After more than 3 years of our blog on this platform, we're moving it to a new Wordpress site. For those of you following us via RSS Feed, we hope you'll subscribe to our new RSS feed. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook. This will be our last post on this version of the blog.
Any of you who have run CALI lessons have learned that they can be quite useful for learning or reviewing subjects for your classes. The Law Library's subscription to CALI gives students and faculty access to over 800 interactive, web-based lessons. Yesterday, CALI just got a bit better with a few enhancements that should serve you well.
First, CALI released a new lesson viewer. That means your lessons will look a bit different, but the main plus for the change is that you can now use CALI on your iPad, iPhone, or other mobile device. Here's a screenshot of the new lesson viewer on an iPad.
The other main enhancement is that student lesson runs and scores will be saved automatically. Previously if you did not hit the save button, your score would be lost. Now CALI saves automatically after each question you answer. A very nice feature.
If you need a CALI authentication code, please contact me at neverss@law.byu.edu.
One of the facts about the United States Code that you may or may not remember from your legal research class is that it has 50 titles. That's a fact that's been repeated to law students for 83 years. Well, not anymore. Late last year Congress enacted a law creating Title 51, "National and Commercial Space Programs." Recently the Journal of Space Law published an issue dealing with this historic change that provides a good history of this new title and the U.S. Code. Now that the U.S. Code has moved beyond 50 titles I think it's safe to say we'll see additional titles in the future.
After all the discussion and debate, a debt ceiling deal was finally reached earlier this week. The bill passed into law is known as the Budget Control Act of 2011. It's useful to note that the authenticated version of the bill and others can be found on the Government Printing Office's Federal Digital System (FDsys). FDsys contains a number of useful government publications that you might need as a lawyer, such as the Code of Federal Regulations, Congressional Hearings, Public Laws, and the Congressional Record. The Government Printing Office has been publishing government information for 150 years and has recently published its own history; Keeping America Informed: The U.S. Government Printing Office: 150 Years of Service to the Nation.
Last week, Robert Ambrogi reported that the Office of Law Revision Council, who has responsiblity for preparing and publishing the U.S. Code, recently released a new official site for the U.S. Code. The site is currently in Beta, but from what I've seen so far it is much better than its previous site. This is another free resource you'll want to be aware of when you head out to practice. Take a look and submit any comments about the new site to uscode@mail.house.gov.
Every summer many of the law librarians from BYU attend a conference put on by the American Association of Law Libraries. This year the conference was in Philadelphia and it was my first time visiting that historic city. Besides the fact that the heat index hit 115 on one of the days, I enjoyed the visit and learned a lot. Before the actual conference began I participated in a conference on legal research education and scholarship with about 20 other legal research professors from across the country. Our host was Drexel Law School. I always enjoy visiting other law libraries and this time I took some pictures to share.
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HeinOnline is one of our favorite resources here in the law library. Most law students know it as the place to get pdf versions of law reviews and journals, but it's much more than that. The Law Library subscribes to a number of different "libraries" in HeinOnline that contain things like the Code of Federal Regulations, legislative histories, state session laws, and a lot more.
Recently we enhanced our HeinOnline subscription by adding the History of International Law library. This library includes more than 500 titles and 550,000 pages dating back to 1690 on International Law subjects such as War & Peace, the Nuremberg Trials, Law of the Sea, International Arbitration, Hague Conferences and Conventions and much more. We hope you'll find it useful in your research.
Beatrice A. Tice has a nice essay in the U.C. Irvine Law Review titled The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School. Tice, the Associate Dean for Library and Information Services at U.C. Irvine School of Law, traces the history of the academic law library as the heart of the law school and examines how that remains true even in our information age. "Simply put," she concludes, "the law library is--and will always remain--the heart fo the law school."
Earlier in the week I tweeted links to a few videos (here and here) showing some of the law school's construction projects going on this summer. Here in the law library we have some of our own construction going on that I thought you might be interested in. We are creating a new quiet study room in the northeast corner of the library's main floor that should be completed near the start of fall semester. It should be a great place to go to get away from some of the inevitable noise in the carrel area. Here are a few pictures taken today. We'll try to keep you updated on the progress.
There is so much information out there (legal and otherwise) that it's nice to get some tips on where to start. That's where librarians come in. Here at the BYU law library, we do our best to help you know where to start a legal resarch project. One way we've done this is to create subject guides that point you to useful information on a topic available through the library or free on the web. Over the past year we've created or enhanced 58 different subject guides for our users. You can also view the guides that have been the most popular in 2011. These subject guides can also be accessed by going to the pull-down menu on the Subject Resources tab on our home page.
These subject guides are a great place to start any research problem and we hope you'll put them to use.
The BYU Law Library is now on Twitter. Follow us @BYUlawlibrary to keep up to date with our blog, Hunter's Query, as well as other goings on here in the law library.
