ZiefBrief

Read This Book: Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas

Law professor Dale Carpenter's new book, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas, is one of the rare nonfiction law books on my "to read" pile. Dahlia Lithwick wrote a fascinating summary of Carpenter's book for the New Yorker. The New York Times (joining many others) gave it a rave review this weekend.  Other reviewers have compared it to another favorite of mine, Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger.  From the New York Times review:

Dale Carpenter’s “Flagrant Conduct” is a stirring and richly detailed account of Lawrence v. Texas, the momentous 2003 decision that overturned Bowers. Carpenter, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, tells the story through the eyes of the major players — the plaintiffs, arresting officers, attorneys, judges and prosecutors — most of whom were interviewed at length. The result is a book that turns conventional wisdom about Lawrence on its head. Indeed, the readers most likely to be surprised by “Flagrant Conduct” are those who think they already know the basic outlines of the case.

Fortieth Anniversary Edition of The Paper Chase

USF Law has long enjoyed a close association with John Osborn, the author of The Paper Chase, the quintessential story of life as a first year law student at Harvard in the 1970's. As a professor of law and Distinguished Scholar in Residence  he has taught on wills and estate planning as well as a very popular course on the law in literature. To mark the Fortieth Anniversary of publication, The Paper Chase is being republished in a new edition with a brand new preface by the author. While much has changed in law schools and legal education in the last four decades, this book should still resonate with anyone who has lived through the rigors of an American legal education.

Though it hasn't been easy to find a new copy of The Paper Chase the last few years, this new edition is available in both a high quality trade paper back print edition as well as a digital edition readable on you Kindle, iPad or other compatable e-readers.

Dahlia Lithwick's Picks: Books About the Supreme Court

In this FiveBooks interview, Dahlia Lithwick picks five great books on the Supreme Court and talks about the process of covering the Court for Slate. 

Kindle Textbook Rental Service Now Available

Tired of carrying heavy textbooks around?  Now some law textbooks are available for rent through Amazon’s Kindle rental service.  You don’t even have to own a Kindle to use the service. You can simply download a free Kindle reading app for any of the following: PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android Windows Phone 7, Blackberry or Kindle. 

According to Amazon, you can save up to 80% off the list price of the printed version of the textbook.  Further, you can typically rent a textbook for between 30 and 360 days.  If you begin with the minimum you can always extend your rental for additional days if you’d like and you pay only for the time you need to rent the book.  You also get to keep any highlights or notes you make even after the rental period expires. 

To find a book, you just search in Amazon’s Textbooks Store and search for the book you want, either by title or by browsing the Law section.  Then look in the Formats section to see if a Kindle edition is available for rent and specify your rental dates.  Be careful, though, as some Kindle editions are only available for purchase.  Make sure you don’t accidentally buy something.  Also, before renting, be sure to compare the price of the Kindle rental to that of a new or used print version of the casebook just to make sure you’re getting the best deal. 

So far many legal textbooks do not have an electronic version available. However, Amazon’s Kindle rental program is a good start.  Hopefully, Amazon will offer more electronic versions of textbooks in the future.  For more details about the Kindle rental service, visit Amazon. 

The Librarians Are Reading....

When National Library Week rolls around, the librarians like to suggest some "fun" reading on ZiefBrief. And the library also serves ice cream to the entire law school on Tuesday, April 19! Here are a few of my favorite books from the last few months of reading:

• The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall.  If you like HBO's Big Love, you'll enjoy this book, but you don't need to be a Big Love fan to enjoy Udall's novel. Golden Richards has four wives, 28 children, a lackluster construction business, and way too many things to worry about. In many ways, this is a classic story about a mid-life crisis, but because it happens in the midst of a polygamous clan, it's a lot more complicated and interesting than the typical mid-life crisis novel. 
• One Day, by David Nicholls.  A runaway summer hit (movie version already filmed) about two college kids, Emma and Dex, who hook up the week that they graduate from college. They continue to torment and preoccupy each other over the next 20 years. A very nostalgic read for Gen Xers, especially the early sections of the book, which include letters that Emma and Dex write to each other.  Perfect vacation read.
• Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this coming-of-age novel is set in a contemporary Irish private school. One of the main characters, Skippy Juster, dies on page five -- hence the title -- and Murray spends the next 600+ pages taking us back in time to figure out what happened to Skippy. Murray's teenagers are perfectly and poignantly drawn. This is one of the funniest -- and heart-wrenching-- books I've read in years. 
• The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas. Also longlisted for the Booker Prize, Tsiolkas's novel opens with a shocker of a scene, at least for contemporary readers. A man slaps someone else's misbehaving child at a barbeque, and in the aftermath of the slap, relationships among the partygoers unravel in predictable but also surprising ways.  You'll either love or hate this novel, but I found it riveting. 
• Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. One of the most absorbing non-fiction releases from the last year. In the late 1930s, Louis Zamperini was an up-and-coming Olympic athlete with big plans for the 1940 Olympics. But World War II intervenes, and Zamperini enlists as a member of the Army Air Force.  When he and his crew have to ditch their plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Zamperini spends 49 days on a battered life raft, surrounded by hungry sharks. The Japanese capture him, and Hillenbrand's description of Zamperini's struggle for survival in a Japanese POW camp will horrify and enthrall you. A great book to read when you need to get a little perspective on what's important in life.

