ZiefBrief

"And now, for the rest of the story...": the background and back story for Law School Cases

Thanks to the innovation of Harvard Law Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose stern visage graces this post), student in US law schools learn the law by reading appellate court decisions. The important cases on each subject are gathered together by the most eminent names in legal scholarship and sold at a thumping great price in a "case book." One of the problems with case books is that the decisions are heavily redacted in the interest of brevity. Sometimes the cuts are so extensive that the poor law student has only the sketchiest idea who the parties are and what the real disputes is about.
Foundation Press, one of the major publishers of case books, has started a series of readable volumes to help fill in the "back story" on some of the most important cases in American Jurisprudence. Currently the Zief law library holds the following titles in the "… Stories" Series:

• Business tax stories
• Civil procedure stories
• Constitutional law stories
• Employment discrimination stories
• Environmental law stories
• Evidence Law Stories
• Immigration stories
• Intellectual property stories
• Labor law stories
• Legal ethics stories
• Property stories
• Tax stories
• Torts stories

Click Here for a random page from the book Torts Stories courtesy of Amazon.


Click Here for the first page of the discussion of the Tarasoff case in the book Torts Stories courtesy of Amazon.


For more information on all these titles and their  location in the Zief Library click on this link to Ignacio, the online catalog.

Congressional Research Service Reports - The Research Goldmine Congress Doesn't Want To Share

When members of Congress need the best possible objective, non-partisan research on any of the diverse issues Congress faces, they can turn to their very own Congressional Research Service (CRS), which boasts a staff of "nationally recognized experts in a range of issues and disciplines, including law, economics, foreign affairs, public administration, the information, social, political sciences, natural sciences." (About the Congressional Research Service.) The rest of us… not so much. Congress has always maintained that it has no obligation to share CRS reports. They're not secret, but Congress makes no effort to release them, so although CRS reports do show up on the web, they appear only in selected, topically-focused collections.

But there are private suppliers for Congressional Research Service reports. And with the Zief Library's recent purchase of CRS reports (through LexisNexis's Congressional Research Digital Collection), researchers at the University of San Francisco may dig into the most complete collection of CRS reports — thousands upon thousands of them — available outside Capitol Hill.

USF’s Congressional Research Service Reports are presented as part of the much larger LexisNexis Congressional service, which is available to all current members of the USF community. Right now CRS reports are available from the early 1940s through 2003. This spring LexisNexis has begun extending the collection both retrospectively and prospectively, and by some time in about two years CRS reports from 1916 to the present should be available. [Update, 5.18.06: LexisNexis's coverage of CRS reports now extends from the early 1940s through January 2006.]

USF researchers can search CRS reports by following these steps.

• Sign on to LexisNexis Congressional [USF community only. If you are connecting from off campus, follow the "Remote Access" instructions.]
• Select "Advanced Search" tab
• Check the "Search within" checkbox to the left of "CRS Reports" and uncheck all the others.
• Set a date range for your search (The default date restriction is "most recent 2 years." You can pick other date ranges from the "Restrict by: date" pull-down menu.)

The LexisNexis Congressional search engine searches the detailed descriptions of CRS but not the reports' full text. The reports themselves are available in PDF format.

You can restrict searches to the CRS reports' titles, subjects, or authors, and if you have a CRS report number (e.g., 92-959), you can enter that number as a search term.

Smaller collections of CRS reports are available for free on the web. If you're not with USF and your institution can't swing the cost of LexisNexis's CRS reports, these sites may lead you to useful reports.

• CRS Reports, by Stephen Young
  
• Univ. of Oregon Libraries Documents Center Congressional Research Service page
  

More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw

This month Westlaw introduced a new way to find relevant regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations: the RegulationsPlus Index.

What is an Index? In this case, it's an alphabetical list of thousands and thousands of terms or concepts that shows which CFR provisions relate to those words or concepts.  (For more see Wikipedia's Index (publishing).) The RegulationsPlus CFR Index is so extensive that in print (yes, Thomson⁄West is selling a print version, and the Zief Library should have it shortly), it takes up four large volumes. [Update, 5.19.06: Zief's copy of the new West's Code of Federal Regulations Index is now on the shelves at KF 70 .A34 W47 Law Stacks.]

Why in the world would you want to use an index when you can do a key word search? Well, take the following example:

Suppose you want to know if there are regulation that govern whether a federal contractor who is kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq can get workers' compensation benefits? If you search the CFR for:

"workers compensation" and  kidnap!  or  abduct!

you will get no documents.

But if you go to the RegulationsPlus Index for the letter "K," and then  scroll down and select the word "Kidnapping," you'll see, at the end of the list of entries for Kidnapping, a reference to: "War, workers compensation, 20 C.F.R. § 61.300 et seq."

