speech in the presentation of claims, the judiciary undermines its own role and responsibility in remedying constitutional violations and providing fair proceedings."

When studying for final exams I always found it quite helpful to look at professor-specific sample exams.  Doing so can give you a feel for how your professor has written exams in the past, as well as give you a practice run at some exam questions.  The Law Library has an electronic collection of professor-specific sample exams available to current BYU law students.  Access to this collection requires a password that you can get by contacting me (neverss@law.byu.edu) or the circulation or reference desks.

I, like many others, am mourning the loss of Professor Michael Goldsmith this week.  He was a true "can do" lawyer, like he always taught his students to be. 

I enjoyed Paul Rolly's Salt Lake Tribune column about Prof. Goldsmith and wanted to pass it on.  Maverick professor an unlikely BYU hero

In our legal research classes we do our best to get you ready to conduct legal research when you go out to practice.  Because of that we don't always get into all the research sources and techniques that may help you if you're writing a case note or other research paper.  I recently wrote a column for Student Lawyer magazine that may be of interest to you if you have to do this type of research (which I like to call "academic legal research"). 

 The return of November means one thing in law school - finals are near.  As scary as that may sound, there is still plenty of time to get ready.  During the next few weeks I will blog about a number of services the law library has to offer to help you prepare.

Today I want to remind you about CALI.  The law library subscribes to CALI because it offers over 600 web-based tutorials on a number of different legal topics.  These tutorials are great at helping you nail down some of those concepts you haven't quite grasped yet.  Also, because of their interactive nature, CALI tutorials are a great way to mix up your study time (especially when you're staring at your outline for minutes at a time without really learning anything - I've been there).  So, if you haven't been using CALI, now's the time to take a look.  Email me at neverss@law.byu.edu if you need our school's authorization code.

When using KeyCite on Westlaw you'll often find cases that have been cited many times.  Roe v. Wade, for example, has nearly 20,000 citing documents.  The only feasible way to deal with so many cases is to limit your KeyCite display.  When doing so, one way you can limit is by document type (i.e. cases, secondary sources, court docs, etc.).  Until now, you've always had to uncheck all the sources you did not want - an annoying process.  But, not anymore.  From Westlaw's Tom Duggan:

"KeyCite “Clear All” Now Available

 Using KeyCite Limits just got even easier! Previously, when limiting KeyCite Citing References by Document Type, you would have to individually de-select each item you wished to exclude. This became very cumbersome if there were many document types but you only wished to include a few. Now just look for the “Clear All” button at the top of the Document Type page under KeyCite Limits and quickly clear all the document type check boxes."

Professor J. Clifton Fleming Jr. has recently posted two of his articles on SSRN.

Some Perspectives from the United States on the Worldwide Taxation vs. Territorial Taxation Debate (with Robert J. Peroni and Stephen E. Shay)

The Deceptively Disparate Treatment of Business and Investment Interest Expense Under a Cash-Flow Consumption Tax and a Schanz-Haig-Simons Income Tax 

 HeinOnline is one of our favorite resources here in the Law Library.  It offers PDF versions of many great legal resources.  While many students and faculty are familiar with HeinOnline and its content, they are less familiar with how to search HeinOnline.  The truth is it takes some practice to learn how to search HeinOnline because its search syntax is a bit different from Lexis and Westlaw.  However, once you get familiar with how to search on HeinOnline you'll find it's a very powerful tool. 

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when searching HeinOnline:

1 - Boolean operators must be in all capital letters.  That means AND, OR, NOT.

2- The root expander in HeinOnline is * not !

3- Proximity searching (something I've written about before) is probably the most different of all the search commands.  In HeinOnline, you put the terms you want close to one another in quotation marks followed by a ~ and some number.  For example, "disaster legislation"~10 means you are looking for the word "disaster" within 10 words of the word "legislation."

4- Boosting a term allows you to influence the relevancy ranking of your results list.  (By the way, you can't have your results ranked by relevance when using a terms and connectors search in Westlaw or Lexis.)  So, if I have two terms, but I think one term is more important I can include a ^ followed by a number after the more important term.  For example, disaster^5 AND legislation will find results with both the terms "disaster" and "legislation" in them, but will bring documents with "disaster" found more frequently to the top of my results list.

Here is a handout David Armond and I prepared for a faculty training I presented at last week.  It only covers the search tips I think students and faculty will use the most.  More detailed search syntax instructions are available here.

