Monthly Archives: July 2008

DC Research gig

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DEPUTY ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AND SPECIALIST, AMERICAN LAW DIVISION- SENIOR LEVEL (SL)
 
The Congressional Research Service (CRS), American Law Division (ALD), is seeking a Deputy Assistant Director. The Deputy Assistant Director counsels the Assistant Director on all aspects of the administration and operations of the division; monitors research, administration and operations of the division in relation to its capacity for and actual experience in meeting needs of the Congress; ensures that the division is working toward identifying public policy problems facing the Congress and follows through with analysis that provides an objective, authoritative framework in which the Congress can assess the consequences of legislative/policy options; demonstrates intellectual leadership in monitoring congressional needs in policy areas within the research management responsibility of the Division; collaborates with other senior research division managers to assure full identification of significant issues and develops analytical approaches; serves with full delegated authority as the Assistant Director in his/her absence; and performs special research, consultative, or administrative assignments as requested by the Director.
 
The American Law Division’s work addresses the myriad legal questions that arise in a legislative context or are otherwise of interest to Congress. Some issues relate to the institutional prerogatives of Congress under the Constitution. Other questions involve constitutional and legal principles of statutory analysis that cross legislative policy areas, such as federalism, commerce powers and individual rights. The division also focuses on the intricacies of legal precedent and statutory construction as they relate to business, crime, the environment, civil rights, international law and other issues.
 
BASIC REQUIREMENT:
Applicant must be a graduate from a full course of study in a School of Law accredited by the American Bar Association and be a member in good standing of the bar of a state, District of Columbia, territory of the United States, or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
. . .
 
The Congressional Research Service, within the Library of Congress, is part of the Legislative Branch of the Federal government. As such, all positions are in the excepted service. The selected applicant may be required to file a financial disclosure statement with the House of Representatives, U.S. Congress, in accordance with the provisions of Public Law 95-521, Ethics in Government Act of 1978.
 
This position is being offered at the Senior Level ($114,468-$158,500).  Please apply online at http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo or call 202.707.5627 to request an applicant job kit. Please refer to vacancy# 080203 in all correspondence. Applications must be received by August 19th, 2008.

The World’s Largest Publishers

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In the July 14, 2008 issue of Publishers Weekly, there was an interesting (annual) feature on “Publishing’s Top Guns.” 

The list of the world’s top publishers is deep and offers an interesting perspective on legal publishers, too.  Three of the top five slots have major legal publishing interests. 

Rank #1: Thomson (7.296 billion in 2007)
Rank #4 Reed Elsevier (6.156 billion in 2007, down from 7.606 billion in 2006) 
Rank #5 Wolters Kluwer (4.982 billion in 2007)

A few other interesting tidbits from the article:

-Reed Elsevier was first place last year, now fourth

-Thomson “would rather be known as a digital publisher than a print publisher — the majority of its revenue is generated by electronic products and services.”

-Cengage Learning, making its first appearance on the list at spot #15, “was formed by the private equity firm Apax Partners and OMERS, a Canadian pension fund, bought by Thomson Learning.”

Students Will Practice IP Law In USPTO Pilot Program

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Students Will Practice IP Law In USPTO Pilot Program

Starting this fall, students at several law schools may file and prosecute patent and trademark applications as part of a two-year pilot program sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Source: IP Law360: Litigation, Policy & People News

 

See also the National Law Journal story “N.Y. Law School, patent office to extend pilot project to streamline exam process.”

New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will extend and expand a year-long pilot project designed to streamline the patent examination process by opening it to scientific and technical experts. The law school also announced the launch of its new Center for Patent Innovations, headed by Mark Webbink, formerly the senior vice president and general counsel at Red Hat, the premier Linux and open source vendor.

“Find it! Legal Research on the Web”

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“Find it! Legal Research on the Web“

WILLIAM A. HILYERD, University of Louisville – Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, Associate Professor of Legal Bibliography.

Materials originally presented June 20, 2008 at the Kentucky Bar Association Conference. Section II contains information on locating Kentucky cases, statutes, regulations, and ordinances on the internet. Other useful Kentucky sites are also mentioned. Section III provides information on locating various types of federal law (statutes, regulations, & cases) using free sites on the internet. Section IV gives tips on using search engines, portals, and meta-sites to locate legal information. Finally, Section V discusses using free sites to locate secondary sources on the internet.

There is a lot of really good information packed into the 9 pages of this article and it is certainly must-read material for anyone researching Kentucky law.  However, I do need to correct one error:  SCOTUSblog, while a truly fantastic resource, it is not the official blog of the United States Supreme Court.

 
Source: LSN Legal Writing Vol. 3 No. 14,  07/28/2008

E-textbooks: Buying, selling, renting, revising, copying, pirating, sharing

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Really interesting “Digital Domain” article by Randall Stross in today’s Business section of the New York Times, “First It Was Song Downloads.  Now It’s Organic Chemistry,” about college textbooks and sites such as PirateBay.org.

