March 2008 Archives

Beginning with the 110th Congress, the Public and Private Laws on GPO Access have been digitally signed and certified. GPO has signed and certified the PDF files to assure users that the online documents are official and authentic.

"To help meet the challenge of the digital age, GPO has begun implementing digital signatures to certain electronic documents on GPO Access that not only establish GPO as the trusted information disseminator, but also provide the assurance that an electronic document has not been altered since GPO disseminated it." Read more at GPO Access' authentication efforts.

Source: WisBlawg via FDLP-listserv

You are invited to attend three Legal Research Brownbag sessions on April 2-4. All sessions are 12:15-1 pm in Room 1. No RSVP is necessary. You can attend 1, 2, or all 3 sessions.

Wednesday April 2:
Mary Rumsey: "Street-Smart Research"
--Avoid scary Westlaw/LexisNexis bills; 4 keys to good online searching; Toolkit for efficient searching

Thursday April 3:
George Jackson: "Administrative Law Research"
--What's the CFR? What's the FR? How to find regulations

Friday April 4:
Vic Garces: "Jump Start Your Research with Treatises & Legal Encyclopedias"
--Learn how to research smarter with secondary sources; Legal encyclopedias; Treatises

These e-resources are now available to all U of M students, faculty, and staff!

CIS Congressional Hearings Digital Collection Retrospective A (added to LexisNexis Congressional)

Gale - newspaper archives
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection

19th Century British Library Newspapers

British Newspapers 1600-1900

19th Century US Newspapers

The Times

The Economist

Also, Women's History Month resources, free from Gale

Waterloo Directory of of English Newspapers and Periodicals

Sources: News from the Libraries and Reference Services blogs

An Advanced Search Syntax Help Guide is available in HeinOnline under the Search tab in any HeinOnline library. This help guides provides detailed instructions and examples for building searches using field names and Boolean operators, as well as details about range, proximity, wildcard and fuzzy searches. The help guide is available in PDF format.

More information about the guide is available at the HeinOnline blog or view the guide at this link.

Photo: A woman voting in Ecuador. International Foundation of Election Systems Photo.

The U.S. State Department has released the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

From the Overview:

Universal human rights seek to incorporate respect for human dignity into the processes of government and law. All persons have the inalienable right to change their government by peaceful means and to enjoy basic freedoms, such as freedom of expression, association, assembly, movement, and religion, without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex. The right to join a free trade union is a necessary condition of a free society and economy. Thus the reports assess key internationally recognized worker rights, including the right of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the prohibition of forced or compulsory labor, the status of child labor practices, the minimum age for employment of children, and acceptable work conditions.

Source: bkallusky01's blog

Legal Writing Citation in a Nutshell
by Larry L. Teply

The law library has multiple copies at call number KF245 .T47x 2008 in the Reserve collection or Reference Office.

Book Description: This book is designed to ease the process of learning legal citation, one of the difficult tasks that students new to the law face. It initially focuses on conventions that underlie all accepted forms and systems of legal citation. Building on that understanding and an explanation of the process of using citations in legal writing, the book then discusses and illustrates the particular rules of The Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Manual for citing cases, statutes, and all other major legal sources. Appendixes provide useful comparative information for these two systems of citation.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

The Thomson Corporation is now a sponsor of the ABA Section of Taxation. This means that Westlaw® is now a primary provider of ABA Section of Taxation.

On the Westlaw Tax Tab – which already offered easy access to world-class tax content (including The Tax Lawyer) from a single screen – you will now find links to complete ABA Section of Taxation content:

A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Consumption Tax Proposals (ABA-CONSTAX)
ABA Tax Section Continuing Legal Education (ABATAX-CLE)
ABA Section of Taxation Comments to U.S. Congress, Federal Agencies and U.S. Tax Court (ABA-FTXCOM)
Guide to Nonprofit Corporate Governance in the Wake of Sarbanes-Oxley (ABA-NCCORPGOV)
Sales and Use Tax Deskbook (ABA-SUTX)
State and Local Tax Lawyer (SLTAXL)
The Property Tax Deskbook (ABA-PTD)
Value Added Tax: A Model Statute and Commentary (ABA-VALADTAX)
And more!

ABA Section of Taxation content is just the latest addition to a large, high quality lineup of tax content on Westlaw, including Mertens Law of Federal Taxation; Thomson, RIA and Warren, Gorham & Lamont materials; KeyCite® for Tax and RIA Citator 2d, the two most powerful tax/legal citators; and much more.

