ZiefBrief

Summer Reading Before Law School - Dean Brand's Recommendation

Dean Jeff Brand, always interested in how law can serve the cause of social justice, stopped by the Zief Library the other day full of praise for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, a "fantastic book," in his words, "that every incoming first year law student should read."

Arc of Justice reports on events that took place in Detroit in 1925. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician, moves his family to a white neighborhood. The neighbors riot, one of them is shot, and Sweet is tried for murder. Author Kevin Boyle of Ohio State University gives us a biography of Sweet, a detailed report of the trial (in which Sweet was supported by the NAACP and defended by Clarence Darrow), a vivid sense of life in the segregated South and North of early 20th century, and some lingering questions about what it has taken and will take to eliminate racial prejudice and segregation in the United States.

USF law students, faculty, and staff can check out the Zief Library's copy of Arc of Justice. It's on the shelves on the second floor at KF 224 .S8 B69 2004.

Here's more on Arc of Justice —

• Forgotten Justice, Priya Jain's review from Salon.

• When a Moving Van Could Spark a Neighborhood War, Patricia Cohen's New York Times review.

• Arc of Justice: An American Tale of Racial Hatred, materials from NPR, including audio files of Tavis Smiley's interview with Kevin Boyle, and of Boyle reading an excerpt from his book.

Maybe This Book Will Help You Ace Your Exams.

With a name like Getting to Maybe you might just think you have found a book about negotiation, (Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher And William Ury is considered the bible of negotiation by some folks) but not so. The full title is Getting to maybe : how to excel on law school exams by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul. There is a lot to be said for books like this one -- most new law students don't have a clue on how to best prepare for and master a law school exam while more experienced students are always looking for that extra edge that will get them a better grade. GTM offers a strategic approach to law school study and exam taking. While this book (or any of the other books in the Zief on the topic) can't guarantee you a better grade, just reading the Chapters on Test Taking Tips could make the difference between a great exam and a mediocre one. Check it out.

"And now, for the rest of the story...": the background and back story for Law School Cases

Thanks to the innovation of Harvard Law Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose stern visage graces this post), student in US law schools learn the law by reading appellate court decisions. The important cases on each subject are gathered together by the most eminent names in legal scholarship and sold at a thumping great price in a "case book." One of the problems with case books is that the decisions are heavily redacted in the interest of brevity. Sometimes the cuts are so extensive that the poor law student has only the sketchiest idea who the parties are and what the real disputes is about.
Foundation Press, one of the major publishers of case books, has started a series of readable volumes to help fill in the "back story" on some of the most important cases in American Jurisprudence. Currently the Zief law library holds the following titles in the "… Stories" Series:

• Business tax stories
• Civil procedure stories
• Constitutional law stories
• Employment discrimination stories
• Environmental law stories
• Evidence Law Stories
• Immigration stories
• Intellectual property stories
• Labor law stories
• Legal ethics stories
• Property stories
• Tax stories
• Torts stories

Click Here for a random page from the book Torts Stories courtesy of Amazon.


Click Here for the first page of the discussion of the Tarasoff case in the book Torts Stories courtesy of Amazon.


For more information on all these titles and their  location in the Zief Library click on this link to Ignacio, the online catalog.

Practical Information on Affordable Housing From Prof. Iglesias

Affordable housing is not a topic that has traditionally gotten a lot of ink from legal publishers, but now the ABA has just published The Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development, edited by the USF School of Law's Professor Tim Iglesias  and his colleague Rochelle Lento from the firm of Dykema Gossett PLLC.

The ABA's blurb announces that the guide "covers the most important areas of law applicable to affordable housing development and provides a comprehensive overview of affordable housing laws."

Sponsored by the ABA’s Section of State and Local Government Law, Forum on Affordable Housing & Community Development Law and written by experts from all over the country, the Guide, in 13 chapters, deals with: planning; zoning, housing codes, and other federal, state and local regulatory issues; financing; enforcing regulatory agreements; and preservation. (For more detail, see the online table of contents.) Professor Iglesias is the author of Chapter 4, "State and Local Regulation of Particular Types of Affordable Housing."

The USF community will find The Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development in the Zief Library second-floor stacks at KF 5729 .L44 2005.

And, The Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development is available for purchase from the ABA

[Other publications by Professor Tim Iglesias are listed on the Zief Library's Faculty Publications page.]

Ring in the New Year with New UK Civil Partnership Law

Welcome to 2006 from all of us at ZiefBrief! To start your year out right here are a few useful references about the recent change in Civil Partnership law in the United Kingdom.

First, a new print publication recently added to the collection here at the Zief. Titled Civil Partnership - the New Law, it guides you through the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 with reference to statutory and case law as well as relevant portions of the European Convention of Human Rights jurisprudence. While primarily aimed at practicing solicitors and barristers it does contain a wealth of the sort of background information on the Act that we US researchers would define as legislative history.

And for those of you who can't (or won't) deal with something so 20th century as a book, there is a good web resource at the British Directgov website. Titled Rights and Responsibilites the target audience is the general public but there are a wealth of links to government agencies and FAQ's of interest to academic and legal researchers.

