ZiefBrief

Searching Blogs With LexisNexis - Yes, LexisNexis!

ZiefBrief is just back from a quick Lexis update, in which we were surprised to stumble on a blog search source (aptly, if a bit redundantly, named "Web Blogs") in the LexisNexis News & Business materials.

It's not completely clear how many blogs are included, but we're guessing maybe a couple of dozen, including Wonkette. [See update, below.] The collection appears to start with January of 2006.

So why search a small collection of blogs on Lexis when you can search thousands via Technorati or Google's Blog Search?

Two reasons occur to us: (1) to retrieve a manageable sample of what a few well-known blogs are saying about a person or issue; or (2) to be able to exploit all of the power of Lexis searching, including the use of proximity connectors (such as w/s or w/p) and ultra-precise date restrictions. [It can't hurt that LexisNexis treats each blog post as a discrete document, either. 7.10.2006.]

If you're a LexisNexis subscriber, here's how to search the LexisNexis blog collection.
Sign on, then, in the "Look for a Source" box, select the "News & Business" tab, then "Combined Sources" and then "Web Blogs." (For Lexis geeks, the short name is: NEWS;BLOGS.) The Web Blogs source is also included in the "News, All (English, Full Text)" source (short name: NEWS:ALLNWS).

[Update, 7.10.2006] Here in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, ZiefBrief managed to get some hard data on Lexis's new Web Blogs source. First, the source contains 425 blogs, many more than ZiefBrief guessed earlier. Second, LexisNexis has advice on incuding and excluding blog content from search results in news group files (such as "News, All").

To limit your results to blog content, add the following to the rest of your search:

and publication(blogs)

To exclude blogs from your search, tack this on to the end of your search:

and not publication(blogs)

Presidential Signing Statements - Get 'em While They're Hot

Articles like the Boston Globe's Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws mark increased interest in and controversy over the presidential practice of appending interpretive statements to laws.

Sara Sampson at Ohio State's Moritz Legal Information Blog has recently offered good advice on where find signing statements.

And now, over at coherentbabble, Joyce Green is building a complete, annotated compendium of President George W. Bush's signing statements. The compendium includes a thorough FAQ about signing statements that explains what they are and why they are controversial, and offers further research advice for anyone who just can't get enough.

[Thanks to Jack Balkin at Balkinization for the tip!]

[Update: 6.28.2006] For more on the debate about signing statements, visit our colleagues at Vox Bibliothecae and read their post Presidential Signing Statements. And its not just we librarians who care. Now the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken notice and has held a hearing on presidential signing statements.

[Update 7.24.2006] The controversy continues with this report of the ABA's Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine (PDF; 34 pages). The Task Force web page reports that "The Task Force will present a report with recommendations to the ABA House of Delegates at the 2006 Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii (August 7-8, 2006)."

Summer Reading: Bracing Yourself for the First Year of Law School

ZiefBrief has noticed that lots of folks looking for advice on getting ready to start law school are wandering from Google into our post on finding inspiration for law review and paper topics.

So, we thought, why not some words on how to spend the summer before law school?

Frankly, we don't think that there's much you can do over the summer to give yourself any concrete advantage or leg up for the first year. The beginning of the first semester, and any orientation period are when you’ll really learn how to tackle law school. Better you should spend the summer doing something fun, so that you show up in the fall rested and refreshed. Here we agree with the U. Conn. School of Law's Summer Reading list, which advises:

Two of the most important things you can do this summer, aside from dealing with real-world obligations such as making money, child care and the like, do not involve reading at all. They include: (1) breathing in; and (2) breathing out! Seriously, you will be much better prepared for the rigors of law school if you have had a balanced, enjoyable and relaxing summer than if you have not.

That said, if you're curious about law (and if you're not, rethink that decision to matriculate now, before you plunk down a year's tuition!) and about what your next 3 or 4 years will be like, you'll find some good suggestions — for fiction, non-fiction, and law-school-survival texts — at these sites.

• Appalachian School of Law's Suggested Summer Reading
• Pace Law Library's Summer Reading section of their Guide for First-Year Law Students
• Univ. of Miami School of Law's Recommended Summer Reading List
  
• Univ. of Wyoming College of Law Admissions Office's List of Readings for Entering Law Students

Or, if you just want to spend a little time with literature before devoting the next 9 months to reading judicial opinions (leavened with the occasional rule, statute, or Restatement section), check out the novels, plays and anthologies on Law and Literature: A List of Works from George Washington Univ. Prof. Daniel J. Solove. [Thanks to SCU's Heafey Headnotes for this tip!]

[Links updated 6.24.2008]

How to Resist a Cease and Desist -- Information on Protecting Fair Use

If things keep going the way they have been, it won't be too long before we look back nostalgically on the "good old days" when gas cost less than $10 a gallon, you could buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks® for less than $20 and there was still a fair use doctrine. Copyright owners continue to aggressively guard their intellectual property from infringement by uses traditionally considered acceptable under the fair use exceptions. Now the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created a Web site and companion blog to try and sort the issue(s) out. The site, appropriately named The Fair Use Network, hopes to address the "mass of confusion for artists, scholars, journalists, bloggers, and everyone else who contributes to culture and political debate. A tall order, but they make a good stab at it. The blog, Fair Use News purports to chronicle "fair use & free expression issues in copyright, trademark & information law."

Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog for this tip.

FirstGov Search - It's Official. It's Governmental. It Works

Last week, ZiefBrief wrote about the new Google U.S. Government Search page. (Check out the post Google Adds US Gov. Search Page.)

Well, Google is great, but savvy searchers never rely on just one search engine. The same search run on different search engines almost always gives different results, and if one search engine disappoints, another might turn up excellent information.

When you're looking for government information, FirstGov, the U.S. Government Official Search, is the perfect complement to Google.

FirstGov searches both state and federal sites, and, in FirstGov's Advanced Search mode, you can even limit your results to "Federal Only," to "All States," or to a specific state.

FirstGov uses MSN Search for web searching, but it also uses Vivisimo's "clustering" technology. This means that your results are grouped by topic and also by agency or state.

FirstGov Search also links to FirstGov's government information portal, and to FirstGov's FAQ Knowledge Base.

Be sure to bookmark FirstGov together with Google's U.S. Government Search!

Google Adds US Gov. Search Page

Busy, busy, busy are the toiling minions serving the ever-growing Googleplex and now they have come up with some more information goodness to lighten our research loads. The Google U.S. Government Search Page has two parts: front and center you will find a search box that limits your search to "Search Government Sites" below which you will find a customizable feed of news about the US government.

While savvy Google users have long known how limit a google search to government sites by adding the modifier site:gov this new service does more. According to the Google FAQ: "The Google U.S. Government Search index includes U.S. federal, state and local sites with domains such as .gov, .mil as well as select government sites with .com, .us, and .edu domains (eg. .usps.com, .ca.us and ndu.edu"

Being able to customize the U.S. Government search page requires the user to have a Google Account. Customization options includes adding and deleting not just news feeds but any other RSS feed of interest (including the ZiefBrief, if you are so inclined). Just click on the Add Content link in the upper left-hand corner of the search page, scroll down to the search box at the bottom of the column that opens up, and type in the url of the source you want to add (in the case of the ZiefBrief that would be http://ziefbrief.typepad.com/ziefbrief/).

Thanks to digg.com for passing this info. nugget along.

Be Careful Where You Step - Dogs on the Beach

What is one of the most contentious, litigious, down-right nasty issues facing politicians today? Ask around and you might find out it is dogs. Well, actually the dogs are OK, it's the dog owners who can raise an unholy stink if public policy gets in the way of their self-proclaimed, god-given right to do whatever they want with their canine companions. Recently a state Assemblymember charged the California Research Bureau  to produce a report on the current status of dogs on the beach (ZiefBrief has tried mightily to find a link between "Dogs on the Beach" and the current hot media meme "Snakes on a Plane", without success.)

The CRB has produced an excellent report that not only supplies a guide to which beaches allow access by dogs (both on- and off-leash) but also a discussion of state and federal law and regulations that restrict such access. For a complete copy of the report in .pdf format check Dogs on the Beach: A Review of Regulations and Issues Affecting Dog Beaches in California.

"There's a sucker born every minute..." - Gambling in California

When California Attorney General Bill Lockyer wanted an overview of gambling in California he turned to the California Research Bureau for an unbiased report on the gambling industry. The report discusses such issues as: Indian casinos, the state lottery, horse racing, card rooms and Internet gambling. The full text of the report is available in .pdf form in a report titled Gambling in the Golden State.

Oh, and the august visage attached to this posting is none other that great showman and expert on the human condition, P.T. Barnum, courtesy of the Wikipedia.

Policy Wonks Rejoice! Read All About the California Research Bureau.

We here at the ZiefBrief have made frequent mention of the wonders of the Congressional Research service (if you want to check how frequently run this Google search). the CRS supplies high quality information, research and reports to the US House and Senate on a wealth of policy topics (for more of our take on  the CRS, check this link). "Wouldn't it be great," we have frequently opined, "if there were something like the CRS on the state level?" While it is not an exact analogue to the CRS the The California Research Bureau (CRB) does do a good job of producing great reports on different policy issues facing California today.

According to their web site: "The California Research Bureau (CRB) provides nonpartisan research services to the Governor and his staff, to both houses of the legislature, and to other state elected officials. These services include preparation of reports and memoranda (both confidential and public) on current policy issues, which might cover topics such as the history of the issue, experiences and proposals in other states, case studies and examples, data analysis, and development of legislative proposals." This is the stuff that policy wonks (and the ZiefBrief) dream about.

For a complete list of all the reports currently available see the California Research Bureau website.

Authorizing the Use of Force in Vietnam - The NSA Tells A Little More of the Story

Before Vietnam became a metaphor for another controversial U.S. military action — and indeed before it even was much of a U.S. military action itself — there was the Tonkin Gulf incident [Wikipedia article]. The attacks (or alleged attacks) on U.S. ships hurry led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing President Johnson "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

Exactly what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin has long been fodder for debate and discussion. Now the NSA (yes, that NSA) has declassified two batches of documents relating to the Tonkin Gulf incident, the latest released just a few days ago. The PDF documents include chronologies, memos, notes, articles, oral history interviews and SIGINT reports and translations.

Thanks to our colleagues at the Resource Shelf for the tip!