Why did the index work when the full-text search failed? The regulations beginning at Section 61.300 use the term "detention," but West's indexers, in reading these regulations, realized that they would cover kidnapping, so the indexers listed the regs in their index under the term "kidnapping."

How can Westlaw subscribers get to the RegulationsPlus CFR Index? At the Westlaw welcome screen enter "CFR" in the "Search these databases" textbox. Then, at the search screen, select the "RegulationsPlus Index" link. You can browse alphabetically or search for index entries that start with or contain certain words or phrases.

[This is ZiefBrief's second post on RegulationsPlus. The first was An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw. The third is A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw’s RegulationsPlus.]

Blogging the Saddam Hussein Trial - Experts' Perspectives

In Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog, leading experts in public international law discuss and debate issues raised by the war-crimes trial of Iraq's deposed president. Grotian Moment bloggers include law professors from the U.S. and abroad, practitioners, and lawyers with IGOs such as the UN. At this writing they have contributed substantive essays on over 30 issues ranging from "The Right to Self Representation" to "Head of State Immunity" to "The Crime of Aggression" to "Lessons from the Milosevic Trial" to "Judge Amin's Resignation" to "Responding to Saddam’s Hunger Strike." In the latest post, Issue #34: Show Trial or Real Trial?, Michael P. Scharf and Gregory S. McNeal take a look at the evidence presented by the prosecution.

Grotian Moment also links to breaking news and to background information on the trial.

Grotian Moment is co-sponsored by the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and by the Public International Law & Policy Group. Its title derives from the term "Grotian moment," which the blog defines as "a legal development that is so significant that it can create new customary international law or radically transform the interpretation of treaty-based law."

[A tip of the hat to Cornell Law Library's InSITE!]

An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw

Back in the day, when ZiefBrief was learning the techniques of legal research, it was a given that there was no truly satisfactory way to find cases interpreting the Code of Federal Regulations. The one tool, Shepard's Code of Federal Regulations Citations, was so beset with quirks and pitfalls that it intimidated even expert researchers. Then came Lexis and Westlaw, and we could write full-text searches to pick up references to the CFR. But that technique (like the Shepard's CFR citator) depended on anticipating all of the ways a court might possibly have referred to a relevant CFR section.

Westlaw's new RegulationsPlus changes all that.

Among the many features of RegulationsPlus are annotations for the CFR. The annotations are written by West editors and are exactly analogous (in concept and look-and-feel) to the annotations to Thomson⁄West's USCA. (Thomson⁄West even plans on taking the retro step of bringing out selected annotated CFR titles in print.)

For examples of CFR annotations, take 36 C.F.R. 1191.1, the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities. To see the annotations written by the Thomson⁄West editors, be sure you select the "Links for" tab in the left-hand frame, then click on the "Notes of Decisions" link in the "Links for" tab.

Or, if you prefer, you can use Westlaw's KeyCite to find cases and other documents that cite your CFR section. To use KeyCite, Select the "Links for"” tab, then select the "Citing References" link.

[This is ZiefBrief's first post on RegulationsPlus. The second is More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw. The third is A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw’s RegulationsPlus.]

Human Rights in 2005 - The State Department's Report

Today the United States Department of State released the 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.  Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Trade Act of 1974, the State Department is required to issue these annual reports on countries receiving foreign aid and on other U.N. member nations.

Previous reports, starting from 1999, are available on the State Department's human rights reports page. Reports from 1993 to 1998 are available via the Democracy and Human Rights section of the State Department archive maintained by the Federal Depository Library at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In due time a print copy of the 2005 report will arrive in the Zief Library, where it will be shelved on the lower level at call number JC 571 .U48a Law Stacks.

The European Court of Human Rights - Insights from Prof. McKaskle

The latest issue of the University of San Francisco Law Review features Professor Paul McKaskle's new article, "The European Court of Human Rights: What It Is, How It Works, and Its Future."

Inspired by Supreme Court's use of European Court of Human Rights case law as persuasive authority in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), Professor McKaskle explores the history, current structure, jurisprudential principles, and problems — particularly a burgeoning caseload — likely to affect future operations of the Strasbourg Court. His primary audience is American lawyers for whom he contends that some familiarity with the court is "useful, if not necessary."

The full citation to the article is: McKaskle, Paul L., "The European Court of Human Rights: What It Is, How It Works, and Its Future." 40 University of San Francisco Law Review 1 (2005).

The article is now available in most, if not all, U.S. academic law libraries — including the Zief Library (where it's currently at the Circulation & Reserve Desk). In addition, Lexis subscribers can retrieve the article by using "Get a Document" and entering the citation: 40 U.S.F. L. Rev. 1. Westlaw subscribers can use "Find by citation" or "Find & Print" and enter: 40 USFLR 1.

[Other publications by Professor Paul McKaskle are listed on the Zief Library's Faculty Publications page.]