ZiefBrief

Presentation on Research Strategy & Secondary Sources

Here is a copy of the presentation for students participating in a clinical program: Download ClinicalExternsSpr08.ppt

Web 2.0 for Legal Researchers

We're giving a presentation this week on just a few of the Web 2.0 applications that are useful for legal researchers.  You can find a copy of our presentation here: Download Web20LegalResearch.ppt

Successful Statute Searching on Lexis and Westlaw

ZiefBrief has noticed that researchers skilled in other aspects of Lexis and Westlaw struggle at times with statute searching.

Diane Murley of Arizona State's Ross-Blakley Law Library must have observed these struggles too, because she's been blogging succinct, invaluable tips for getting the most out of statutes on Lexis and Westlaw.

So far, there are four tips in the series:

• Finding Statutes on LexisNexis
• Finding Statutes on Westlaw
• Printing Statutes on LexisNexis
• Printing Statutes on Westlaw

HeinOnline Is Blogging!

Need PDF versions of law review articles, sections from the Code of Federal Regulations, or Federal Register pages? Trying to find an older law review article that isn't available on Lexis or Westlaw?  Looking for federal legislative history?  If your answer is "yes" to any of these questions, you need HeinOnline, an online resource available to all USF law students, staff, and faculty. 

For tips on using HeinOnline, you can visit the rather quaintly-named HeinOnline Weblog, which gives all kinds of valuable tips on how to get the most out of this fabulous online resource!  Almost all large law firms subscribe to HeinOnline (92% of the top 100 law firms in the U.S. are subscribers, to be exact), so it's a good idea to become familiar with this resource in law school so that you can search with ease when you begin practicing.

Westlaw Hornbook & Nutshell Initiative Leaves Law Students Out

ZiefBrief was surprised to learn recently that Westlaw now includes some hornbooks and nutshells. (As of today, there are 7 hornbooks, and 16 nutshells — a tiny percentage of what's available in print.)

ZiefBrief was not at all surprised to discover, when we tried to field test these online nutshells and hornbooks, that they are not included in law school subscription plans. Having nutshells and hornbooks available to law students on Westlaw would no doubt completely undercut the market for the print versions of these excellent study aids, and we can't imagine that West's book publishing division would put up with that.

So who does this help? Researchers with commercial accounts. Nutshells and hornbooks are great way for lawyers to get up to speed quickly on new and unfamiliar areas of law, and having them on Westlaw puts them in the hands of attorneys who wouldn't normally have print copies hanging around.

(To see what hornbooks and nutshells are available, log on to Westlaw, and enter "IDEN" in the "Search these databases" textbox. At the IDEN search screen, switch to "Terms and Connectors," and run this search: hornbook or nutshell. Academic users can run this search, but they won't have access to the publications .

Handy Guide to Tackling Multi-State Legal Research

If you practice with an institution that represents clients with national or multi-state business activities, you can be sure that, at some point in your career, you'll be asked to "find the laws relating to X legal issue" in a handful of states.  If you're really unlucky, you'll be asked to do a 50-state survey of the laws in a particular area. 

Two law firm librarians, Margi Heinen and Jan Bissett, have just published a very useful research guide designed to help researchers tackle multi-state legal research efficiently.  You can find this guide, "Reference From Coast to Coast: Learning to Love Those 50 State Surveys," on the always-excellent LLRX.com.  The authors cover resources for multi-state research from Lexis and Westlaw as well as great free Internet resources, like the National Conference of State Legislatures' 50 State Legislative Tracking Web Resources, which links to multi-state surveys on different legal topics available on the web. 

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.

The Law -- It Just Wants To Be Free

Public.Resource.Org issued a press release today announcing that they will "release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose." They are able to do this thanks to an agreement they reached with Fastcase, Inc.
Carl Malamud, the founder of Public.Resource.Org is famous for his efforts making the SEC's EDGAR materials available to the general public for free. There is a great story about Malamud and his effort to convince West Publishing Company to allow his organization to digitize West materials at Tim O'Reilly's (of O'Reily computer books) blog.

Law Library of Congress Gets a New Look, Maintains Useful Research Tools.

In honor of the 175th anniversary of their creation, the Law Library of Congress unveiled a newly redesigned web page. ZiefBrief would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the LLOC on their anniversary and to remind our readers about what a useful research destination they can be. Two useful resources of special note are:

Guide to Law Online:
This is a very useful list of links maintained by the Law Library of Congress Public Services Division designed to provide a portal of Internet sources of interest to legal researchers. In addition to providing links to the full text of cases, codes, regulations the pages of the Guide provide useful links for lay people interested in the law.

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN)
GLIN is a searchable online database containing laws, judicial decision, legislative records and legal literature for jurisdictions spanning the globe. Contributors are governmental agencies and international organizations that add original-language, officially published, full text documents in electronic format. Unofficial summaries (generally in English) accompany each document. Full texts of materials in the GLIN are available as PDF files.

Has Roe v. Wade been Overruled? Editorial Judgment in Cite-Checking Tools

Has ZiefBrief gone off the rails? Are we entering the realm of contentious ideological debate? Well… no. But we do have a point about legal research.

The other day we were preparing a simple exercise in finding cases by citation, using Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), as an example. We noticed that Shepard's gave Roe a red stop-sign (indicating the most highly negative treatment), and we explored further. It turned out that, as the Shepard's editors see it,  Roe was "Overruled as stated in" Gonzales v. Carhart, 127 S. Ct. 1610 (2007) [PDF; 73 pages].

Curious to see what the competition said, we ran Roe through KeyCite on Westlaw. KeyCite gave Roe a yellow flag. A step down from the red flag, the yellow signals, in the views of the KeyCite editors: "Some negative history but not overruled". When it came to the effect of Carhart on Roe, KeyCite said: "Modification Recognized by Gonzales v. Carhart."

The lesson is that researchers ultimately need to read the citing cases (here, Carhart) and decide for themselves what effect they have on the case they are researching (here, Roe). Cite-checking tools at best give attorneys signals as to potential problems. It is the attorney's responsibility to follow up.

So has Roe been overruled? That's not for Shepard's or KeyCite to say. Their core purpose is to alert researchers to a possible change in status and point to the citing cases (such as Carhart). The legal community as a whole needs to read those cases and debate their meaning before we can begin to work out where Roe stands today.