Monthly Archives: June 2011

“Please remember that your function is to correct my errors, not to introduce errors of your own”

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I just picked up the Winter 2010 issue of the University of Louisville Law Review.  The article by Melvin I. Urofsky, “Louis D. Brandeis and His Clerks,” was great fun to read.  Take a look at the article when you have a moment, but I want to share some of the best tidbits here.  As you might guess, many have a research connection.

When discussing the thorough work expected of the clerks, Urofsky writes:

“This research took place before the computer age; a legal researcher can now use Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw and instantly have all of the citations on the screen, or Google to get non-legal facts.  His clerks had to to do it the old fashioned way–going to the law library and using the decennial digests for state and federal case citations and other tools for statutes.  They called government offices to get  reports or copies of hearings, kept track of articles appearing in law reviews, and when they spotted a title that might be relevant immediately sent for a copy.  Some used typewriters and others wrote by hand, but their research memoranda often ran for dozens of pages.”

Brandeis expected work to be meticulous.

“When Brandeis came in, he put two volumes of state reports on the desk.  ”Did you read all of the cases cited in the footnotes?” he asked.  Acheson [his clerk] said that he had.  ”Suppose you read these two again.”  The cases had no bearing on the argument and had slipped in from digests that Acheson had used to organize the notes.  He went on to apologize and Brandeis dismissed the matter with one sentence: “Please remember that your function is to correct my errors, not to introduce errors of your own.”

There would be as many as 20 drafts going back and forth between Brandeis and his clerk — each adding new citations and making corrections.  Notably, Urofsky mentions,  Brandeis was the first Supreme Court Justice to cite to a law review.   [The journal was the American Labor Legislation Review and the case was Adams v. Tanner, 244 US 590 (1917).]

I will close with a very amusing  passage that centers on his former clerk, James Landis, and his new appointment as the youngest dean in Harvard Law School’s history:

“You mean the Harvard Law School? [Brandeis] asked.

“Yes,” Landis replied.

“Why do you want to take that?”

“Well,” [Landis] stumbled for an answer, “it’s a great position.”

“Anybody can be a good Dean of the Harvard Law School,” Brandeis advised.  ”Why not take some smaller school and do something with it?”

After Google Book Search: Rebooting the Digital Library

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“After Google Book Search: Rebooting the Digital Library” 
University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 559

RANDAL C. PICKER, University of Chicago – Law School

The rejection of the Google Book Search settlement means that we are at a point of rebooting how we design our digital library future. There were many criticisms of GBS and the settlement but perhaps chief among those was the risk that approval of the settlement would have locked in a single approach to digital libraries. Google would have received unique access to the so-called orphan works and that would have provided it what may have been a decisive advantage against digital library competitors, both private and public. As we move forward on the orphan works, we need to do so with two principles in mind. First, we need to enable broad competing uses of the orphan works while, to the greatest extent possible, respecting the rights of the orphan works holders. Second, we should not repeat the mistake of the GBS settlement by somehow tilting the table in favor of digital library monopoly, either public or private.

We should want to foster a rich digital library ecosystem. GBS makes clear that we can have large-scale private digital libraries. That is an important development and one that we should seek to enable. If we create use rights for copyrighted works for digital libraries, we should be sure to make those privileges available to both public digital libraries and private digital libraries such as GBS and its successors. Our existing statutory safe harbors for libraries favor noncommercial libraries and archives. The emergence of GBS suggests that that is too narrow a conception of what libraries can be in the digital age and we need a statutory scheme that supports that.

Source: LSN: University of Chicago Law School, Law & Economics Research Paper Series Vol. 13 No. 4, 06/27/2011

 

How to Win a CALI Award: Some Personal Advice from Two Law Students Who Have Done It

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Stephen E. Schilling and Rebecca M. Greendyke won a multiple CALI awards, which are awarded at a number of law schools to the student with the highest grade in a class.

But they did something else, they wrote an article (published in the University of Dayton Law Review, Winter 2011) on how to win the award.  In their article, “How to Win a CALI Award: Some Personal Advice from Two Law Students Who Have Done It,” they provide helpful tips for academic success in law school.

I suggest reading the article for yourself, but I want to mention a few of the best bits of advice.

For starters, a student should “know thyself, know thy professor  and know thy class.”

