Category Archives: Law schools

Global Legal Education and Comparative Visa Regulations

Posted on by
Reply

Global Legal Education and Comparative Visa Regulations

 Luca C.M. Melchionna, St. John’s School of Law, Columbia Univ. – Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America

available on SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1392944

Legal education is slowly but steadily becoming global. U.S. law schools are adapting to the need to educate jurists who can work on cross border issues. Within the next 100 years, U.S. law schools will face the challenges of educating an increasing number of international students, while dealing with diverse legal systems.

In the next 100 years, U.S. law schools will expand overseas with several branches (at least one in every country or group of countries with legal and economic relevancy) and will embrace corporate form and a business approach. Faculty and administrators should carefully plan today for the future placement (in terms of ranking) and development (in terms of scientific breakthrough) of their academia if they seriously consider obtaining global presence, recognition and intellectual credibility. Those who do not have plans to globalize today will struggle tomorrow locally.

Only those law schools that are investing today in a solid globalization of their curricula and hiring faculty with diverse skills will be the primary actors in the field of global legal education in the 22nd Century.

This article has three main objectives:
(a) To define the issues currently influencing the movement global movement in legal education and their effect on its future development.
(b) To analyze the visa (or entry) regulations of the countries where U..S. students currently have the privilege of travelling for study or research purposes.
(c) To analyze the host regulations that U.S. universities have to face when they plan to offer educational services in a foreign jurisdiction through a physical presence in that jurisdiction.

An analysis and comparison of the entry regulations of 16 jurisdictions will be offered, with special attention to the French, Italian, E.U. and U..S. visa situations. The paper will analyze how E.U. regulations are not completely and uniformly followed by some member states and how U.S. regulations could be improved for at least short term study programs. The legal and economic consequences of these regulations will be addressed as well.

Law Journals and Open Access: A Call to Action

Posted on by
2

Here’s a little article I just wrote for Speaking of Computers, ”an e-newsletter for the Stanford academic community.”  This has been covered here before, but I think it’s a message worth repeating, especially as we brace for budget cuts and some hard decisions.  And besides, now I have a really nice photo to share!

 Law Journals and Open Access: A Call to Action

In November, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of the so-called Gang of 10 law library directors (directors from some of the nation’s top law schools) held at Duke Law School in Durham, North Carolina. One of the activities of this meeting was the drafting and signing of the “Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship,” which calls for all law schools to stop publishing their law journals in print format and to rely instead upon electronic publication, coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.

Why Open Access?
Each of the nation’s 200+ law schools produce at least one student-edited law journal, containing scholarship and important policy pieces from law professors, judges, distinguished practitioners, and students. The bulk of legal scholarship is published in such law journals. Here at Stanford Law School we produce nine such journals. Right now the only way to access all of this significant content electronically is through expensive databases such as HeinOnline, LexisNexis and Westlaw.

It would be a better legal information world if researchers could reliably turn to the host law school for any law journal from that school and find all of its articles, available for free in open and stable electronic formats.

Open Access Leaders
It was especially fitting that this inspirational document was drafted and signed by us while at Duke. Duke is a leader in the open online repository movement, with the Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository created in 2005, and all Duke law journals made accessible online since 1997. The Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository is a full-text electronic archive of scholarly works written by the Duke Law faculty, as well as other scholarship produced at the law school. A scholarship repository and open access law journals go hand-in-hand.

The chief architect of the Durham Statement was John Palfrey, the new library director at Harvard Law School, who is also a leader and visionary in the open access movement. In May 2008, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free.

What’s Next?
The Durham Statement is our exercise in aspiration, with the hopes of getting more – eventually all – law schools on the open access bandwagon.

There are issues yet to be resolved. For one thing, especially during these difficult economic times, financial analysis is needed. Law schools receive royalties from the online databases that provide law journal access – some schools far more than others – so the cost-savings to the schools from ceasing print and to the schools’ libraries from no longer having to buy, bind and shelve issues needs to be carefully weighed against any potential loss of revenue income. And there are additionally important archival and standards issues to be debated and decided.

The Durham Statement seeks to move the analysis, debate, and discussion forward.

For More Information
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship
http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/02/20/durham-statement-on-open-access-to-legal-scholarship/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/durhamstatement

The Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository

Harvard Law School open access motion

durhamdrafters1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The authors of the Durham Statement. Top row, left to right: Dick Danner (Duke),
Radu Popa (NYU), John Palfrey (Harvard), Claire Germain (Cornell),
Paul George (University of Pennsylvania), Jim McMasters (Northwestern),
Blair Kauffman (Yale). Bottow row: Paul Lomio (Stanford),
Judith Wright (University of Chicago), Terry Martin (University of Texas).

China Law Libraries Online

Posted on by
Reply

The Law Librarians of China (China Law Libraries Online) have revamped their Web site.   All content is in Chinese, but they expect to post English language materials in the near future.  Hat tip to Wei Luo.