One of the great things about being a law librarian is discovering new and useful information. Recently, while researching some criminal law and procedure issues, I came across the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. The UCR has all kinds of different annual statistics on crimes and arrests nationally, as well as by region, state and local agency. You can even build tables of your own with the UCR Data Tool. If you're doing any type of statistical research or need crime or arrests numbers, the Uniform Crime Reports is a great place to go. These Reports and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Vicitimization Surveys are considered the nation's two crime measures.
If you weren't one already, law school has a way of turning students into Supreme Court watchers. Now that the most recent term is over, SCOTUSblog (which all law students should become familiar with) has given us all the numbers you'll ever want for the term that was in their Stat Pack. Call me a nerd, but I could definitely spend way too much time looking through all this. If you need a shorter version, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog gives a rundown of some of the interesting facts you'll find in the Stat Pack.
Professor Shima Baradaran has recently posted one of her newest articles, Fair Trade and Child Labor, to SSRN. This article was co-authored with Stephanie Barclay and will be published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
I can't say I love legal citation. I understand why we have it and it's useful to me when I want to look up what's being cited, but some of the rules frustrate me.
One of the things I do find interesting about legal citation is that for the most part we still rely on a vendor-owned system - West's National Reporter System - for the majority of our legal citations. Anytime you see an F.2d, P.3d, etc. in a citation, those are based on a the West system. As the internet began changing things there was a push to move away from the West system of citation and go to vendor-neutral citation, so that the West Reporters wouldn't be needed to cite case law. Some states, including Utah, were pioneers in this effort. The Utah Supreme Court issued a standing order (no. 4) in 2000 instituting a neutral citation that was to be used for cases issued on or after Jan. 1, 1999. (The citation looks like this: Smith v. Jones, 1999 UT 16, ¶ 21.) In reality, the Utah citation was not vendor-neutral as the standing order says that "Intial citation shall also include the volume and initial page number of the Pacific Reporter in which the opinion is published." So, while Utah has a public domain citation, it still relies on West's National Reporter System. (The prior example would have to be cited like this initially: Smith v. Jones, 1999 UT 16, ¶ 21, 998 P.2d 250.) Ultimately, the vendor-neutral citation front has been slow to expand.
This has been on my mind recently as Illinois announced that it would institute vendor-neutral citation. From what I've seen, Illinois is the largest jurisdiction to take this step and it will be intersesting to see if others follow its lead. (Although I must say some of the examples provided in the article about IL don't make it look quite as easy as the UT format.) If others do begin following its lead we could see quite a shift in legal citation in the next few years.
Law students are now well into their summer jobs and externships and we hope it's going well. Don't forget the law library is still around to help if you get stuck, so don't forget to ask a law librarian. We've heard from a number of you this summer and we're happy to help.
In that vein, I wanted to pass along a few things that might help your research go smoother this summer. The first is an article about mastering your summer research assignments by Frank Kimball (hat tip to ZiefBrief). He points out some useful tips for doing research this summer. He focuses on something I think is critical--making sure you ask questions during your initial meeting with the attorney assigning the project. The second is a column I wrote for Student Lawyer magazine called Observations for Summer Research Success. Hopefully, some of the things I've seen and learned can aid you in being successful this summer.
The ABA Journal had an interesting article last month discussing the Supreme Court's practice of stealth overruling. This is a practice in which the justices avoid expressly overruling precedent, but in effect do overrule it by "gnawing away at old cases without officially declaring them dead." This is a practice legal researchers should be aware of as they Shepardize/Key Cite cases. Analyzing whether your case is still good law may not be as simple as finding language saying it is overruled or not. As the first commenter to the piece points out, stealth overruling causes problems for practicing attorneys trying to determine the law and properly advise clients.
Dead Precedents: The Justices Overrule, But They Often Do So StealthilyOne of the nice additions to WestlawNext is the ability to save your research in folders. WestlawNext has recently added the ability to share those research folders with other WestlawNext users. Research is often a collaborative process and folder sharing will make collaboration much easier. This will be a big benefit to attorneys and students and I'm glad to see WestlawNext has incorporated it.
To share a folder, simply go to options when you're on the Folders screen and select "share."
From there you can add the contact information of those you want to share with. As a BYU law student you will have access to the names of WestlawNext users in the BYU Law community. After selecting names, your folder will be shared with those you have designated and they will be able to review your folder and, if you've given them the rights, contribute as well.
The law library is always a different place in the summer. One reason is that there always seems to be some kind of construction going on nearby. The University is currently working to finish up some of the new dorms that are replacing the old Deseret Towers and they've begun some work near Heritage Halls that has the law library vibrating most of the day. As I sat shaking at my desk I was reminded of some newspaper articles I scanned a few years back about the groundbreaking of the addition to our very own library that took place in 1995. The old law library did not have a name, but with the new addition the library would bear the name of Howard W. Hunter.
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