The Future of Reading and Researching the Pacific Northwest tree octopus

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Today’s New York Times has a front-page feature “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” by Motoko Rich.  “This is the first in a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.”  The article contains numerous instances of using the internet for research and the resulting potential liabilities; for example:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy.  In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

The article also mentions Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” the subject of a post here, “Jet Ski research” – Is Google Making Us Stoopid?  The New York Times article offers a good example of some “Jet Ski research” as performed by a 16-year old boy:

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites.  Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

New Book: Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan

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Chandos publishing recently released a new mongraph: “Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.” This work is edited by Xia Jingfeng, a reference librarian at Rutgers. It will be interesting to see if any regional repositories, open source platforms, or informal exchanges are emerging in these East Asian jursidictions.  Hat tip to the Tao Yang at Rutgers for alerting us to this interesting new title.

Summary from the Publisher’s Website:

This is one of the very few books that systematically explores the characteristics of scholarly communication outside the West. Over the last decade the advances in information technology have remodelled the foundation of scholarly communication. This book examines how countries/regions in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan) have reacted to the innovations in the conduct of research and in the exchange of ideas. It outlines the traditional systems of scholarly exchange in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and then concentrates on the efforts of these countries/regions to provide revolutionary ways of writing, publishing, and reading of information produced by members of the academic community. It also discusses the achievements as well as challenges in the process of technology innovations, highlighting the uniqueness of practices in scholarly communication in this part of the world.

http://www.chandospublishing.com/chandos_publishing_record_detail.php?ID=163 

This is the final post from the Rocky Mountain branch of Legal Research Plus. Many thanks to our friends at the University of Denver Westminster Law Library for their help these past weeks. I look forward to joining my colleagues in Palo Alto for future postings.

Reports on Asian Legal Markets from ALB Legal News

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ALB Legal News magazine has generously posted free reports on the legal market in individual Asian countries. The reports cover the outlook for the legal profession in each country, as well as specific legal sectors. In 2008, they have published reports on China, Singapore, Korea, India, Vietnam and the Philippnes.

ALB Legal News Reports http://asia.legalbusinessonline.com/reports/232/list.aspx

Creating course materials from the free case repository

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Over on the Open Case Law Google group, law professor Patrick Wiseman writes:

” . . . [M]y interest in free caselaw is mostly for teaching purposes.  I’m putting together an all online US constitutional law course, using US Supreme Court decisions from the repository (and occasionally elsewhere for missing or more recent cases).  I thought perhaps this group might find what I’m doing with the cases of some interest, and so send you an example:

http://ul451.gsu.edu/courts.gov/c/editedUS/392/392.US.83.416.html

The case, which will take a moment or two to load fully as there’s some script stuff going on, is Flast v. Cohen, about the standing of taxpayers to challenge alleged congressional violation of the Establishment Clause.  Select an elision, [...], and see the elided text; note too that most US Supreme Court decisions cited within the decision are linked (either to an edited version of the case if I have one or to the original if not).  The styling will look familiar, as I have not (yet) restyled the cases much to give them my ‘brand’.”

 

Please do take a look (and wait the moment it takes for the page to load).  And note, too, how great a paragraph-based citation system, rather than vendor-specific page-based system, would work.

Beyond Borders in the Classroom – The Possibility of Transnational Legal Education

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“Beyond Borders in the Classroom – The Possibility of Transnational Legal Education“

Ritsumeikan Law Review, Vol. 25, pp. 183-208, 2008
Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 08/63

LUKE R. NOTTAGE, University of Sydney – Faculty of Law, University of Sydney – Australian Network for Japanese Law
FRANK BENNETT, Nagoya University – School of Law
KITTISAK PROKATI, Thammasat University – Faculty of Law
KENT WILLIAM YAMANAKA ANDERSON, Australian National University – ANU College of Law
LEON T. WOLFF, University of New South Wales – Faculty of Law
MAKOTO IBUSUKI, Ritsumeikan University – College of Law

This is an edited transcript of a panel discussion, a popular format in Japanese law journals, from a conference held in Kyoto on transnational legal education. Two professors based in Japan join with three based in Australia, and one from Thailand, to compare and assess various experiments in recent years.

One model involves students physically crossing borders. Some take entire degrees abroad, as with the Masters programs at Nagoya and Kyushu Universities. Other students increasingly take some courses abroad. For instance, the “Canberra Seminar” in Australian law includes a week of “Legal English” before a week introducing key areas and principles of the common law most interesting for law students from Japan. A more ambitious example is the “Kyoto Seminar” in Japanese law, involving both Japanese and non-Japanese professors and students in teaching and learning. In another variant, students sometimes get partial credit for activities abroad, like some students from Australia who have participated very successfully in the Intercollegiate Negotiation and Arbitration Competition in Tokyo. Difficulties include the costs involved for students (and their home institutions). This has led to some law schools instead developing more courses taught in English, involving permanent or visiting professors abroad, as in Thailand.

Another more recent approach uses Information Technology to run courses in parallel in different jurisdictions. Students remain in their home institutions, but are linked up (through e-mail and/or internet video-conferencing) to hone their skills in cross-border legal communication. Examples include a contract negotiation and renegotiation simulation involving students in Canberra and Tokyo. The main challenge is logistics, including the extra time involved particularly for instructors.

Nonetheless, all six panelists agree that transnational legal education is no longer a possibility. It is already a reality, but one requiring further experiments and efforts to train the new generation of globally aware law graduates demanded by legal professions, the public and private sectors, and citizens world-wide.

 Source: LSN Public International Law Vol. 3 No. 55,  07/25/2008