Hunter's Query

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

We appreciate all of the 2Ls who participated in the Legal Research Survey sent to you by your research professors.  We had 84 responses.  The information you provided us about the legal research you did over the summer will be very helpful to us.  We are always trying to improve legal research instruction. 

We also wanted to congratulate the winners of the drawing for those who completed the survey.  Thomas Weber was the winner of a $20 gift card donated by LexisNexis and Matt Hall won 1000 WestlawRewards points donated by Westlaw. 

Headnotes, found at the beginning of cases in both Westlaw and LexisNexis, are a valuable research tool.  Because of their long life and their impact on legal research and the legal profession, West's headnotes with their Topics and Key Numbers have been analyzed and explained many times.  (Here's one example.) 

On the other hand, LexisNexis headnotes have been a bit more of a mystery to me. LexisNexis has always made it clear that the text of their headnotes is taken straight from the text of the case.  (This is different than West's headnotes, which are written by an editor.)  But, it has taken me a bit longer to get an accurate understanding of how the topics and subtopics in a Lexis Headnote were created and assigned.  When I have asked Lexis employees about this, some have not known how the process works and at least once I was given some misinformation - that the process was done mostly by computers.  Now, finally, I have an explanation that Lexis seems ready to stand by.  Here's an excerpt from an email from Michael Morton, my regional account manager. 

"[T]he editor reads the case and manually chooses the classifications.  He or she has a tool much like an index that has all of the classifications listed there (topics and subtopics).  For each point of law in the case that the editor chooses to include as a headnote, he or she then selects the most relevant subtopic/topic.  Often they are given more than one as obviously they can not be hammered into only one subtopic.  If the language does not fit any current topics, then the editor can request a new one created and a committee of editors makes that decision, but that is very rare.  Once the editor has chosen the language and matched the topics, the secondary editors then check that to make sure it is correct. 

Professor Kevin Worthen, former Dean of the Law School and now Advancement Vice President of BYU, has recently posted many of his articles to SSRN.  Click on the following titles to view the abstracts and download the articles.

Who Decides and What Difference Does it Make? Defining Marriage in 'Our Democratic, Federal Republic'

The Essence of Lawyering in an Atmosphere of Faith 

On Knowing and Caring 

Eagle Feathers and Equality: Lessons on Religious Exceptions from the Native American Experience

Shirt Tales: Clerking for Byron White 

Religiously Affiliated Law Schools: An Added Dimension 

Protecting the Sacred Sites of Indigenous People in U.S. Courts: Reconciling Native American Religion and the Right to Exclude 

Discipline: An Academic Dean’s Perspective on Dealing with Plagiarism

Who Will Control the Future of Indian Gaming? 'A Few Pages of History are Worth a Volume of Logic'

Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Potential Normative Power of American Cities and Indian Tribes

The Role of Indigenous Groups in Constitutional Democracies: A Lesson from Chile and the United States

Who’s in Charge Here? Tribal, State, and Federal Authority Over Non-Indian Resource Development in Indian Country

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Light of Thornton: The People and Essential Attributes of Sovereignty

The Grand Experiment: Evaluating Indian Law in the 'New World'

Shedding New Light on an Old Debate: A Federal Indian Law Perspective on Congressional Authority to Limit Federal Question Jurisdiction

One of the things I talked about in the Academic Legal Research training today was choosing a topic for a case note or seminar paper.    There are lots of different ways to go about selecting a topic.  Often case note authors are looking for circuit splits so they can write on a topic that may someday reach the U.S. Supreme Court.  While searching in Lexis and Westlaw is certainly one way to find circuit splits, there are a few other resources that can be more helpful.

United States Law Week: Circuit Splits - U.S. Law Week examines important cases across the country on a weekly basis.  The Circuit Splits feature highlights the cases that have caused splits among the circuits, providing you with a list of topics and summaries of the issues involved.  A quick glance can give you several possible topics.  This resource is available through the Law Library.

Split Circuits Blog - On this blog, Professor A. Benjamin Spencer of Washington & Lee University School of Law, tracks cases that have generated a circuit split among the federal circuit courts.

If you're writing a seminar paper or some other type of research paper, here are some other resources that might help you find a topic.

BNA Resources - Available through the law library, legal publisher BNA provides daily, weekly and monthly reports on specific legal topics that might be of interest to you.  Finding a relevant BNA publication may help you find a hot topic to write about.

Law Professors Blog Network - This network of blogs is designed to "assist law professors in their scholarship and teaching."  While you may not be a law professor, here you can find a blog that provides scholarly discussion on a topic you may be writing about.

ABA Journal Blawg Directory - The ABA Journal brings together many legal blogs and arranges them by subject, making it easy for you to find a blog on your topic.  Finding such a blog may help you find current topics that would be good to write about.

This is just a start, but you're likely to find a good topic with one of these resources.

The U.S. News and World Report has recently ranked law schools based on the percentage of graduates in federal judicial clerkships.  BYU Law tied for 7th with the University of Michigan at 14%.  The survey looked at 2007 graduates.  Here's some further information on the rankings.

Hat tip to the WSJ Law Blog.

Above the Law reminds us that the deadline for the Attorney General's Honors Program at the U.S. Department of Justice is Tuesday, Sept. 8.  Eligibility and application information is available here. The website notes that the "Honors Program is the only way that the Department hires entry-level attorneys." 

Writing a case note or comment?  Need to get started on a seminar paper?  Can't find the right topic?  Research for an academic paper can be a bit different than typical legal research.  But, don't worry.  The library's here to help.

Join us on Thursday, Sept. 10 at 1pm in room 275/76 as we discuss resources that can help you with your research paper.  You know about Westlaw and Lexis, come find out about other resources you should know about.