ZiefBrief

The Paperless Law Review? An Experiment at USF

One of ZiefBrief's favorite parts of the job is working with USF four excellent student-edited journals.

This year we're excited to watch the University of San Francisco Law Review move toward an entirely paperless editing cycle. Led by Editor-in-Chief Robin Bennett, the USF Law Review Board is pursuing this goal by aggregating digital article drafts, sources cited, and other information on a SharePoint site accessible to all editors and staff.

As part of this initiative, the Zief Library is advising the Law Review on finding the most stable, reliable digital documents for source collection. This has meant wrestling with the Bluebook and its insistence on official sources and its bias in favor of print.

Our approach includes creating a Google Notebook on Law Review Source Collection with links to the most authoritative and most stable PDF sources for the sorts of documents (law review articles, cases, statutes, regulations, Congressional documents) commonly cited in law review articles — and then training all Law Review staff in tips and techniques for using the top sites, like HeinOnline and GPO Access. There are still times when the Law Review has to pull and scan paper sources, but they're well on the way toward paperless production of their journal.

Standing Out on Your Summer Law Job - Secret Weapons

Law students lucky enough to have landed summer jobs or internships in these tough times are working harder than ever to make a good impression on their employers.

One sure bet is to get known as a great researcher. Students who've taken an advanced legal research class have the edge here, but anyone can give their research skills a big boost by following this precept (coined by Dean Cowan and Schelle Simcox, librarians at U.C. Berkeley’s law school and Paul Hastings, respectively) —

Practice Materials: The Practical Way to Practice Law

The deliberate redundancy drives home the point that researchers who start with practice guides, treatises, continuing legal ed. publications, and other similar so-called "secondary" sources will get a firmer grasp on the context of the client's problem and the issues it raises, and will wind up doing better work in less time.

So where to find practice materials? There are lots of ways. Perhaps the best is to ask the librarian, if your office has one, or to ask the attorneys you're working with for their favorites. Or you can call the reference librarians back at your law school to get their suggestions.

These web sites are handy guides to practice materials dealing with the various areas of law:

• Kent Olson's Treatises & Services by Subject — or UVa's customized version of Treatises & Services by Subject
• For California law, the Zief Library's California Practice Guides list
• Harvard Law Library's Legal Treatises by Subject
• The Georgetown Law Library Treatise Finder
• Santa Clara Heafey Law Library's Major Legal Treatises
• Pace Law Library's Subject Guide to Legal Treatises

For more advice on acing your summer job, try Suffolk Law School's podcasts on Transition from One-L to Summer Legal Work. [Hat tip on this one to the Moritz Legal Information Blog.]

Judge Sotomayor: In-Depth Background

If you're looking to get your hands on comprehenisve information about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, these sources should help.

• Sonia Sotomayor page, Law Library of Congress.

  Lists articles and other publications; has information on Judge Sotomayor's 1992 and 1997 confirmation hearings; links to other web sites. [Hat tip to Emily Carr, Legal Reference Specialist, Law Library of Congress.]

• Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide, Georgetown Law Library.

  Includes or links to biographies, transcripts of the 1992 and 1997 confirmation hearings; citations to publications by Judge Sotomayor; background information about the nomination and confirmation process.

• Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor Opinions and Papers (SOTOMAYOR-NOM), from Westlaw (for subscribers only).

  Contains "opinions joined or authored by Judge Sotomayor while sitting on the United States Court of Appeals and the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York … federal or state decisions in which Judge Sotomayor was an attorney of record or party … [selected] articles written by or about Judge Sotomayor … a current resume of Judge Sotomayor by West's Profiler … her biography from the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary … congressional documents related to the nomination process."

• Articles by or about Judge Sotomayor, from HeinOnline (for USF subscribers only).

  Over 170 articles containing at least one mention of the nominee. [If you belong to another institution that subscribes to HeinOnline, try this link to HeinOnline's Sotomayor articles.]

Supreme Court Nomination Information

There was a time in the not too distant past that Zief law librarians scurried around and printed out everything we could find on the nominees for a newly vacated seat on the US Supreme Court. All of those pages would be slapped into a three ring binder for the edification of anyone who happened to be interested. Needless to say, this generated a lot of dead trees for a resource relatively few people saw.
    Now that we are in the Age of the Internet it makes more sense to share top-drawer web sites for our patrons with an interest in the process and people involved in selecting Justice Souter's replacement. The following sites currently show information on the last round of nominations but they will undoubtedly be brought up-to-date as events transpire.
    A good first stop is the Supreme Court Nominations Page at the Law Library of Congress. This useful collection of information includes lists of nominees confirmed and not confirmed by Congress, bibliography on the nomination process, and information about nominees.
    Another good source is the Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide maintained at our sister Jesuit institution, the Georgetown Law Library. The page outlines the nomination process and includes information about nomination hearings of justices and past confirmation failures.

