ZiefBrief

New Zief Digital Resources: Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, Emanuel Outlines & more!

We're excited about our purchase of new digital resources for USF Law students! You will sign in to use these online resources in the same way that you sign on to access other myUSF applications, such as campus email, course registration, etc.

• The law library’s Lexis Digital Library furnishes digital access with highlighting, note-taking, and printing options for study guides in the Understanding and Questions & Answers series. Check the Fall 2020 booklist to find out if your professor recommends an Understanding series text. In addition, the Lexis Digital Library has been enhanced to offer free access to the following required Fall 2020 course texts:

• Animal Law (Liebman): Wagman, Waisman & Frasch, Animal Law: Cases and Materials, 6th ed. (Carolina Academic Press 2019).
  
  
• International Human Rights Law (de la Vega): Donoho, International Human Rights Law (Carolina Academic Press 2017) & Weissbrodt et al., Selected International Human Rights Instruments and Bibliography for Research on International Human Rights Law, 4th ed. (LexisNexis 2009).
  
  
• Legal Research, Writing & Analysis I (Abelkop): Chew & Pryal, The Complete Legal Writer (Carolina Academic Press 2017 – note that the second edition will be posted as soon as it is available from the publisher).
  
  
• Legal Research, Writing & Analysis I (Hutchinson): McFarlane, Dudovitz & Rowe, California Legal Research, 3d ed (Carolina Academic Press 2016).
  
  

• The Lexis Digital Library also offers free access to Expert Learning for Law Students. This book is highly recommended by several USF Law professors and teaches students how to incorporate specific successful learning strategies into their law school studies.

• Our new Wolters Kluwer Online Study Aid Library offers access to these study guides: Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, and Emanuel Outlines. Students can personalize their accounts to take notes, highlight, and print digital books. Check the Fall 2020 booklist to find out if your professor recommends a Glannon Guide or Examples & Explanations text. The Wolters Kluwer digital library also includes over 200 videos with coverage of 21 course areas written and presented by law professors and practitioners.
  
  
• Whenever possible, the law library is purchasing some required course texts through Marketplace OverDrive and making them available to law students through the Lexis Digital Library platform. Unfortunately, any digital books that we purchase from publishers that aren’t affiliated with Lexis are subject to more restrictive loan rules. Each copy may only be borrowed by one student at a time for a period of 7 days. The following required Fall 2020 course texts are available to borrow for 7-day periods:
  
  
  • California Civil Discovery (Driscoll & Piasta): Moore et al., Depositions in a Nutshell (West Academic 2016).
    
    
  • Appellate Advocacy (Vu): Garner, The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (West Academic 2019) & Legal Writing in Plain English (University of Chicago Press 2013).

The law library is reviewing publishers’ digital package offers on a rolling basis. We just added an ebook library with scholarly books on international law. We'll continue to add more digital titles throughout the Fall 2020 semester. Watch for the law library’s announcements in This Week at USF for details about new digital collections!

The librarians are available if you have any questions about accessing and using these materials. You can reach the librarian team via live chat, Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm.  You can also email the team at: [email protected] 

We look forward to working with you this semester, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have suggestions about how the law library can assist you with your learning objectives this semester!

Study Aids to Help 1Ls (and others) Ace Their Classes

The Zief has a wealth of materials intended to help students better understand the law. While nothing will take the place of reading the case book and briefing the cases you read, everyone needs an occasional helping hand digesting legal concepts.  The tools available run the gamut from the very general to the highly specialized. We have broken down what we think are the things you might use (and the things you should avoid) in being as prepared as possible for class. The attached handy chart is color coded to help you identify source that are recommended (green), those that have some drawbacks (yellow) and those that you should think twice about before using (red). Click on the image to see it full size.

If you would like a recommendation about a particular source or subject just ask a research librarian.

 

 

Pew Research Study on American Reading Habits

Librarians think about readers' format preferences (print, ebook, audiobook) a lot.  We want to be sure that the library materials we purchase are in a format that works for our patrons.  The latest Pew Research Center survey of Americans' reading habits reveals that print books continue to be the preferred format for the majority of readers. According to the study, "when people reach for a book, it is much more likely to be a traditional print book than a digital product. Fully 65% of Americans have read a print book in the last year, more than double the share that has read an e-book (28%) and more than four times the share that has consumed book content via audio book (14%)." Only 6 percent of Americans read books in digital-only format, while 38 percent read books exclusively in print.

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."