ZiefBrief

Justice Antonin Scalia Bobblehead added to Zief Collection

We are proud to announce the latest addition to our growing collection of bobblehead figurines with a handsome likeness of Justice Scalia. These whimsical representations are produced by the Law Review the Green Bag as a special gift to their loyal subscribers. Go to the Scalia bobblehead library catalog record for a brief description, or the Green Bag web page for a more in-depth analysis of the iconography to be found on the bobblehead.

And a bobble of gratitude to Leslie C. for schlepping and shipping our latest addition to its new home.

Can I Trust This Web Site?

Well, of course you can trust ZiefBrief; we're librarians!

But what about other sites? How can you tell if you can rely on the information they present? There are no hard-and-fast rules, but Karen G. Schneider of the Librarians' Internet Index concisely summarizes some guiding principles in Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. (Karen is the Director of the LII, and author of the personal blog Free Range Librarian.)

[Thanks to Slaw for the tip!]

If Karen’s article intrigues you, you'll find more on evaluating web sites at Genie Tyburski's Virtual Chase: Teaching Legal Professionals How To Do Research. Particularly useful is the "teaching web" Evaluating the Quality of Information on the Internet. Using a slide-show format with plenty of telling anecdotes, this teaching web covers these major topics:

• Why Information Quality Matters
• Criteria for Quality in Information
• How to Evaluate Information
• Hoaxes and Other Bad Information
• Alerting Services on Bad Information

Three accompanying checklists summarize the main points.

Human Trafficking - Amassing Web Sites

As the USF School of Law prepares to host the symposium "Invisible Chains: Human Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United States," notice comes to ZiefBrief of a new web portal and search engine on human trafficking.

The site, Human Trafficking Search, is a project of the National Multicultural Institute and links to thousands of NGO, IGO, and governmental web resources on trafficking. Visitors can display relevant sites by country or broad topic (trafficking, bonded labor, child labor, or sex slavery), or use the site's basic or advanced search engines to look for more narrowly-focused sites. The site also has the last trafficking news, courtesy of Yahoo!News.

[Thanks to beSpacific for the tip!]

[The University of San Francisco School of Law symposium Invisible Chains: Human Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United States will take place at the law school on February 3, 2006. It is jointly sponsored by the Center for Law and Global Justice  and the Journal of Law and Social Challenges.]

California's Three Strikes Law - A Primer

California's "Three Strikes" law (Cal. Penal Code Sec. 667) turned 10 recently, and to mark the occasion the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office has released A Primer: Three Strikes - The Impact After More Than a Decade. The Primer's chapters include:

• Introduction and Background
• The Legal Evolution of California's Three Strikes Law
• Impact of Three Strikes on the Criminal Justice System
• The Impact of Three Strikes on Public Safety
• Conclusion - The Future of Three Strikes

[Thanks to the Librarians' Internet Index for the tip!]

Reliving the Alito Hearings With Verbatim Transcripts

With Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings at an end, and the Senate debate about to begin, you may find yourself trying to recall exactly what Judge Alito or one of his questioners said during the hearings. If so, click over to the Washington Post's Campaign for the Court blog, and particularly to the post that links to each day's transcripts of the Judiciary Committee hearings on the Alito nomination.

[Thanks to beSpacific and SCOTUSblog for the tip!]

Liveblogging the Alito Hearings

Once again the good folks at SCOTUSblog are liveblogging the Alito hearings. For minute-by-minute updates on each day's events, surf on over to SCOTUSblog and look for the "Alito Hearings" posts of January 9th and beyond. To get you started, here are first two posts, from Monday the 9th:

• Alito Supreme Court Hearings: 1/9/2006
• Alito Hearings: 1/9/2006

Alito's Opinions Condensed: Yale's Alito Project

Looking for a way to get up to speed on Judge Samuel Alito's opinions before his confirmation hearings start on Monday? No time to read all 415 majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions he's written? No worries! The Alito Project at Yale Law School has it covered.

In this informal project, a small group of Yale Law School students and faculty read each one of Judge Alito's opinions, summarized their findings in a 62-page report, and delivered a copy of the report to each U.S. senator.

Yale's press release describing the Alito Project links to the full report, The Alito Opinions: A Report of the Alito Project at the Yale Law School (PDF; 62 pages).

[Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog for the tip!]

Ring in the New Year with New UK Civil Partnership Law

Welcome to 2006 from all of us at ZiefBrief! To start your year out right here are a few useful references about the recent change in Civil Partnership law in the United Kingdom.

First, a new print publication recently added to the collection here at the Zief. Titled Civil Partnership - the New Law, it guides you through the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 with reference to statutory and case law as well as relevant portions of the European Convention of Human Rights jurisprudence. While primarily aimed at practicing solicitors and barristers it does contain a wealth of the sort of background information on the Act that we US researchers would define as legislative history.

And for those of you who can't (or won't) deal with something so 20th century as a book, there is a good web resource at the British Directgov website. Titled Rights and Responsibilites the target audience is the general public but there are a wealth of links to government agencies and FAQ's of interest to academic and legal researchers.

Thanks to the Librarian's Internet Index for the tip on the web resource.