“Knowing yourself means knowing how you learn best and doing things to make yourself the best law student you can be.  Knowing your professor means learning how your professors teach, how they test, and what their expectations are.  Knowing your class means knowing your material.  This entails practicing  and working problems, using outside sources, and being prepared with tips and tricks to make your exam answers stand out.”

I really liked the suggestion to “be your own professor” — in other words, try to teach yourself the material.  The article also provides tips on how to ‘target’ the right courses for success, from reputation, exam mode to class size.

But, I was most pleased by the suggestion to “use outside sources.”  The authors were highlighting the importance of picking the right study aids, but there is much more to looking beyond your assigned readings.  We’ve seen in our ALR class that some of our strongest students are those who look beyond the traditional (or expected) resources.   And, browsing through our course reserves collection (which is often stocked with those ‘suggested’ other readings by professors) can be incredibly valuable and time-saving.

Good tips worth thinking about.

 

Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the United States Courts of Appeal

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I just happened across this new article in the Spring 2011 issue of the Missouri Law Review, “Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Quality in the United States Courts of Appeal,” by Robert Anderson IV.

The abstract reads:

“This article presents an empirical performance ranking of 383 federal appellate judges who served on the United States Courts of Appeals between 1960 and 2008.  Like existing judge evaluation studies, this Article uses citations from judicial opinions to assess judicial quality.  Unlike existing citation studies, which treat positive and negative citations alike, this Article ranks judges according to the mix of positive and negative citations to the opinions, rather than the number of citations to those opinions.  By distinguishing between positive and negative citations, this approach avoids ranking judges higher for citations even when the judges are being cited negatively.  The results are strikingly different from those found in the existing citation count-based studies of judicial performance.  When the mix of positive and negative citations is taken into account, many of the most highly cited judges from the citation-count studies are only average and some of the average judges in the citation-count studies emerge as the most positively cited.  The results suggest there is an objective performance measure that can measure judicial performance and provide incentives for fidelity to the rule of law.”

 

Save the Tweets: Library Acquisition of Online Materials

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The latest issue of AIPLA Quarterly Journal (Volume 39, Issue Number 2, Spring 2011) just landed upon my desk, and at page 269 I found this article calling for “digital acquisition rights”:

Save the Tweets: Library Acquisition of Online Materials, by Jodie C. Graham

Its abstract from the AIPLA webpage:

As the Internet becomes an increasingly pervasive communications technology in society, public discussions and other born-digital documents of social and political importance frequently exist solely on various websites.  To fulfill their missions of preserving public knowledge, libraries seek to acquire and make accessible web documents to scholars, students, and other library patrons.  However, section 108 of the Copyright Act, which previously provided sufficient protection from liability for libraries’ acquisition and reproduction activities, does not adequately map onto the technological realities of acquiring digital documents over the Internet.  As a result, libraries must accept the risk of copyright infringement liability or forgo preserving historically important online documents.  This Note proposes a set of amendments that would update section 108 to extend libraries’ current limited protections from copyright liability to the acquisition, preservation, and making available of online documents.​

Legislative History Research: A Basic Guide

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Legislative History Research: A Basic Guide
INFOdocket
Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy
CRS — Legislative History Research: A Basic Guide

Posted on June 20, 2011 by fulltextreports
Legislative History Research: A Basic Guide (PDF)

    This report provides an overview of federal legislative history research, the legislative process, and where to find congressional documents. The report also summarizes some of the reasons researchers are interested in legislative history, briefly describes the actions a piece of legislation might undergo during the legislative process, and provides a list of easily accessible print and electronic resources. This report will be updated as needed.

Source: Congressional Research Service (via Federation of American Scientists)
Hat tip to the always useful-to-follow Boley Law Library in Portland, Oregon (to follow on Twitter, it’s:   @lawlib )

A Proposed Course of Action for UniversalCitation.org …

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Cornell Law School’s Peter W. Martin, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Emeritus, who has contributed in the past on vendor-neutral citation (see, e.g., 99 Law Lib. J. 329 (2007)), recently wrote:

A Proposed Course of Action for UniversalCitation.org or Some Alternative Non-Commercial Entity

See: UniversalCitation.org

Among other things, Prof. Martin emphasizes right off the bat that:

It is 2011 not the mid-nineties. The environment has changed since the ABA and AALL first came out for public domain citation…

Cross-posted on Law Library Blog.