Feeling the Need For Some Presidential Clemency? This Is the Web Site For You!

While it is doubtful that any of the upright citizens that make up the readership of our fine blog will ever need the services of the Pardon Attorney, it is good to now where to go if you need an Executive Branch "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

According to the official web site (click here to open in a new browser window) "The Office of the Pardon Attorney, in consultation with the Attorney General or his designee, assists the President in the exercise of executive clemency as authorized under Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the President's clemency power extends only to federal criminal offenses. All requests for executive clemency for federal offenses are directed to the Pardon Attorney for investigation and review. The Pardon Attorney prepares the Department's recommendation to the President for final disposition of each application. Executive clemency may take several forms, including pardon, commutation of sentence, remission of fine or restitution, and reprieve."

This site is truly a one-stop-shopping source the forms and regulations you will need to get the ball rolling on your personal pardon. In addition, there are fascinating statistics on the forgiveness of past and current presidents. For example: of the 6 cases commuted by George W. Bush as of today, 5 were for drug related offenses -- the sixth was for Lewis "Scooter" Libby's conviction for obstruction of justice, false statements, and perjury. Go figure.

Election Day 2008 and Beyond - Following the Legal Issues

While ZiefBrief hopes for an election which all sides will acknowledge as fair and well-run, ZiefBrief has prepared for any contingency by bookmarking Election Law @ Moritz, the place to go for breaking news, analysis, commentary, and actual litigation documents.

Election Law @ Moritz "covers developments in the law of election administration — laws dealing with voter registration, voter ID, early and absentee voting, provisional balloting, poll workers and polling place procedures, recounts and election contests, and other related issues." It's built upon the expertise of the  faculty of Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, many of whom specialize in election law or related topics.

Particularly useful features include the "Election '08 Top Issues"; the up-to-the-minute "Information and Analysis" (available as an RSS feed); the Major Pending Cases chart; the State-by-State and Topic-by-Topic coverage; the side-by-side comparison of state election laws; and links to other useful blogs and web sites.

[Thanks to the Moritz Legal Information Blog for the tip!]

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.

Putting Today's Same-Sex Marriage Decision in Context

Those looking to build a law review topic out of today's California Supreme Court decision in In re Marriage Cases  (No. S147999, Cal. May 15, 2008) [PDF; 172 pages] (News release [PDF; 7 pages]) might want to explore these research leads:

• Same-Sex Marriage: A Selective Bibliography of the Legal Literature, by Paul Axel-Lute

• Sexual Orientation and the Law: A Research Bibliography, from the Standing Committee on Lesbian and Gay Issues, a special division of the American Association of Law Libraries' Social Responsibilities Special Interest Section. (See especially the section on couples) This bibliography is also available in print. The Zief Library's copy is at: KF 4754.5 .A1 S494 2006 Law Reference.

• Searches for books —

• A quick keyword search to find some useful books in your library would look something like this:

  "same-sex marriage" and law (This link will run a search for scholarly books on same-sex marriage in the Zief Library stacks.)

• You can also search for books worldwide via WorldCat. Try this search:

  "same sex marriage" law

• Or, you can use Google Book Search to search inside the book. Try this search:

  "same sex marriage" law

Learn How to Find U.S. Congressional Materials

A pair of librarians at U.C. Berkeley have put together a short series of informative tutorials to help you figure out how to find U.S. Congressional materials both on-line and in print. It is pretty basic stuff but it could help any researcher get up to speed on finding essential government documents. The bottom half of the tutorial screen opens up an active LexisNexis Congressional connection. Luckily, the USF Gleeson/Geschke library subscribes to this service and all USF students and staff should be able to follow along without any trouble.

Thanks to the Librarian's Internet Index for this tip.

One in 100 Americans Behind Bars -- Pew Report Released

The Chronicle of Higher Education points out in this article that a new report on the US prison population and spending has just been released. The report is the work of the Pew Center of the States and is titled One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (click here to link directly to a 37 page .pdf file.)  Why the interest by the Chronicle of Higher Education, you may ask? Well, it turns out that there are now 5 states (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) that spend more on corrections than they do on higher education. California, with an $8.8 Billion budget for corrections is very close to this mark spending 83 cents on correction for every dollar spent on higher education. This report is a treasure trove of statistics and bibliographical information for anyone interested in prisons, policy, or the general population.