ZiefBrief

Summer Reading - Finding Paper & Law Review Topics

It's late spring. You're emerging from the grueling first year of law school * and are now thoroughly grounded in the foundational legal subjects of contracts, civil procedure, torts, criminal law and property. Some of your next academic challenges will likely involve scholarly writing of various types: seminar papers, upper-division research papers, law review comments and notes….

The problem is, in the struggle to survive first year, you probably didn't have time to follow current legal events, and you may have even lost touch (just temporarily, we hope!) with whatever it was that drew you to law in the first place.

So how will you come up with meaty and interesting (to you and others) paper and law review topics?

Before school starts again and the paper crunch sets in, why not follow the latest legal news and controversies over the summer? There are all sorts of well-written newsletters and blogs that can reconnect you to the wider legal world, and may even rekindle your passion for the law.

Here are just a few places to find good reading and good ideas:

Legal News Sites and Newsletters

• Jurist - Paper Chase - "Serious law. Primary sources. Global perspective."
• How Appealing - ostensibly devoted to appellate litigation, but covers legal news very broadly
• SCOTUSblog - detailed Supreme Court news
• Wall Street Journal's Law Blog - special emphasis on law and business
• U.S. Law Week - weekly report on developments from around the country. USF law students and faculty will find links to U.S. Law Week and a slew of other BNA newsletters  on the Zief Law Library web site. (If you're at another law school, check with your law library to see whether they subscribe to USLW.)
  

Commentary

• FindLaw's Writ - Legal Commentary - op-ed-style essays from professors, politicians, practitioners
• Jurist - Forum - essays on current legal controversies from scholars around the world

Links to Legal Blogs on All Topics

• Law X.0's Taxonomy of Legal Blogs, which organizes blogs topically
• Blawg - especially the Legal Subjects & Areas category
• Blawg Republic - the latest posts from various blogs and a directory of blogs by category
• The Blogs of Law

(If you routinely visit lot of blogs and online newsletters, a service like Bloglines can help you stay on top of all of them.)

Next Steps

[update, 6.12.06] Once you've rekindled your interest in the law, see the Zief Library's guide to Finding a Topic for Your Comment, Note, or Law School Paper for a more extensive survey of ways to look for good topics for law school writing projects.

* [6.20.06] About to start law school? Thought you'd find summer reading advice here? Visit our post Summer Reading: Bracing Yourself for the First Year of Law School instead.

[Links updated 6.25.2008.]

Surviving Finals

Just in time to alleviate end-of-semester stress, our colleagues at Santa Clara's "Heafey Headnotes" have this gem of a post on Exam Prep Advice. Among the lifelines they cite is the Law School Academic Support blog, whose exams - studying and exams - theory categories are packed with useful tips and ideas.

[Thanks, Amy!]

Supreme Court Approves Citation to Unpublished Federal Court Opinions

Citation to unpublished federal judicial opinions will likely soon be allowed in any of the U.S. Federal Courts of Appeal. A new Rule 32.1 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure [PDF text], approved by the Supreme Court under its authority to prescribe federal court rules of procedure, will go into effect on December 1, 2006 unless Congress takes action to countermand it.

For more on this story, see this report on the Supreme Court's approval of Rule 32.1 and Tony Mauro's article: "Supreme Court Votes to Allow Citation to Unpublished Opinions in Federal Courts" from law.com.

A summary of the federal courts' rulemaking procedures is available on the U.S. Courts - Federal Judiciary web site.

[Thanks to Timothy Stanley at Justia.com for the tip!]

Weasel Numbers, Welfare Economics, and Social Welfare - A New Article from Prof. Dibadj

Professor Reza Dibadj's new article, "Weasel Numbers," has just appeared in the latest issue of Cardozo Law Review.

Professor Dibadj opens with a brief overview of "weasel words" in law—words like "reasonable" or "due care" which do not admit of any precise definition. He continues:

Perhaps in an attempt to cabin the unnerving open-endedness of weasel words, however, interdisciplinary scholarship occupies increasing prominence in legal academics. In particular, law and economics, the most influential of these interdisciplinary movements, "seeks to replace the legal process virtues of judgment and statesmanship with the formal algebra of neoclassical economics." On the one hand, its illustrious proponents, notably Richard Posner, believe that law should be guided by economics, which they optimistically paint as the "science of rational choice." And while there have been several brilliant critiques of the law and economics paradigm, the vast majority of these arguments have been from outside the economics tradition.

I take a different tack and argue against conventional interpretations of law and economics from within the literature of welfare economics itself. In sum, I make two arguments. The first is that traditional law and economics deeply misunderstands modern advances in welfare economics. The second is that these advances point to the need for a robust administrative state—a conclusion directly at odds with mainstream law and economics, which too often revels in denigrating public bureaucracy.

I introduce into the literature the notion of "weasel numbers" as a new metaphor to debunk the myth that mathematical economics can provide certainty. Just like lawyers must deal with weasel words, welfare economists must deal with weasel numbers. While both are useful, neither will provide a first-best solution. To believe that welfare economics can provide precise answers to questions of public policy is a pipe dream.…

Reza R. Dibadj, "Weasel Words," 27 Cardozo Law Review 1345 (2006) is available in full (as a PDF file) at the Cardozo Law Review web site.

The article is available in print 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: 27 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325. Westlaw subscribers can use "Find by citation" or "Find & Print" and enter: 27 CDZLR 1325.

[Other publications by Professor Reza Dibadj are listed on the Zief Library's Faculty Publications page. The USF Law School web site has this profile of Professor Dibadj.]

A Growing Federal Register Archive from Westlaw's RegulationsPlus

In its RegulationPlus initiative Westlaw has not only annotated the Code of Federal Regulations and create a CFR index from scratch, it also now offers the entire Federal Register, from 1936 to the present.

The Federal Register is "the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents." (GPO Access Federal Register site.)

For some time, the Federal Register from 1980⁄81 has been available on Westlaw in the FR ("Federal Register") database — and on Lexis, too, in the "FR - Federal Register" source. Westlaw's RegulationsPlus project extended coverage back to the inception of the Federal Register.

The pre-1981 Federal Register appears in the Westlaw database FR-OLD ("Archival Federal Register 1936-1980") database. As Westlaw's Scope screen notes, users' queries search  "the citation, date, and summary information of the content, in addition to the Adobe text in the attached PDF file." Search results show document summaries, and each summary links to a downloadable PDF file of the full Federal Register document.

Members of the University of San Francisco community can also find the Federal Register via HeinOnline. HeinOnline's Federal Register covers 1936 to the present, in exact page images.

All researchers may use the Government Printing Office's Federal Register site, which covers  1994 (volume 59) to the present.

[This is ZiefBrief’s third post on RegulationsPlus. The first was An Annotated CFR At Last! New From Westlaw . The second was More Ways to Find Federal Regulations - RegulationsPlus Index on Westlaw.]