August 2007 Archives

Upcoming changes to Law Library hours:

Saturday Sept.1 OPEN 10 am-6 pm (Reference Office open 11-5)
Sunday Sept. 2 OPEN Noon-6 pm (Reference Office open 1-4)
Monday Sept. 3 CLOSED

Beginning Tuesday Sept. 4:
Monday-Thursday OPEN 8 am-10 pm (Reference Office open 9-8)
Friday OPEN 8 am-6 pm (Reference Office open 9-5)
Saturday OPEN 9 am-6 pm (Reference Office open 11-5)
Sunday OPEN Noon-6 pm (Reference Office open 1-5)

The library may have different hours around holidays and breaks so please check our website at: http://www.law.umn.edu/library/libinfo.html#HOURS

The Politics of Legal Writing: Proceedings of a Conference for Legal Research and Writing Program Directors, July 28-29, 1995, is the record of the proceedings of the first national conference of legal writing program directors, held in San Diego, California, at the California Western School of Law on July 28-29, 1995.

Sixteen conference presentations are reported, and the document also includes the reports of the post-conference activities by the conference attendees that led to their decision to form the Association of Legal Writing Directors. The original document was edited by Jan M. Levine (Duquesne), Rebecca A. Cochran (Dayton) and Steven J. Johnsen (Lewis-Clark), with support from the West Publishing Company, and while the document has been available on the Internet, and was distributed to all conference attendees, it has not been formally published elsewhere. It can now be downloaded from SSRN.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

FOREIGN LAW RESEARCH RESOURCE

FLARE is a collaboration between the major libraries collecting law in the United Kingdom: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Bodleian Law Library, Squire Law Library, British Library, and School of Oriental and African Studies. It is working to improve the coverage and accessibility of foreign legal materials at the national level and to raise expertise in their use. The work is currently focused on improving national coverage of the law of the transition states of central and Eastern Europe and building a distributed national collection of official gazettes. Current projects include: a series of Research Guides to the law of foreign jurisdictions, training courses on the law of the transition states, a Union List of holdings of European Legal Gazettes in major research libraries.� (from the website)

URL: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/flare/flare.htm

Source: OPL Plus Blog

Angela Hedlund is a recent addition to the law library staff. She is a Library Assistant II, working half in circulation and half in administration for the director of the library. Angela began her staff position August 13, 2007, but had worked since 2005 as a student employee. Her favorite part of her job is handling the wide variety of tasks that come her way each day. Angela traveled to Spain, England and France earlier in the summer, speaks Spanish, and can sign (though not fluently).

Angela enjoys reading, biking, camping, hanging out with friends, movies, shopping, swimming, cooking (and eating :), and traveling. A new thing she's interested in trying is kayaking. Angela's motto is Carpe Diem, and says "it sounds cliche, but I aspire to live it."

A new free online resource for law students has just been launched by the American Constitution Society. It is called ACS ResearchLink and is designed to help law students search for topics for their law review/journal notes, seminar papers, dissertations, and independent research projects. Law students can use the database to find a topic they like or as a springboard for something else, including building working relationships with practitioners.

Visit the site at http://researchlink.acslaw.org/

DATABASE OF US STATE DATABASES
The Government Documents Roundtable (American Library Association) is putting together a wiki of state agency databases on business, people, agriculture, and more. This site will attempt to collect links to them in one place. They hope to add search capability at a later date. Only the following states’ sites are active as of 7/14/07, but this looks to be a great idea. Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming

URL: http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases

Source: OPL Plus blog

Mary Rumsey is the Foreign, Comparative & International Law Librarian. She has been at the law library since 2000 and finds that the most enjoyable part of her job is teaching people how to find information for themselves.

Mary spends her time away from the law library walking the dog ("Seamus the Yellow Lab with Expensive Medical Problems"), reading, admiring her children, and "fretting." She would love to have lunch with Richard Dawkins, holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, because Mary finds him quite interesting.

FOREIGN LAW TRANSLATIONS
The Institute for Transnational Law

This site is a resource for French, German, Italian, Austrian and Israeli legal materials in the fields of constitutional, administrative, contract and tort law. The English translations of decisions from Germany and France include cases from the Reichsgericht, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Bundesgerichtshof, the Conseil Constitutionnel, the Conseil d’Etat and the Cour de Cassation. From the University of Texas at Austin Law School, funded in part by the MD Anderson Foundation.

URL: http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/transnational/work/

You can find another discussion of legal translations in the article from Law Library Journal 98, no. 3: "Scaling the Tower of Babel Fish: An Analysis of the Machine Translation of Legal Information" by U of MN Law Librarian Sarah Yates: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v98n03/2006-27.pdf

Looking for a quick dose of interesting facts? Discover magazine has a feature called "20 Things You Didn't Know About _____" and you can subscribe to it on their website so that you receive new editions. Here's a sample:

Number 7 and 9 in 20 Things You Didn't Know About Robots:
by Sean Markey, Corey S. Powell

7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.

9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.

View more at: http://discovermagazine.com/columns/20-things-you-didnt-know

Piper Walters is a Library Assistant II in the Inter-library Loan/Document Delivery department. She also works on the ASAP Faculty Services and retrieval service. Piper has worked at the law library since Fall 2005. She loves that her job doesn't tie her to her desk. She needs to pull items from the stacks, retrieve books from other libraries on campus, and deliver materials to faculty offices.

Piper enjoys photography, reading, and swimming. She just finished her first year of an Interior Design degree at Dakota County Technical College. http://www.dctc.edu/prospStudents/programs/intDesign.cfm

Piper loves to travel and visit new places. In fact, her dream is to have lunch with her parents and sister while in Italy, where they would "sit outside, eat margherita pizza, and drink wine." Piper is originally from Idaho and went to school in Oregon. While she misses the Pacific Northwest, she loves living in Minnesota.

From the Sunlight Foundation:
"The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites� for government transparency. They provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics.

Many of these resources apply the Web 2.0 ethos to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways – often times by mashing data together from disparate sources to maximize the usability of that information."

Source: Law Librarian Blog

Here is the list of new titles the law library acquired in July 2007. The list is also on the library's home page.

July Acquisitions

Julie Dorn is a Library Associate II, working in the Cataloging Department. She's worked at the law library since October 2005. Julie's favorite part of her job is cataloging the materials that go into the LART Collection (Law, Literature and the Arts Collection located in the Hedin Alcove on 2nd floor).

Julie enjoys her feline friend, Squeak (pictured below), as well as art, food, walking, reading, movies, and traveling when she can. If she had a super-power, Julie's would be either mind-reading or being able to instantly absorb knowledge (like suddenly being fluent in Portuguese or playing the piano without a lesson).

The U of MN, Law School and Law Library are open today, August 2, one day after a tragic bridge collapse very close to Mondale Hall. However, the nearest bridge, 10th Ave (aka Cedar Avenue) bridge, is blocked off. If you are planning a trip to the library or building, please take an alternate route.

Feel free to call the library (612-625-4300) or email your request if you do not want to travel into the area.

For circulation, email lawcirc@umn.edu.
For reference, email law-ref@umn.edu.
For Document Delivery or Interlibrary Loan, email x-asap@umn.edu.
For general/other library information, email lawlib@umn.edu.

You can also visit our website for more information resources: http://www.law.umn.edu/library/home.html