© 2007 West, a Thomson business

Contact a Reference Librarian if you have any questions.

Why does the Bureau of Land Management care about what coffee cans looked like in the 1910s? For a very good reason. According to the document's introduction, Hill's Brothers Coffee cans are a great way to date digs dating back to the late 1800s because of the tendency of Hills Brothers to change their can designs every so often.

You can read the 39-page PDF document here.Download file

Hills Bros. coffee can chronology : field guide, published by U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management in 2006.

Source: Free Government Information Blog

Recently, the Deane Law Library blog (Hofstra School of Law) has featured five resources or news that may be useful for legal research needs:

Immigration Policy Center:
The Immigration Policy Center is the research arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation. IPC was established in 2003 with the mission to provide policymakers, academics, the media, and the general public with access to accurate information about the effects of immigration on the U.S. economy and society. The IPC attracts nationally recognized scholars as research fellows and guest authors, and publishes timely reports on the role of immigrants and immigration policy.

Law Library of Congress on Constitutional Law
The Law Library of Congress is offering PDF downloads of books and articles on three of the more contentious subjects in constitutional law: executive privilege, war powers, and presidential inherent powers. All are by Louis Fisher.

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a digital collection of the Tobacco Control Archives at the University of California at San Francisco, contains more than 8 million searchable documents "created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities." Of particular interest to law students and researchers are links to litigation, legislation, health research, and advertising web sites, and to archive collections.

Supreme Court Justices on Writing and Advocacy
Get insights from the top jurists in the country about what makes for good legal writing and advocacy. On LawProse, Inc, you will find interviews of eight Supreme Court Justices in which they discuss what they find persuasive and what they wish attorneys would avoid. These interviews were done in 2006-2007 by Bryan Garner, editor-in-chief of the last two editions of Black’s Law Dictionary.

"I Do Solemnly Swear . . .": Presidential Inaugurations
"I Do Solemnly Swear . . .": Presidential Inaugurations is available through The Library of Congress’ American Memory database. "I Do Solemnly Swear . . ." provides access to over 2,000 digital files relating to presidential inaugurations from George Washington's in 1789 to George W. Bush's inauguration of 2001.

March is Women's History month. In honor of the women who have made their way in the profession and achieved great things, here are just a few tidbits about inspiring women lawyers and their accomplishments in the profession:

Alice Paul (1885-1977): Lawyer Alice Paul was the founder of the World Woman's Party in 1913 and the author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. She was quoted as saying, "There will never be a new world order until women are part of it."

Burnita Shelton Matthews (1894-1988): Matthews was a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, appointed by Harry Truman in 1949. She was the first woman appointed to any United States District Court.

Sandra Day O'Connor: Justice O'Connor was the first woman Justice of the United States Supreme Court, having been nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Janet Reno: The first female Attorney General of the United States, Reno was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.

Roberta Cooper Ramo: First woman President of the American Bar Association, inaugurated in 1995.

Geraldine Ferraro: Chosen as the vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic slate by presidential candidate Walter Mondale, Ferraro was the first woman in United States history to be on the presidential ticket of a major party.

Whether you like these women or not, and whether you agree with their politics or not, their efforts and accomplishments, along with those of many other women lawyers, have helped pave the way for advances of women in the profession. But as Justice O'Connor said, "Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances."

For more information about women's legal history, check out the Women's Legal History Biography Project.

And these other resources:
The Women Lawyers Index

Women's Legal History Web Resources

Source: Legal Ease blog via Stark County Law Library Blog

"A private and nonpartisan initiative, E-VotingBooth.com gives voters a greater voice in the democratic process by inviting them to vote online on any piece of legislation being considered by Congress. Results of these virtual polls are sent to Congress and the president. The site will also allow users to compare their own votes with those of their elected officials, and to hold the officials accountable."

Read more at Government Innovators Network

Direct link to resource: http://e-votingbooth.com/

Please take note that the law library service hours will change over spring break (March 15-23).

The law library will be closed Sat-Sun March 15-16 and Friday March 21-Sunday March 23.

Law students will still have 24/7 access to the library through their UCard, but the circ desk and reference office will not be staffed on those days.

Monday March 17 to Thursday March 20 the library will be open 8 am to 4:30 pm. The Reference Office will be open 9 am to 4:30 pm.

