ZiefBrief

Neat Research Tools -- Capitol Words and LOUIS

Just so we are clear on this, ZiefBrief is the alter ego for a crew of dedicated law librarians here at the Dorraine Zief Law Library. After surfing the web for a while, some of the members of the team feel like a spider on Benzedrine. We find cool stuff, which leads to more cool stuff, that links to more… you  get the picture – there_is_SO_MUCH_STUFF!! So we find a little item, you might call it “web candy.” But on closer examination it is so much more.

Take for example a recent discovery, Capitol Words. To quote the web site: “Capitol Words gives you an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word. For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.” Here is the latest example:

Fun, not earth shattering and you can add the site to your RSS aggregator and get a daily heads-up on what they are saying in the halls of congress.

"But Wait! (as they say on all the infomercials) There's More!!" Capitol Words is just one project of a group called the Sunshine Foundation (named after the Brandeis quote that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.") Another interest project they are working on is LOUIS (click here to visit), an acronym for the Library Of Unified Information Sources. Through LOUIS their "ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government.... LOUIS currently contains, in fully searchable format, seven sets of federal documents:

• Congressional Reports
• Congressional Record
• Congressional Hearings
• Federal Register
• Presidential Documents
• GAO Reports
• Congressional Bills & Resolutions"

So check out Capitol Words and the other works of the Sunshine Foundation today. Its worth the trip.

Indispensable Practice Guide

The Zief librarians are always on the lookout for the next indispensable, "must have" practice guide, and we think all of our readers will agree that Cheerleading and the Law: Risk Management Strategies is a necessity for all lawyers confronting those pesky, cheerleading and mascot-related legal issues.  There are several handy chapters like:  "Mascots: Background, Court Cases and Other Issues" (this chapter begins with a helpful introductory discussion, "What Is a Mascot?"); "A Brief History of Cheerleading" (find out who qualifies as the first cheerleader!); and "Cheerleading and the Courts" (one of the subtopics in this chapter is entitled "Cheerleading Coach Offered a Plea Deal" -- yikes).  The book has at least one rave review from the President/CEO of Cheer Ltd. Inc., who claims that Cheerleading and the Law "may well be one of the most important books written for the spirit industry."  I never even knew that a "spirit industry" existed, but that's just one of the many, many valuable bits of information that you'll pick up when you read Cheerleading and the Law.

Unlike most treatises and practice guides, Cheerleading and the Law isn't a budget-buster. It can be yours for the low, low price of $22!  Pick it up today.

A Flood of Free Federal Appellate Case Law

Suddenly, after years of doing without any decent free source of federal appellate decisions, legal researchers now have least two excellent options:

• The Public Library of Law (from Fastcase)
• US Court of Appeals Cases and Opinions (from Justia)

Both the Public Library of Law and Justia have federal circuit court cases going back to 1950. Their search engines are user-friendly, and each allows you to limit your search to a particular circuit.

(The Public Library of Law and Justia (via its Supreme Court Center) also have all Supreme Court decisions. In addition, Justia has federal district court opinions from 2004 to the present, and the Public Library of Law has state appellate and high court cases from 1997 to the present.)

Why so much new federal case law all of a sudden? As Robert Ambrogi explains it, in mid-February public.resource.org and the Creative Commons jointly released 18 million pages of public domain federal case law. After that, it was just a matter of days before Justia and the Public Library of Law took this raw data and rolled out search engines for the decisions.

[Thanks to Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites  for the tip about the Public Library of Law, and thanks to Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg for the tip about Justia!]

New Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography

Researchers who are looking for law-related scholarly articles containing substantive empirical studies -- you're in luck!  The Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography is now open for business.  From the Law Librarian Blog (Dec. 5, 2007):

"Not officially launched, but now live is the fabulous Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography. A joint product of UCLA and Cornell law schools (with much of the indexing and literature review to create the database done by librarians at those two schools, namely Matt Morrison, Jill Fukunaga, and June Kim), users can search for ELS articles by author, title, subject, or year.  For those of us who have grappled with requests for ELS articles in a particular subject, we know how difficult these projects can be.  This new product is much needed and provides an important service in this expanding area of legal scholarship."

For a detailed description of the database, click here.

ALR and Lexis Part Ways -- January 2008

We all knew that this day was approaching -- the day when American Law Reports content would be available exclusively on Westlaw.  (What is ALR, you ask?  Check out this handy Harvard Law Library research guide to learn all about ALR.)   

