ZiefBrief

eLangdell: A CALI - Harvard Joint Venture

Last Monday at CALI, I attended a fascinating session on interactive, online casebooks.  Professor Steve Bradford from the University of Nebraska Lincoln College of Law presented his thoughts on what an online casebook should look like:

• It should have plenty of hyperlinks, leading to primary and secondary materials cited in the text, interactive tutorials (such as CALI exercises, of course!), multimedia files (oral argument audio files would be a natural here);
• The content should be highly malleable -- instructors should be able to change the organization of the casebook contents to meet their own individual teaching agendas, and they should be able to turn off hyperlinks when it suits their pedagogical needs;
• Students should be able to highlight and take notes in digital form.

Sounds pretty exciting, but is anyone doing anything to make online casebooks a reality?  I learned that the answer to this question is a resounding "yes." 

First, CALI announced at the conference that they are partnering with Harvard's Berkman Center to create a "new educational resource sharing platform."  The venture will establish the Legal Education Commons -- known as eLangdell -- "where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts, and video."  The venture will also concentrate on developing "innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy."

Thomson West is also entering the field with their new Interactive Casebook Series.   According to promotional materials, West's interactive casebooks will feature the following:

• Simultaneous print version and electronic publication (user may only access e-version by purchasing print book), with a searchable text that can be highlighted or otherwise annotated by users;
• Electronic version includes extensive hyperlinking to Westlaw versions of legal materials, Black's Law Dictionary, supplementary online resources, and internal cross-references;
• Layout departs from the traditional, all-text casebook format through use of marginalia/text boxes, diagrams, and color/border segregated feature sections for hypotheticals, references to scholarly debates, or other information.

I find West's insistence on packaging the online and print versions of casebooks in this series pretty annoying, but at least they're working on moving casebook publishing into the 21st century.  If you're interested in seeing an example of West's venture yourself, you can view one of the chapters of Spencer's Civil Procedure, the first book in the interactive series.

Prof. Freiwald Helps Court of Appeals See Its Way Clear to Protect E-Mail Privacy.

In what is being heralded as an important expansion of privacy protection for e-mail, the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit recently released a decision on the case of Warshak v. US

The court ruled that a citizen does have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email stored on the computers of their Internet Service Provider or other intermediary (such as HotMail or GMail.) As a result, the warrant seizure provisions of the Stored Communications Act need to be applied when prosecutors are seeking such electronic communications and to the extent the SCA permits access without a warrant, the court found those provisions to be unconstitutional.

The local angle in this decision is that University of San Francisco School of Law Professor Susan Freiwald filed an Amicus brief in support of plaintiff Warshak's privacy rights. Check out Prof. Freiwald's publications at her faculty bibliography page for list of more of her work on Cyberlaw and privacy issues.

Judge Says No to BAR/BRI Settlement

Greetings from oppressively sunny and hot Las Vegas!  I'm attending the CALI conference at UNLV Law, learning all about new and innovative ways to use technology in legal education.

I wasn't surprised to hear via the WSJ Law Blog that a federal judge has refused to approve the BAR/BRI settlement, apparently because of concerns about incentives that were offered to the lead plaintiffs in the litigation.  The National Law Journal has a more extensive story if you would like additional details.  A final settlement hearing is scheduled for July 9.

Summer Reading Before Law School - Dean Brand's Recommendation

Dean Jeff Brand, always interested in how law can serve the cause of social justice, stopped by the Zief Library the other day full of praise for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, a "fantastic book," in his words, "that every incoming first year law student should read."

Arc of Justice reports on events that took place in Detroit in 1925. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician, moves his family to a white neighborhood. The neighbors riot, one of them is shot, and Sweet is tried for murder. Author Kevin Boyle of Ohio State University gives us a biography of Sweet, a detailed report of the trial (in which Sweet was supported by the NAACP and defended by Clarence Darrow), a vivid sense of life in the segregated South and North of early 20th century, and some lingering questions about what it has taken and will take to eliminate racial prejudice and segregation in the United States.

USF law students, faculty, and staff can check out the Zief Library's copy of Arc of Justice. It's on the shelves on the second floor at KF 224 .S8 B69 2004.

Here's more on Arc of Justice —

• Forgotten Justice, Priya Jain's review from Salon.

• When a Moving Van Could Spark a Neighborhood War, Patricia Cohen's New York Times review.

• Arc of Justice: An American Tale of Racial Hatred, materials from NPR, including audio files of Tavis Smiley's interview with Kevin Boyle, and of Boyle reading an excerpt from his book.

Legal Research - Is There One Right Way?

Over at the Wall Street Journal's always-entertaining Law Blog, a lively discussion has broken out in response to a post describing Pillsbury Winthrop’s Summer Associate Research Challenge, and many of the comments resurrect the old print-versus-online debate.