Thanks to the Librarian's Internet Index for the tip on the web resource.

Rolling Out the New California Criminal Jury Instructions

As of January 1, 2006, the Judicial Council’s new California criminal jury instructions will become the "official instructions for use in the state of California" whose use is "strongly encouraged." (Cal. Rules of Court 855.)

In preparation, both the Courts and LexisNexis (the official publisher) are making the instructions available to lawyers, scholars, and the public.

Researchers can download the new instructions (and related information) for free at the Criminal Jury Instructions Resource Center. The Resource Center offers —

• A Table of Contents (PDF, 151 KB)
• The complete text of the California Criminal Jury Instructions (PDF, 4466 KB)
• A User's Guide (PDF, 149 KB)
• Links to Rules of Court applicable to the new criminal jury instructions (Rules 855, 229, and 6.59

More information is available at the California Courts' New Criminal Jury Instructions Online Press Center.

LexisNexis has just announced the availability of the new source "Judicial Council of California Criminal Jury Instructions" (short source name: CAL;JUCACI). LexisNexis subscribers can use this source to find jury instructions by browsing a table of contents or by running a search using the "Terms & Connectors," "Natural Language," or "Easy Search" methods.

(Westlaw does not yet have a database of these instructions, but the smart money is that it's just a matter of days until we see one.)

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[Update, 12/12/05] As predicted, it did not take long for Westlaw to catch up. Today Westlaw announced the availability of a new database, "Judicial Council of California Criminal Jury Instructions" (CALCRIM), which contains the full text of the new instructions.

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[Update, 1/23/06] Print copies of the new California Criminal Jury Instructions have begun to arrive in the Zief Library. Our first set comes from Thomson/West: Judicial Council of California Criminal Jury Instructions: CALCRIM, KFC 1171.A65 S8 2006 Law Reserve.

First-of-a-Kind: Contract Litigation Practice Guide

Now, for the first time, there is a California practice guide devoted entirely to litigating contract cases. The two-volume Matthew Bender Practice Guide: California Contract Litigation thoroughly covers all the main issues that might arise in a contract case, and even spares a few chapters to deal with breach of warranty and with the sale of goods. The particulars are:

Crompton, Charles, Matthew Bender Practice Guide: California Contract Litigation (Newark, NJ: LexisNexis, 2005- ). KFC 225 .C76 Law Reserve.

It's also on Lexis as the source "Matthew Bender Practice Guide: California Contract Litigation."

And there's even a USF School of Law connection: Jennifer Siegel, '02, wrote Chapter 3, "Determining Jurisdiction and Venue in Contract Actions."

Zief Moves Into Audio Books With "The Outlaw Sea"

The Zief Library has made its first foray into audio books with The Outlaw Sea, in which Atlantic Monthly's William Langewiesche reports on the virtually unregulated world of merchant shipping. In the jacket blurb, the publisher writes:

…William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises—licit and illicit—that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons…. Here is free enterprise at it freest, opportunity taken to extremes. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems—shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of two perfectly adapted pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism.

This is the outlaw sea—perennially defiant and untamable—that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.

The Outlaw Sea has received great reviews (see, for example, Chris Patsilelis’s review of the Outlaw Sea in the Houston Chronicle or Richard Ellis's review of the Outlaw Sea in the UK's TimesOnline), and is the perfect complement to Zief's more traditional materials—cases, statutes, treaties—on Maritime Law.

Zief's version of The Outlaw Sea is read by the author and is unabridged.  It's available at the Circulation Desk at HE 571 L36 2004 Law Res AV. USF Law School students, faculty, and staff may check it out for 72 hours (and renewals are allowed).

HIPAA, HIPAA, Hooray! *

If you are a provider or consumer of health care in America you need to know about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Originally enacted to stem the misuse of sensitive private health information, the Act will require a slew of new administrative burdens for the US health care and insurance industry. The Zief library just added a new one volume loose-leaf treatise on the subject titled HIPAA: A Guide to Health Care Privacy and Security Law. This research tool covers both state and federal privacy laws laws, as well as exploring how and when the federal rules preempt the state. The Appendixes provide a veritable cookbook for assembling a HIPAA compliant policy manual for a business that handles protected health information.

* a tip o' the hat to LR for providing the pun for the title of this posting.

Fighting "PowerPoint Phluff" with Edward R. Tufte

Depending on your point of view, the presentation software PowerPoint is either the greatest tool for presenting information to a group of people since the invention of the chalkboard, or it's the work of Satan. For most people bad PowerPoint presentations are akin to pornography—you can't exactly define what is that makes them bad, but you know them when you see them. Edward R. Tufte has written some of the most thought-provoking words about what's wrong with PowerPoint, and how to improve presentations made using it. In his slim volume The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Tufte illustrates the limitations of PowerPoint, lambastes some of the common misuses of the software and tells the reader how to use the software intelligently and effectively. If you think you will be called upon to make a presentation, a few minutes spent with this book may stand you in better stead than wading through a 400 page guide to PowerPoint.

To learn more about Edward R. Tufte and his theories on visual representation/presentation of information go to Professor Tufte's web site at www.edwardtufte.com.