I learned last fall that ALR's days on Lexis were numbered, but hadn't yet heard of an actual date when ALR would be yanked from Lexis.  My esteemed colleague, Bonnie Shucha at WisBlawg, has posted an article from Information Today, informing legal researchers that ALR content will only be available on Westlaw as of January 2008. 

Law Profs and Law Review Editors Rumble Again

It seems like Daniel Solove of Concurring Opinions feels compelled to pen at least one snarky post about student-run law reviews each semester (see our earlier post for another example), and his latest contribution is entitled "A Sample Law Review Submission Policy."  Here are some fun excerpts:

In considering your article, we use an objective point system for assessing scholarly quality. Articles receiving over 100 points are generally accepted. Here is how it works:

1. Are you from a highly-ranked law school?  If yes, add 20.

2. Have you published in highly-ranked law reviews?  If yes, add 30.

3. Is your name Cass Sunstein?  If yes, accept immediately.

4. Does your article have a nifty title?  If yes, add 10.

5. Is the introduction good?  If yes, add 40.

6. Do the footnotes need a lot of editing?  If yes, subtract 50.

7. Does your article have more than 6 parts?  If yes, subtract 10.

  Not to be outdone, a former editor returned fire in the comments with this list of questions:

Are you that insufferably self-important professor from our faculty who made our life miserable 2 years ago when we made the mistake of publishing his article? If yes, multiply by zero.

Does your article reflect that you think "empirical study" means "counting things"?  If yes, subtract 20.

Are you Jennifer Lopez with tenure and elbow patches? That is, will you constantly pester us with capricious requests? Will you ask us to speak to your research assistants, will you drop by the office, will you--instead of accepting or rejecting our proposed changes--want to discuss them all in excruciating detail? If so, and if we can detect it in time, subtract 15. Subtract only 5 if your article has any redeeming qualities.

Most entertaining!  And thank you, former editor, for also drawing attention to the overuse of the Humpty-Dumpty quote from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.  A quick Westlaw search reveals 219 uses of this quotation in United States law review and journal articles, and that is just too many!

Law Professor Blogs Are Flourishing

Concurring Opinions has posted its 2007 Law Professor Blogger Census.  According to Professor Solove, there are now 307 blogging law professors, and the range of topics is quite impressive.  Law professors are blogging about aviation law, reproductive rights, poverty law, sports law, consumer law, .....well, you get the idea!  If you're interested in a particular practice area, these blogs are a great way to keep current on the latest developments and find paper topics that won't put you to sleep. 

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. 

U.S. Legal Publishing Continues to Move Overseas

Today ZiefBrief learned that Incisive Media, a U.K. company, has purchased  the venerable ALM (formerly American Lawyer Media), publisher of the American Lawyer, The Recorder (one of San Francisco's legal papers), the National Law Journal, and other well-regarded national and regional legal magazines and newspapers.

This may be a good thing for ALM, as Robert Ambrogi (our source for this tidbit), opines, but ZiefBrief can't help but be a little concerned about the ongoing flight of U.S. legal publishing. All major U.S. legal "imprints" are already foreign-owned. Thomson, the Canadian media giant, owns West and its many divisions; Reed-Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch concern, owns LexisNexis and its kin; and Wolters-Kluwer of the Netherlands owns CCH. The last holdout among major publishers is the employee-owned BNA (Bureau of National Affairs), and we wonder if ALM will be just the first of many smaller publishers to be cherry-picked by foreign corporations.

Realistically there is no danger in having all of our law published abroad. (Though heaven forbid that we should ever mortally offend Canada, the U.K. or the Netherlands and awake one morning to find, in searching the Constitution via Westlaw or Lexis, that we are now ruled by Her Majesty Queen Beatrix  or Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth!) Still, on an emotional level, it strikes us that law is somehow akin to a nation's cultural patrimony and it seems odd that so little of ours is in the hands of domestic companies.

Changes to West Key Number System

West has just announced that it has added more than 3,000 new key number classifications to the West Digest System topic, Constitutional Law.  West also issued this handy reminder to researchers using the West Digest System online:

Remember: When an existing headnote is reassigned to a different or newly created West topic or key number, the former topic or key number remains visible--and searchable--in the appropriate case law database on Westlaw. As a result, you can retrieve a case using either its current or its former West topic and key number classifications.

Need a refresher on using the West Digest System on Westlaw?  Check out the Westlaw user guides or talk with a Zief reference librarian!