Security monitors will be on duty 8 am to 5 pm on the weekends (Mar 15-16, 22-23) and 3:30-8:30 pm Mon-Fri that week.

C-SPAN Indexes Public Domain Videos of Congressional Proceedings

C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle (beta) is an index of the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings. The video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available and the video and text are placed side-by-side for users to watch, read, and compare. C-SPAN has placed these recordings in the public domain and encourages users to create direct links to single speeches and pages on other web sites and blogs. The Congressional Chronicle covers the 108th (2003-2004), 109th (2005-2006), and 110th (2007-present) Congresses. Previous Congresses back to 1988 will be added in the future.

Some of the features of the site:

-Clicking on a day shows a timeline of the actions and members speaking for that day with the topic of their remarks from the Congressional Record.

-Clicking on a member’s name will bring up the text of their remarks and allow you to play the video of the speech.

-Each member’s appearances are summarized at the top of this page by the number of days that they spoke on the floor and total time of those speeches.

-There is a search by member and by bill. Other searches will be added in the future including a full text search.

Source: AALL's Washington Blog via Free Government Information blog

Copyright
© 2008 American Association of Law LibrariesTheme: Contempt by Vault9.
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A new eReference Collection has been acquired from Sage Publications.

Among the many titles, the following may be of particular interest to legal researchers:
Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment
Encyclopedia of Juvenile Justice
Encyclopedia of Law & Society
Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement
Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime
Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities
Encyclopedia of White-Collar & Corporate Crime
Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice
Encyclopedia of Law and Society
Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

You can access all titles currently available at: http://www.lib.umn.edu/get/sageereference but note that some titles listed above are still forthcoming. Once you click inside a title, you have the option of searching the contents, browsing the entries or index, or examining a reader's guide to entries based on thematic categories.

Thanks to Associate Director for Collection Development Connie Lenz for the info on this resource!

The law library has added three small collections. All three are "donated" collections made up entirely of user and staff donations. For more information on any of the collections, or to make a donation of items, please email lawlib@umn.edu.

MLF Collection
The MLF Collection was created at the request of the law student organization Minnesota Law Families. The collection is comprised of books, media, and activity materials to keep children of law school parents occupied while accompanying their parents to class or study groups. The collection is located in two locations: books, activity/coloring books, crayons, colored pencils, and markers are in the leisure collection in the 2nd floor loft area; child-appropriate DVDs, CDs, or other media will be located in the Reserve Vertical File. A list of items in the Reserve Vertical File will be accessible on the Reserves Intranet page under "Minnesota Law Families" as items are added: http://www.law.umn.edu/library/tools/section.html?id=296
*MLF Collection items are not a substitute for parental supervision while in the library.

Foreign Language Leisure Collection
Parlez-Vous Français? ¿Habla Espanol? Then this collection is for you! We've created a special area in the leisure collection for foreign language leisure books. They are located on the top shelf farthest to the left and are indicated with a shelf sign. The leisure collection is located in the 2nd floor loft area. Leisure collection items do not need to be checked out and can be returned at your…leisure!

Rec Sports Equipment Collection
Looking for a study break from the law school grind? Need a little fresh air after spring arrives? Check out our rec sports equipment collection! We have an assortment of outdoor activity items located in the Reserve room that can be checked out. Items include Frisbees, jump ropes, footballs, a horseshoe set, and an assortment of sport balls. A list of all items is accessible on the Reserve Intranet page under "Rec Sports Equipment": http://www.law.umn.edu/library/tools/section.html?id=297

From the University of Southern California Gould School of Law comes a new resource on English Medieval Law:
ENGLISH MEDIEVAL LEGAL DOCUMENTS
AD 600 - AD 1535:
A COMPILATION OF PUBLISHED SOURCES.

From the site:

The goal of this project is to create a collaborative database on the published sources of English medieval legal documents, and to provide links to the growing number of online sources currently being developed.

If you are aware of new digitizing initiatives or new publications of medieval legal documents, or if you would like to add, edit, or comment on the present contents of the wiki, please feel free to do so. You may register by clicking on the link on the right of the wiki screen.

For further information, e-mail Hazel D. Lord, Senior Law Librarian, at the Asa V. Call Law Library of the University of Southern California School of Law hlord@law.usc.edu

Direct Link: http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php

Here is the list of new titles the law library acquired in February 2008. The list is also on the library's home page.

February Acquisitions