ZiefBrief

Online Companions to Law Reviews

Most of us have heard of Yale Law Journal's Pocket Part and Harvard Law Review's Forum.  But did you know about Texas Law Review's See Also or Connecticut Law Review's CONNtemplations?  Ken Strutin has compiled a very handy list on LLRX of all of the law reviews that have created some sort of online forum that allows for debate and discussion of the articles published by the law reviews.  These websites can be great resources for students who are researching note or law school paper topics. 

The Zen Lawyer

Our local paper, the SF Chronicle, has an interesting front-page piece on lawyers who are incorporating meditation into their schedules to help alleviate the stress of practicing law.   One attorney interviewed for the piece assures fellow lawyers that "[y] can still be a warrior . . . but because you're at peace with yourself and you're centered, you're not coming from rage or fear or anger."  Speaking of rage, fear, and anger, avoid the reader comments accompanying this article if you would like to avoid exposure to any of the above emotions.

BAR/BRI: Round Two!

For those of you who just finished the bar, the last name that you want to hear is "BAR/BRI."  But as I predicted, BAR/BRI's legal woes are not over.  The bar exam preparation company has been sued again, according to this article from the National Law Journal.  The new lawsuit is currently winding its way through a New York federal district court, and it alleges that students were overcharged about $1,000 for the company's bar prep course.  The plaintiffs are seeking up to $48 million in damages as well as injunctive relief.

TWEN Gets a Facelift

Last Wednesday, Westlaw unveiled a new look and feel for the law school home page, as well as some aesthetic and functional improvements for TWEN.  One of the biggest changes is that you can now display only active courses on your "My Courses" page or only inactive or archived courses by clicking on either the "Active Courses" or "Hidden Courses" button.  This is a nice feature that helps to reduce the clutter on your TWEN home page.  If you'd like a quick five-minute tutorial that displays the latest TWEN changes, you can find the tutorial here.

Historical Supreme Court Briefs by the Thousands - Now Online at the Zief Library

The Zief Library's latest big digital acquisition is Thomson⁄Gale's U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978, part of its Making of Modern Law collection.

Researchers in the USF community can connect to U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs on campus or at home. (For remote access, you'll be asked to give your name and your USF student or staff ID number.)

Once you're connected, you'll have access to something like 350,000 documents from about 150,000 cases — many of them cases the Court declined to hear. All of the documents are available in PDF format, giving the exact image of the original. There are also multiple search features: key word searching; searching or browsing by case name; searching or browsing by author; retrieving documents by case citation.

These few examples give a sense of the treasures in Gale's U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs —

• The Motion to Advance in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
• The Transcript of the Record in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
• The Petitioner’s Brief in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
• The Petition in Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938)
• The Government’s Brief in Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942)

And for the post-1978 period? The Zief Library has Supreme Court records and briefs from 1951 to the present on microfiche, and for the most recent years there are a variety of options on the web and on Lexis and Westlaw. (For more information on finding Supreme Court briefs and other documents, see the Zief Library research guide Supreme Court Research: Getting Started.)

Contempt of Congress - A Dispassionate View of a Hot Topic

At Balkinization yesterday Marty Lederman alerted us to a newly-released Congressional Research Service report on contempt of Congress.

Prof. Lederman describes the report (Congress's Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure [PDF; 68 pages]) as "characteristically comprehensive, careful, balanced and informative."

Today, Prof. Lederman follows up with a link to the House Judiciary Committee draft report on the refusal of Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten to comply with the committee's subpoenas [PDF; 70 pages].

Brand New CALI Lessons

We stopped by the CALI booth at AALL to pick up a list of new CALI lessons just released for the 2007-2008 school year.  We'll be featuring a list of selected links to these lessons by subject area throughout the week. What are CALI lessons?  They are online, interactive tutorials about specific academic legal subjects by law professors and law librarians.  There are a wealth of CALI lessons on first-year and bar topics, and CALI has even created a list of CALI lessons by casebook.  If you're a faculty member or currently enrolled student at USF, you can contact any reference librarian to obtain your CALI registration code and start reviewing or taking CALI lessons.  If you're an incoming first-year student, you will receive the CALI registration code during orientation week.

First up -- Legal Concepts, Legal Research and Legal Writing:

• Podcast from Professor Douglas McFarland: "Advice to a 1L"
• Podcast from Profs. Grohman and Brown:  "Preparing for Your First Semester at Law School"
• Professor Diane Murley's interactive lesson:  "Where Does Law Come From?"
• Professor Sarah Gotschall's interactive lesson:  "Introduction to Search Logic and Strategies"
• Professor Rebecca Trammel's interactive lesson: "Plagiarism: Keeping Out of Trouble"

Good Luck to Those Tackling the Bar Exam!

Even though I've been immersed in New Orleans' restaurant and music scene for the past four days, I was jolted back to my work life in California when I noticed that there were quite a few passengers clutching BAR/BRI study guides on my flight back to San Francisco.  The bar exam starts tomorrow, and the Zief staff will be sending good thoughts to all of our recent graduates who begin the exam tomorrow!  Good luck to all of you!  You can do it!

Help Rebuild New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity

Habitat? New Orleans? As you might guess, the link to law libraries is that ZiefBrief is in the Big Easy for the annual meeting of the American Associations Law Libraries. Yesterday we slathered on the sunscreen and, with about 75 other librarians, trekked out to the upper Ninth Ward to work on the Musicians' Village, a New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity  project supported by Ellis and Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. Once it's completed, the Village will house 70 families and feature the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, complete with a recording studio and space for performances and classes. Habitat also plans to build another 150 homes in the Ninth Ward (and would gladly accept donations to make it all possible).

ZiefBrief and our colleagues muscled framed walls about, painted almost completed houses, and put in flooring systems on one that was just starting out. And on the way to and from the site we got a good look at the blocks after blocks of devastation still remaining. No video or photos could have prepared us for what we saw — and this in a part of the city that was not as badly hit as the lower Ninth Ward. Even now we are still struggling to wrap our brain around it. Along with the devastation, there were some (sadly sparse, it seemed to us) signs of hope: the restored home; the house with the trailer out front and work being done. Habitat's 220 homes will be a big boost to the Ninth Ward, but so much is still needed….

[Update, 7.15.07] For another report on AALL's day in the upper Ninth, see Mary Whisner's post My Day as a Laborer on AALL's Second Line Blog.

[Update, 7.16.07] Thanks to ZiefBrief's Nola colleague Brian Huddleston, photos of the day are now available. See: Law Librarians at New Orleans Habitat for Humanity.

[Update, 7.27.07] The first articles in the New York Times series Patchwork City ("on the fragmentary recovery of New Orleans and its people, nearly two years after the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina') coincided nicely with ZiefBrief's visit to the Big Easy.

The series so far:

• Aching for Lost Friends, but Rebuilding With Hope (By Susan Saulny, published July 2, 2007)
• Largely Alone, Pioneers Reclaim New Orleans (By Adam Nossiter, published July 2, 2007)  (This is how it looked to us in the Upper Ninth Ward — here and there homeowners, on their own, trying to rebuild.)
• Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many (By Shaila Dewan, published July 12, 2007)
• New Orleans Recovery Is Slowed by Closed Hospitals (By Leslie Eaton, published July 24, 2007)
• A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk (By John Schwartz, published August 17, 2007)
• Insurers Bear Brunt of Anger in New Orleans (By Leslie Eaton & Joseph B. Treaster, published September 3, 2007)

Off to NOLA

We'll be attending the American Association of Law Libraries' meeting in New Orleans from July 14-July 20 and making multiple visits to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (pictured here), so posting may be erratic during the next week.