I am sure you're all looking forward to registering for Winter classes in one week's time.  In anticipation of that I wanted to alert you to a few classes taught by some of our law librarians that you may want to consider. 

Advanced Legal Research (Law 796R §8) Prof. Gary Hill, TH 9-9:50

This course will cover research topics and advanced techniques in the following areas: administrative law, legislative history, practice materials, government documents, non-legal databases, internet resources, tax research, treaties, and family law. There are assignments for each area and a bibliography that is to integrate the topics and techniques learned in the course.

Federal Tax Research (Law 796R §20) Prof. Dennis Sears, W 2-2:50

This course focuses on researching the basic documents generated by the IRS. Students are introduced to various hardcopy and online resources available to research these documents. They are assigned to research specific documents in assigned resources and to present an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the resources so that each resource can be compared and contrasted with other resources. The course culminates in an annotated bibliography by each student of a tax topic of the student’s choice, approved by the professor, in which the student uses the various resources introduced during the course of the semester to complete the bibliography.

Intro. to Law Librarianship (Law 796R §25) Prof. Galen Fletcher, T 10-10:50

Awareness of current trends and developments in information aspects of the legal profession. Introduces the various departments and types of specialization within law libraries, and examines different types of law libraries, their organizational structures, collections and services. Designed for students with an interest in law librarianship or legal bibliography or both.

Brian Leiter has recently released his Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality for 2009 and BYU Law has come in ranked at #27.  The ranking is based on "the average of the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for the class that entered in fall 2008."

Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog.

Legal citation is full of legal abbreviations.  A number of these are easily recognized by legal researchers (P.2d, F.Supp, U.S., etc); however, many others are completely foreign (A.N., EWiR, W.L.R.,).  You'll probably encounter some unfamiliar abbreviations when performing a source pull or reading a law review article.  When I'm looking for the meaning of a legal abbreviation there are two places I turn - Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations and Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. 

Prince's Bieber Dictionary, or Bieber's as many librarians call it, focuses on abbreviations and acronyms found in American legal literature.  It is a book found behind the law library reference desk (KF 246 .B46 2009) in which you can look things up by abbreviation or by title.  I have cracked the code of many unfamiliar abbreviations with Bieber's as my tool. 

Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations is a web-based tool that focuses more on foreign and international legal abbreviations than does Bieber's.  Freely available on the web, this index's search functions allow you to search by both abbreviation and title.  Its foreign and international abbreviations make it an excellent companion to Bieber's.

With these two tools you're unlikely to get stumped by a perplexing legal abbreviation.

Professor Lynn Wardle has recently posted two of this articles to SSRN.  Click on the titles to read the abstracts and download the papers.

Restructuring Democracy or Lawlessness? Critical Reflections on in Re Marriage Cases 

From Slavery to Same Sex Marriage: Comity Versus Public Policy and Inter-Jurisdictional Recognition of Controversial Domestic Relations

  LexisNexis has recently released a new Shepard's Signal for statutes.  The red encircled exclamation point you may encounter when shepardizing a statute indicates "that citing references in the Shepard's Citations Service contain strong negative treatment of the Shepardized section (for example, the section may have been found to be unconstitutional or void)."

   The Law Library has recently acquired access to the Religion Case Reporter - "the only publication in the United States devoted exclusively to reporting and indexing judicial opinions addressing the interaction between law and religion."  The Religion Case Reporter provides summaries and sometimes the full text of these court opinions dealing with religion.  The best part about this resource is its cumulative index that allows researchers to quickly find cases that combine religion and other legal topics.  For example, the entry "adoption" in the index will provide you with several adoption cases that involve religion in some way. 

Organizing your research is an important part of the research process.  You need a good way to keep track of all the cases, statutes, etc., and how they apply to your research problem.  One resource that may be helpful to you is CaseMap.  CaseMap is a LexisNexis product that comes with the Library's LexisNexis subscription.  In conjunction with the Library and the Advocacy Program, LexisNexis will be offering CaseMap training on Monday (9/28) and Tuesday (9/29).  All law students are invited to attend (and some 1Ls are required to attend - check with your legal research instructor.)  Here's the schedule:

Monday, Sept. 28th

11-11:50 - rm. 306

12-12:50 - rm. 275/76

3-3:50 - rm. 275/76

Tuesday, Sept. 29th

9-9:50 - rm. 205

10-10:50 - rm. 205

3-3:50 - rm. 275/76