Happy 75th Anniversary Federal Register

The Federal Register is published daily, Monday through Friday, except offical Federal holidays. It is a wealth of regulations (new and revised), legal notices and executive actions. It is the "newpaper" of all the Federal agencies and the rest of the Executive branch. We just got the final print issue of volume 75 of the Federal Register. The final page count for volume 75 is 82,589 which falls a close second behind the year 2000 when the total was 83,294 pages. To give you an idea of how it has grown, in the first year of publication in 1935, the entire volume was only 2,268 pages (to be fair that first volume was only March through December.) Another way of looking at the full run of volume 75 is that it fills almost 12 linear feet of shelving. Because most researchers only use the digital version of the Federal Register these days they can't appreciate how much the Feds generate in a year. Attached to this post is a picture of the whole year, with a law librarian added to give a sense of scale. Click on the small image to see the full-size version of the image in a pop-up window.

Today Is John Grisham's Birthday

Legal thriller author John Grisham turns 56 today.  The Writer's Almanac has a fun bio of Grisham today, including these tidbits: 

He settled on being "a high-powered tax lawyer," but then he got to law school and found that he was stunned by the "complexity and lunacy" of tax law. He barely passed that class.

Grisham got up at 5 in the morning to work on his first novel before going to his law office, and it took him three years to finish it.  As soon as he sold the film rights to The Firm, he stopped practicing law, saying that quitting practice was "the happiest day of [his] life."

Google eBookstore

Google announced today that it has opened its Google eBookstore, which will allow users to "buy, store, and read Google eBooks in the cloud."  You can set up a free, password-protected account (just like a Gmail account), and store an unlimited amount of books there.  Of course, the next question is, "Which devices will play nicely with Google-purchased books?"  So far, it looks like you can read a Google-purchased electronic book on a PC or Mac (Google eBooks is compatible with any browser with Javascript enabled), an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or a Nook.  If you've got a Kindle (like me), you're out of luck.  You can read more about device compatability here.  I ran a few sample searches for popular law school exam preparation materials (Examples and Explanations, Siegel's), but didn't get any results.  However, if your goal is to find well-priced popular fiction, you'll be a happy camper.  

Google Books: Faulty Metadata?

Laura Miller at Salon has written a fascinating and troubling article on Google Books.  Miller interviews UC Berkeley professor Geoffrey Nunberg who wrote earlier about finding "endemic" errors in Google Books in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Miller describes a few of the errors that Nunberg found:

A search for books published before 1950 and containing the word "Internet" turned up the unlikely bounty of 527 results.

Other errors include misattributed authors -- Sigmund Freud is listed as a co-author of a book on the Mosaic Web browser and Henry James is credited with writing "Madame Bovary." Even more puzzling are the many subject misclassifications: an edition of "Moby Dick" categorized under "Computers," and "Jane Eyre" as "Antiques and Collectibles" ("Madame Bovary" got that label, too).

Metadata is the crucial information about a book that is included in a bibliographic record (title, author, publication date, etc.).  We librarians know that errors in bibliographic information in any database can make it impossible for users to know that a document or item is available.  For example, if an online catalog record misspells words in the book's title, the user may not be able to retrieve that book's bibliographic record when she searches for it using the title's correct spelling in the online catalog.  Google Books is often hailed by academics as the best thing since sliced bread, but librarians know that if the metadata is faulty, retrieving information from a database can be a frustrating endeavor. It's great to see this discussion about Google Books happening, and I hope that Google continues to work to improve its metadata (for a detailed response to Nunberg from Google's Jon Orwant describing how Google is trying to address these issues, see Nunberg's original blog post on the metadata problem).

Free Electronic Copies of Casebooks

A few professors have decided to create their own electronic versions of casebooks for their classes, which they are willing to share with others at no charge. Eric Johnson just posted the first volume of the Torts casebook that he has created on PrawfsBlawg.  Another example of the free electronic casebook, Thomas Field (Intellectual Property).  If you are a law professor interested in creating your own electronic casebook, check out CALI's eLangdell Stimulus Project, which includes some small financial incentives for publishing your own electronic casebook with CALI (conditions and restrictions apply).