Author Archives: Erika Wayne

About Erika Wayne

Erika V. Wayne is deputy library director and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. Along with George Wilson, Kate Wilko and Paul Lomio, Erika Wayne has co-taught Advanced Legal Research for 3 years. Erika's interest in Open Access dates back to the 1996 when she helped in the development of the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse -- the first court designated internet site for public posting of securities litigation filings. And, she hates to pay for *anything* that should be free. She has a law degree from Penn and a library degree from Illinois.

Google Fresh

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Announced today on the Official Google Blog: Google is bringing you ‘fresher’ search results.

Based on changes in their ranking algorithm, approximately 35 percent of searches will be impacted (or made ‘fresher’).  The motivation behind this change is to give searchers more recent results for current and regularly occurring events.

According to the post, the changes will impact searches for:

  • “Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.”
  • “Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.”
  • “Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information. “
Google recently eliminated (or ‘subtracted’) the power search “Plus” operator.   With all of these changes, it might be time for a bit of a re’fresher’ for some of us…..

“We don’t know what it is that they’re not putting online”

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According to a new report from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, reporters regularly turn to government (Federal, State and Local) websites for data needed in their stories.

David Herzog writes on the RJI site, “The findings from the survey, conducted as part of my fellowship at RJI, show that government data – whether it’s a spreadsheet or database file – has become a key ingredient of U.S. daily newspaper reporting.”

Of those surveyed, many reporters noted deficiencies in government websites.  According to one reporter, “We don’t know what it is that they’re not putting online.”

Herzog shares a few of the notable complaints from reporters using government websites:
“They just don’t put enough of it there”
“I end up going to Google”
“Getting current records is often difficult”

 

 

 

 

FOIA Court Challenges Up 27% in FY 2011

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The FOIA Project has just announced that FOIA court challenges were up 27% over last year.

The release states:

“The recently completed 2011 fiscal year saw 378 court challenges to the withholding of information by the federal government, up 27% from the previous fiscal year, according to district court information compiled as part of the FOIA Project.”

The FOIA Project contains information on 949 cases either filed or closed since October 2009.  The site has also has new features and charts, including:

“Closed cases: All FOIA cases filed in district courts and closed since FY 2010 (October 1, 2009) are now listed on the site….”
“New charts: Two new graphics have been added to the foiaproject.org website: a chart showing counts for closed cases and a map detailing the geographical distribution of closed cases.”
“New searches: You can now search the court documents database by the date in which a FOIA case was closed. In addition, you can also now search by the name of the judge who presided over the case.”

PACER Fees Increase

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According a press release on the U.S. Courts website, PACER fees will be going 25% effective November 1st:  

“The Conference also authorized an increase in the Judiciary’s electronic public access fee in response to increasing costs for maintaining and enhancing the electronic public access system. The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per page, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system.”

The release continues to describe a few exemptions:

“The Conference was mindful of the impact such an increase could have on other public entities and on public users accessing the system to obtain information on a particular case.  For this reason, local, state, and federal government agencies will be exempted from the increase for three years. Moreover, PACER users who do not accrue charges of more than $15 in a quarterly billing cycle would not be charged a fee. (The current exemption is $10 per quarter.) The expanded exemption means that 75 to 80 percent of all users will still pay no fees.”

The expanded fee exemption (from $10 to $15 a quarter) offers additional help, but an exemption for academic institutions and law libraries, or at least GPO depository libraries, would serve the public good.

Might be a good time to teach your students and attorneys about using RECAP.

New SCOCAL Resource – 9th Circuit Questions of Certification to the California Supreme Court

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Thanks to the good folks at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, the SCOCAL site now has a terrific new resource.

The 9th Circuit Questions of Certification to the California Supreme Court page contains a detailed list, with links, of all the questions certified to the California Supreme Court by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The practice began in 1998 and the list includes current cases.

Under California Rules of Court, Rule 8.548 (Decision on request of a court of another jurisdiction):

On request of the United States Supreme Court, a United States Court of Appeals, or the court of last resort of any state, territory, or commonwealth, the Supreme Court may decide a question of California law if:
(1)The decision could determine the outcome of a matter pending in the requesting court; and
(2)There is no controlling precedent.

Some time ago, the attorneys at  Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP starting tracking these types of questions as presented to the California Supreme Court by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

As we’ve mentioned before (here and here), our ALR students write annotations on California Supreme Court cases that appear on the SCOCAL site.  Our students regularly contact the attorneys in the cases to acquire briefs for posting on SCOCAL alongside their annotations.  This past quarter, one of our students reached out to the the attorneys at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP.  Lucky for us, the attorneys there knew about our site and asked if we would be interested in posting and hosting their terrific resource listing the questions presented to the California Supreme Court.    We, of course, said yes.  Our students have now annotated sixteen of the cases on the list, and we hope to add more this year.

Please take a look and spread the word.

Special thanks, as always, to the amazing crew at Justia for everything they do to support the SCOCAL project as it evolves and grows.

WordPress and Law Libraries

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I recently attended a fantastic conference: WordCamp San Francisco.

I came away feeling very inspired by the event and the community.  As a ‘frugal’ person, I was also super impressed at how they managed to pull off such a polished affair for only $50/person for full registration — that included lunch and caffeinated drinks for 3 days!

I thought that the name tags were pure genius.   Instead of getting a bulky brochure with all the program details (many more than I’d ever want), the name tag

was actually a small booklet attached to a lanyard.  And, everything you *really* needed to know was inside.  It had the mini-schedule, conference hash tags, maps, etc.  Very nifty.

I was also wowed by the numbers shared (and artistic, jazz inspired slides) during Matt Mullenweg‘s State of the Word address on Sunday.  Two statistics that were really impressive:

This made me wonder: how do these numbers relate to the .edu domain slice?  And, in particular, the law school environment?
So, although highly unscientific, if you do work in the law school/law library world, would you take a moment to answer the following question.  I’ll be happy to share results.

“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?”

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.”