ZiefBrief

New Article From Professor Reza Dibadj

Professor Reza Dibadj's article, "From Incongruity to Cooperative Federalism," appears in Volume 40 of the University of San Francisco Law Review.  Here is the abstract from the Legal Scholarship Network:

The conventional wisdom has been that state law governs internal affairs, and federal law governs disclosure. This reassuring construct, however, has little basis in today’s reality. Left alone, states have not provided adequate shareholder protections: state securities laws were historically anemic, and the regulatory reach of state corporate law shrank under a prevailing contractarian ethos. As consequence, beginning in 1933, federal securities laws emerged to regulate many internal affairs. Curiously, however, as federal regulation has grown and become increasingly preemptive over the past decade, it has often decreased shareholder protections. As a consequence, some states have recently reversed course, using newly energized state securities laws to pursue fraud.

The responsibility for regulating the relationship between corporations and their shareholders has thus descended into a welter of confusion. Neither dual federalism nor preemptive federalism has been satisfactory.

In order to begin overcoming this morass, the article draws on new research in the theory of economic regulation. In particular, it proposes that the relationship between corporations and their shareholders operate within the framework of cooperative federalism using a reverse-Erie framework. The federal government would set minimal shareholder protections, but leave implementation and the creation of enhanced standards largely to the states. The article concludes by addressing a number of constitutional issues cooperative federalism might raise, including the creation of federal common law by state instrumentalities, as well as possible non-delegation and anti-commandeering concerns.

Lexis subscribers can retrieve this article by using "Get a Document" and entering the citation: 40 USF L Rev 845.  Westlaw subscribers can retrieve the article by entering the same citation in the "Find By Citation" box.  The Summer 2006 issue of USF Law Review is also available in print at Zief Law Library.  You can find Professor Dibadj's faculty profile here.

Pick a Patent with Google

IP practitioners love to carp about the free patent search site offered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The search engine is clunky, the .pdf files don't load, it takes forever. But its free (a.i.b.) so you couldn't complain too much.

Now there is a new player in town -- the Google Patent Search (beta). It claims to cover the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO. That would be all patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006 -- approximately 7 million patents. It is said to use the same algorithms used by the very popular Google Book Search. The results are fast and easy to read and open on just about every browser on the block.

Needless to say, this opens up a wealth of entirely frivolous searches, such as patents granted to Michael Jackson (for a collection of 17 other "celebrity patents" check out this link) and "an apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force".

Lawsagna - Brain Food for Law School Success

Wishing you had a better way to prepare for law school exams? Looking for paths to a successful spring semester? Dish up a heaping serving of Lawsagna, a new blog full of "thoughts, tools, tricks, tips and other ingredients for a successful learning experience in law school and beyond."

Lawsagna's recipe includes advice on learning styles, time management, motivation, memory, food and drink, and much more. Most law students will find intriguing new ideas here.

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

Holiday Cheer

As finals draw to a close, faculty, students, and staff could all use a little chuckle.  We recently came across a side-splitting list of holiday song mondegreens from Snopes.com that is guaranteed to make even the most frazzled among us crack a smile! 

What's a mondegreen, you ask?  As Snopes describes it, it is a "series of words resulting from the mishearing of a statement or song lyric."  My personal favorite from the list is this mangled version of the opening lines of "Good King Wenceslas":  "Good King Wences' car backed out, on the feet of heathens."

Happy holidays, everyone!

[Update: if you crave more mondegreens, check out the mondegreen columns from the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll.]

50-State Statute Surveys - Making an Onerous Research Task a Little Easier

This fall, ZiefBrief worked with several students who were helping a professor find the laws of all 50 states on a specific topic. They came to the reference desk downcast at the thought of searching state by state by state…. They went away encouraged, having learned of three tools that can cut hours - or days - off of 50-state research projects.

The lifesavers:

• Subject Compilations of State Laws - Initially the work of Lynn Foster and Carol Boast, Subject Compilations is now carried on by the incomparable Cheryl Rae Nyberg. Each annual volume is organized by topic, and lists books, web sites, articles, and other documents that cite to (or reproduce) state laws on the topic in question. Even though Subject Compilations is not available online, it's our favorite tool for answering those "what are all of the state laws on X subject" questions. In the Zief Library, you'll find Subject Compilations at KF 1 .F67 Law Reference.
• National Survey of State Laws, edited by Richard A. Leiter - A one-volume set that summarizes (and cites to) state statutes on 45 topics in 8 broad categories. National Survey doesn't have the depth of coverage of Subject Compilations, but if you're dealing with a major topic like capital punishment, minimum wages, or child custody, you'll probably find the answer faster in National Survey. Zief's copy is at KF 386 .N38 2003 Law Reference.
• Westlaw’s 50 State Surveys (SURVEYS) database - Combines the National Survey of State Laws with Legal Research Center's Multijurisdictional Surveys. Researchers can browse by topic or search by key word.

If your research problem involves regulations rather than statutes, you'll find helpful citations in Subject Compilations of State Laws. If you are a Westlaw subscriber, you can also try the REG-SURVEYS database. For more information, See our post Westlaw's 50 State Regulatory Surveys - Relieving (Some of) the Pain of Multi-State Regulatory Research.

[Update, 1.30.2007] Our colleagues at Heafey Headnotes point out that Harvard Law Library has an excellent guide to Multi-State Legal Research listing dozens of tools to alleviate the pain of 50-state research projects. Though the guide is geared to researchers at Harvard, academic law libraries will have most of the tools it mentions. (Thanks, Prano!)

 

The History of Law and the Future of Legal Research - More Zief Local News

In the second issue of Z-Flyer (PDF; 4 pages), your Zief law librarians report on:

• Gale's Making of Modern Law, a online collection of over 25,000 historical English and American legal treatises - now available to researchers at the Zief Library
• This fall's Berkeley symposium “Legal Information and the Development of American Law”
• New blogs from and for the legal academic community

Tracking the Reorganized California Rules of Court

As of January 2007, the revised (and completely renumbered and reorganized) California Rules of Court will go into effect.

For a heads-up on what's coming, you can get the text of the rules along with tables to lead you from the old rules to the new, and vice versa, at the California Rules of Court reorganization page. (Print publications from West and LexisNexis should catch up with the changes by the end of 2006.)

For more information, see the news release describing the revisions and reorganization (PDF; 2 pages) or the complete report on the reorganization of the California Rules of Court (PDF; 148 pages).

(Thanks to Peg LaFrance for the tip!) 

Legal Research Still Involves Reading

For a pithy reminder that research involves a little more than copying a juicy chuck of statutory or judicial language into a brief, article, or paper, take a look at Diane Murley's Law Dawg Blawg post, Research Tip: Read the Stuff You Find. If the document does not in fact say what you say it says, your research isn't done!

The Numbers Game

Are you writing a term paper that requires you to track down some statistical information, but you're not sure how to go about finding the statistics that you need?  If so, you should know about FedStats, a page sponsored by the federal government that provides free access to the "full range of official statistical information available to the public from the Federal Government."  FedStats offers an easy-to-navigate home page, which allows you to look up government statistics by subject, agency, or geographical region.  If you're not sure which agency's statistics you need to examine, FedStats even offers a handy description of the kinds of statistics kept by each federal agency.  For even more help with statistical research, check out this statistics research guide from the librarians at Harvard Business School's Baker Library.