We Zief Library reference librarians don’t come down on one "side" or another of this hoary question, and we often feel that print-versus-online is in fact a false dichotomy or at least an over-simplification. While there are indeed reasons to choose print over online, or vice versa (some having to do with cost and time, and some having to do with unique properties of online databases or of paper [see note]), there are other, equally important choices to be made in crafting an efficient research strategy.

Two of the central choices are —

• Do you start at primary sources — the cases, statutes, regulations — or do you begin with a treatise, practice guide, article, etc.?

  In this instance we do tend to take sides, strongly favoring starting with the "secondary" source in which some expert (one hopes!) offers an analysis of the area of law and its central issues, along with citations to major cases and statutes. Usually this strategy will save you a lot of time, and reduce your chances of missing some important aspect of the problem. And to the extent that secondary sources are available online, this ceases to be an computer-versus-books decision.

• Do you run a key word search (even then there's the choice of terms and connectors or natural language) or do you take advantage of some preexisting organizing system — a table of contents, an outline (the foremost example being West's Key Number digest system) or an alphabetical index — created by humans to try to impose some order on the information on your topic.

  Here there's no right answer. The best strategy will depend on your issue, the area of law you are in, the amount of time you have, your access to online research tools. And once again, though key word searching of course requires a computer, you can often use tables of contents, indexes, and outlines both online and in the books.

[Note: For a sophisticated discussion of the unique properties of paper and the persistence of paper tools even in high-tech settings, take a look at The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. USF researchers can check out a copy from Gleeson Library. It's on their shelves at HF 5521 .S43 2002.]

ZiefBrief Breaks In To Print

We here at ZiefBrief never pass up a chance to toot our own horn and when the Recorder called about including us in a feature article about blogs in the legal workplace we jumped at the chance. Well, the article, A Blog of Their Own, is out and available at the CAL LAW web site. The article discusses ZB's humble origin as an alternative to a widely ignored print newsletter that the library produced. It also brings up the ZiefBrief's moment in the sun when a 10 minute call to the Archivist at the Yale University Library helped settle the burning question  of whether Anna Nicole Smith's first husband taught wills and trust while a professor at Yale Law School. Thanks to article author Pam  Smith for getting the word out about our efforts.

Ask.com Relaunches

A few months ago, I blogged about a beta search engine, Askx.com, a creation of Ask.com, which furnished "all-in-one" search results on one screen.  Instead of running separate searches for web, video, blog, image, or news content, users could use Askx.com to run one search and get results on one screen for all of these categories. 

Askx.com was apparently a success for Ask.com, because the company announced recently that all Ask.com searches will now incorporate this "all-in-one" approach.  Yea!  For an example of how these new results look, check out this search for information about "Alberto Gonzales."  Note that you get some handy suggestions for narrowing or broadening your search in the left-hand panel, web results in the center panel, and image, video, Wikipedia, and news results in the right-hand panel.  If you click on "more" on the top left of the screen, you can find blog search results as well.  Very useful when you're researching breaking legal news!

CRS Report on XDR TB, Quarantine, and Isolation

This recently released Congressional Research Service report, "Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB): Quarantine and Isolation," contains everything you've always wanted to know about federal quarantine and isolation powers, including a reminder that the terms "quarantine" and "isolation" are not interchangeable.  "Quarantine" refers to the practice of separating individuals who have been exposed to an infectious disease, but who are not yet ill, from individuals who have not been exposed to the disease.  "Isolation" refers to the practice of separating a confirmed infectious person from individuals who aren't infected. 

CRS reports are available on a wide range of domestic and international legal issues, and they can be extremely helpful to legal researchers.  For more about these tools, see our earlier post on the topic.

Summer Reading Before Law School (2007)

Every summer, legal bloggers seem to love to give advice to soon-to-be One Ls about what they should read during the summer before law school.  ZiefBrief tackled this topic last June, and you can review our 2006 summary of recommended pre-law school reading at this earlier post. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, readers have been weighing in with their favorites (Volokh's recommendations are here), and one of the commenters, Marina, has started keeping a very helpful list of the books recommended by Volokh Conspiracy readers at Lists of Bests.  My recommendation:  Richard Kluger's Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality.  And of course, we've got Simple Justice at Zief.

More BAR/BRI Madness

According to this Law.com story, Eliot Disner has just asked the court to name him "co-lead counsel" in the BAR/BRI class action suit.  Not surprisingly, McGuireWoods, Disner's former employer who fired him days ago, is fighting Disner's request.  Regardless of the outcome of Disner's request, he will still receive 30 percent of the attorneys' fees generated by the case.