ZiefBrief

Thanks, Professor Levit!

Professor Nancy Levit (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law) has a paper posted on SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network entitled "Scholarship Advice for New Law Professors in the Electronic Age."  As I was reading the paper, I was pleasantly surprised to read this very enthusiastic endorsement of academic law librarians' services (note that footnotes are omitted):

Tap the wonderful resource of reference librarians.  Law libraries support faculty scholarship in numerous ways, and the nature of librarianship is changing.  Many libraries provide specialized training about information technology and ways to use electronic research tools and document repositories.  A number of libraries have programs to train research assistants. . . . Some libraries ask reference librarians to provide more targeted research assistance directly to professors.

Remember that Zief's reference librarians are happy to assist faculty with all of the above tasks!  Contact us if you'd like to learn more about our faculty services.

Roundup of Criticisms of NY Advertising Rules for the Bar

The NY State Bar is realizing that it doesn't pay to rouse the ire of blawggers.  Law.com posted a New York Law Journal article today, which summarizes the latest round of negative commentary on New York's recent proposed rules for attorney advertising. Attorneys are so incensed by the new rules that they are taking time out of their busy practices to write lengthy critiques. For example, Latham & Watkins partner, Joshua Stein, submitted a 29-page, single-spaced, indexed critique of the proposed rules entitled "Tangling Up the Web for Lawyers."  In his comments, Stein makes it clear that he's not impressed with the NY State Bar's efforts.  He argues that the rules would "interfere with benign and reasonable website and email communications by lawyers" and that "the bloated definition of 'advertisement' in the Rules goes far beyond any intuitively reasonable definition of that term."  If Stein's filing is typical of the comments that the NY State Bar can expect to receive on these proposed rules, it looks like they'll have some lively reading after the November 15 comment deadline.

Testing Research Skills - A Looming Bar Exam Burden??

At a recent law librarian seminar, ZiefBrief picked up on discussions about a proposal floated by the National Conference of Bar Examiners to add a legal research skills test to the bar examination.

Erica Moeser, the NCBE president, outlines the proposal in the May 2006 "President's Page" column of the Bar Examiner magazine. It's definitely not a done deal; the NCBE has just begun to explore the idea.

At this weekend's seminar, ZiefBrief's fellow law librarians raised the following questions about testing legal research on the bar exam —

Are research skills such that failure to demonstrate them should be the basis for denying someone a license to practice law? If we do test for legal research, how to we decide which skills are essential? And how do we formulate a test that tells us whether or not candidates in fact have those skills?

Ms. Moeser notes that the inquiry into the need for and feasibility of a legal research skills component of the bar should last through 2007 — so no matter what the outcome, this year's 3Ls can heave a sigh of relief.

[The Bar Examiner is on the NCBE web site, but the web version does not include the "President's Page." The full Bar Examiner magazine for May 2006 is available on microfiche in USF's Zief Law Library, and is likely to be available in print or on fiche at most other academic law libraries as well.]

The Bench a Refuge from Mandatory Continuing Education? No Longer!

A Judicial Council of California press release alerts us that as of January 1, 2007 California trial court judges and other trial court personnel will be required to undertake continuing education. The content of the courses will be determined by presiding judges and court executive officers.

For more details, see the press release, Judicial Council Takes Action on Continuing Education for Trial Courts (PDF; 3 pages) and Judicial Branch Education: Minimum Education Requirements for the Judicial Branch on the Judicial Council’s web site.

The Brothers Grimm and Criminal Law

As I was perusing Jon Carroll's column in the San Francisco Chronicle over my cereal this morning, I came across this tale of a highly inventive criminal law exam, which reader Rita Charles e-mailed to Carroll in response to his Oct. 17 column about Hansel and Gretel:

I went to John F. Kennedy University School of Law in Orinda. Back in 1976, Judge Norman Spellberg (now retired) was my instructor in Criminal Law. For our final exam we were given three Golden Books: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; Jack and the Beanstalk; Hansel and Gretel. We were told to list all the crimes and defenses. That was the final. . . . I especially liked Snow White  --  she co-habited with seven dwarves, and at the end she was kidnapped by a guy on a horse, who had probable unlawful intercourse with her. But I think the most crimes were in Hansel and Gretel. Such adorable children, but they were murderers!"