PACER Training Pilot Project Begins in July

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PACER Training Pilot Project Begins in July
June 17, 2011

A pilot project aimed at having public libraries enhance the public’s knowledge and use of the federal judiciary’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service begins July 1, 2011.

Two libraries – the Library of Congress in the District of Columbia and the Law Library for San Bernadino, California – will kick off the pilot, but up to 50 additional public libraries may join them in future months.

PACER allows users to obtain case information from federal courts without having to visit the courthouse. The service allows an Internet user to request information about a particular case or party, and makes the data immediately available for printing or downloading at a cost of 8 cents per page.

In the pilot project, libraries will conduct at least one training class for the general public every three months, and offer training or refresher opportunities for library staff at least one a year. Those staff members, in turn, may assist library patrons in the use of PACER. For participating libraries, the first $50 of PACER use fees each quarter will be waived.

The pilot is a joint undertaking of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the Government Printing Office, and the American Association of Law Libraries.

The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools

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That’s the conclusion reached by Joel Murray in his paper “Professional Dishonesty: Do U.S. Law Schools That Report False or Misleading Employment Statistics Violate Consumer Protection Laws?.”

From the conclusion:

The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools. Many law schools are violating the FTC Act by reporting false and misleading employment statistics. The FTC has jurisdiction over law schools because they are professional schools oriented towards preparing students for legal careers and therefore, provide pecuniary benefits to students. If a law school reports false or misleading employment statistics in marketing materials or to U.S. News and World Report, the law school engages in deception and false advertising in violation of the FTC Act. Reporting false employment statistics is deceptive as prospective law students have limited, or no, resources to determine a school’s actual employment statistics. These employment statistics play a material role in a prospective law student’s choice to attend a law school. . . .

And here’s the paper’s abstract:

This paper examines the potential legal application of the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act) to American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law schools. In recent years, evidence has emerged indicating that many law schools are misreporting or falsifying employment statistics in marketing materials and to the U.S. News Rankings and World Report law school rankings, the preeminent rankings for United States (U.S.) law schools. The reporting of false or misleading employment statistics to prospective students may violate provisions of the FTC Act that prohibit deceptive practices and false advertising. This paper reviews evidence that U.S. law schools are misreporting employment statistics, examines how the FTC Act applies to U.S. law schools, and argues that U.S. law schools that misreport or falsify employment statistics violate multiple provisions of the FTC Act.

And here’s the complete cite:

Murray, Joel, Professional Dishonesty: Do U.S. Law Schools That Report False or Misleading Employment Statistics Violate Consumer Protection Laws? (May 27, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1854709

 

Analysis of Large Data Sets (“Big Data”) Will Become More Important in the Future

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Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

(May 2011)

is an approximately 150-page report by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and others that finds:

analyzing large data sets—so called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.

For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. Harnessing big data in the public sector has enormous potential, too. If US health care were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US health care expenditure by about 8 percent. In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues. And users of services enabled by personal location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus….

Drawing on detailed analysis of five domains—health care, retailing, the public sector, manufacturing, and personal location data—the research identifies five broadly applicable ways to leverage big data:

  1. Making big data more accessible in a timely manner. In the public sector, making data more accessible across otherwise separated departments can sharply reduce search and processing time. In manufacturing, integrating data from R&D, engineering, and manufacturing units to enable concurrent engineering can cut time-to-market.
  2. Using data and experimentation to expose variability and improve performance. As they create and store more transactional data in digital form, organizations can collect more accurate and detailed performance data on everything from product inventories to personnel sick days.
  3. Segmenting populations to customize actions. Big data allow organizations to create ever-narrower segmentations and to tailor services precisely to meet customer needs. This approach is well-known in marketing and risk management, but can be revolutionary in places like the public sector.
  4. Replacing and supporting human decision-making with automated algorithms. Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Such analytics have applications from tax agencies to retailers.
  5. Innovating new business models, products, and services. Manufacturers are using data obtained from the use of products to improve the development of the next generation of products, and to create innovative after-sales service offerings. The emergence of real-time location data has created a new set of location-based mobile services from navigation to people tracking.

Hat tip to Docuticker.com.