Perhaps Carroll's column will inspire other criminal law professors to employ this method of examination!  There are certainly plenty of other crime-laden children's stories to choose from, including "Rapunzel," "The Robber Bridegroom," and "The Three Little Pigs."

Electronic Discovery Resources

The electronic discovery-related amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are scheduled to take effect on December 1, 2006 -- just a few weeks away!  Luckily, Tom Mighell and Dennis Kennedy have compiled an extensive list of Internet resources relating to the new rules on this month's Law Practice Today. 

Maybe This Book Will Help You Ace Your Exams.

With a name like Getting to Maybe you might just think you have found a book about negotiation, (Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher And William Ury is considered the bible of negotiation by some folks) but not so. The full title is Getting to maybe : how to excel on law school exams by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul. There is a lot to be said for books like this one -- most new law students don't have a clue on how to best prepare for and master a law school exam while more experienced students are always looking for that extra edge that will get them a better grade. GTM offers a strategic approach to law school study and exam taking. While this book (or any of the other books in the Zief on the topic) can't guarantee you a better grade, just reading the Chapters on Test Taking Tips could make the difference between a great exam and a mediocre one. Check it out.

New Online Sources for Voter Information

The good folks at the San Francisco Department of Elections have updated their web site for the upcoming November elections . Lots of good information including San Francisco Poll locations and links to current voter pamphlets.

On a regional level the Bay Area Outreach Committee (BAOC) is a joint effort of 12 Bay Area Counties and the Secretary of State that was set up to meet state and Federal laws requiring each county to develop a voter outreach program to increase registration and participation in the electoral process. Their web site  contains information about the greater Bay Area election scene. Included are phone numbers for information on voting in California in English, Spanish,  Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese,  Tagalog and Korean.

Northwestern Univ. Law Review's New Blog

Northwestern University Law Review has created the Northwestern Colloquy, "the first scholarly weblog to be operated by a major law review."  Northwestern editors plan to include posts on scholarly topics and short articles that will be posted on the blog first, then subsequently published in the print journal.  Even more exciting, the student editors will be cite-checking each blog post!  Here's a complete description of this new endeavor from the editors:

The subject matter [of a post] can be anything within the field of legal inquiry, whether a short exposition of a new idea, an analysis of an emerging legal topic, an ongoing debate regarding a legal issue, or a short response to an already published piece of scholarship. Readers can rely upon the Law Review to ensure that citations in these pieces support the assertions made in the posts. We will also be allowing comments on these pieces in a moderated forum. We hope that this new feature will serve as both an attractive new way in which to publish ideas and as a meeting place for far-flung scholars to interact and refine their work.

Additionally, for those who wish to publish pieces that straddle the border between the depth and rigor of an article and the speed and brevity of a blog post or an op-ed, the Colloquy will regularly publish short pieces of scholarship, of no more than 5000 words and 40 footnotes. These short pieces will be initially published on the web, and subsequently added to a print volume of the Law Review. This will drastically shorten the amount of time that lapses between the conception of an idea and the possibility of its publication in a major law review from more than a year to less than three months. Just as with the blog posts on the Colloquy, students will provide authors who contribute these short pieces with the editing and citation-checking services that are a hallmark of legal publication.

Google Announces Document and Spreadsheet Service

Are you tired of e-mailing documents between your school and home computer or saving them to a flash drive?  Wouldn't it be nice to have some documents accessible from any computer and be able to share them with others who are working on them with you?  With the introduction of Google's document and spreadsheet service, you can access your documents and spreadsheets from any computer with an Internet connection.  According to Google, the new service allows you to edit and spell-check documents, upload Word documents, download documents to your PC in Word, PDF, or other formats, and view the editing history for each document.  You can also share your documents with others so that you all have the ability to edit the document.  You'll need to create a Google account in order to use this free service, and of course, there are some who aren't particularly comfortable with being subjected to "Google's prying eyes," as Steve Bryant notes here.  But for those of us who just want to use a reliable method of transferring lecture notes or classroom exercises from work to home, Google's service is a welcome innovation.