The China Law Libraries Online Web site does post links to 17 major law school libraries in China:

 

Peking University School of Law, Law Library
http://www.law.pku.edu.cn/tsg

 

Tsinghua University School of Law Library
http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/docsn/fxy/lib/index.htm

 

Chinese People’s University Law School Library
http://www.law.ruc.edu.cn/library

 

Sun Yat-sen University School of Law Library
http://202.116.73.59/library/rule.asp

 

Chongqing University School of Law Library
http://law.cqu.edu.cn/fxtug/Index.asp

 

Chongqing University School of Law Library
http://law.cqu.edu.cn/fxtug/Index.asp

 

Hunan University School of Law Library
http://law.hnu.cn/index.php/action_category_catid_6.html

 

Nanjing University School of Law Library
http://law.nju.edu.cn/Article/ShowClass.asp?ID=20079331283361

 

Xiamen University Library Law Library
http://210.34.4.20/library/lib_law/main1.html #4

 

Wuhan University Law School Library
http://210.42.125.38/

 

Sichuan University School of Law Library
http://fxy.scu.edu.cn/tsqb

 

Yantai University School of Law Library
http://www.law.ytu.edu.cn/index.html

 

Shanxi University School of Law Library
http://202.207.216.178/list.php?fid=39

 

Liaoning University School of Law Library
http://law.lnu.edu.cn/release/ziliao

 

Jilin University Research Center for Theory of Law Library http://www.legaltheory.com.cn/info.asp?id=205

 

Jilin University Research Center for Theory of Law Library http://www.legaltheory.com.cn/info.asp?id=205

 

Zhejiang University Guanghua School of Law Library

http://www.lawlib.zju.edu.cn

 

China Law Libraries Online http://www.chinalawlib.org.cn/

The History of CALR, Part 1: More on Thomson West and FLITE Takes Flight

Posted on by
5

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED LEGAL RESEARCH (CALR)

______________________________________________________

First in an occasional series

More on Thomson West Merger and FLITE Takes Flight

********************

This is the first in an occasional and somewhat random look back at the early days of computer-assisted legal research (CALR).  It stems from a post here earlier in the week about a terrific new book by noted antitrust lawyer (and Stanford Law School alumnus) Gary L. Reback, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (catalog record copied below). The very readable book gives an insider look at the merger (Mr. Reback represented LexisNexis) and as Jonathan Zittrain notes on the jacket, “Gary Reback offers a powerful defense for government’s role in protecting market competition. He draws from rich historical examples and his own extraordinary personal vantage point: his victories and defeats at the front lines of the most high-profile antitrust cases of the past two decades.”

Thomson West Merger

In 1997, Mr. Reback took a vacation to Hawaii after he had “spent a year of futility . . . trying to convince the Justice Department to block an anticompetitive merger that would raise the price of hiring a lawyer for just about every consumer of legal services anywhere in America.”

Storytelling for Lawyers and Monopolizing the Law

Chapters 14 (“Storytelling for Lawyers”) and 15 (“Monopolizing the Law”) tell the story of the 1996 merger of Thomson and West, “. . . the largest publishers of court opinions, treatises, and other materials used to do legal research. No other company was even close in terms of market share or customer usage.” And, as an earlier post here suggests, the end result of this merger created a wrecking ball for academic law library budgets. In my opinion absurd and obscene annual price increases was indeed an effect of this merger.

These two chapters trace through some of the very interesting history of legal publishing, electronic and otherwise, from the 1870s to present.

At one point in chapter 15 Mr. Reback states “. . . both Thomson and LexisNexis started charging law schools for online legal research, originally provided free of charge.” I shared this information on the law library directors listserv.

A few directors contested that statement and commented that, to their knowledge, neither Lexis nor Westlaw was ever free; a couple of other directors weren’t so sure and thought that perhaps there were some free installations.  But this comment also elicited a small flood of memories and reminiscences from directors about the very early days of CALR.

Stanford Law Library’s First CALR Terminal (Lexis only)

I myself came to stanford in 1982.  At the time the library had one Lexis terminal, and no Westlaw terminal.  The terminal was the so-called “DeLuxe” terminal, which was a large sit-down consol, reminiscent of the “con” of an early Star Trek starship.  It was located in a room shared with our photocopiers and microforms, both of which were used far more than the Lexis terminal.  For one thing, there was a daily blackout period and we could not access the database between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. There was no downloading of documents, and printing was done laboriously, one screen shot at a time.  Connection was via an internal modem and a phone line paid for, I think, by Lexis.

Dick Danner, from the Duke Law Library noted on the listserv that “the early history of Lexis from an insider’s perspective, with a bit about Westlaw, can be found in: William G. Harrington, ‘A Brief History of Computer-Assisted Legal Research,’ 77 Law Library Journal 543 (1984-85).”

The Air Force Starts Digitizing the Law – FLITE (Federal Legal Information Through Electronics) Database

And then J. Denny Haythorn, Associate Dean of Library and Information Services & Professor of Law at Whittier College School of Law shared this very interesting story about FLITE (reproduced with permission):

In the Law Library Journal article the author refers to the system the Air Force had developed by the late 1960s. The Air Force system was called Federal Legal Information Through Electronics (FLITE) and was operated from the basement of the Air Force finance center in Denver at Lowery Air Force Base.  FLITE had a large staff inputting federal court reports, administrative court reports (e.g., Comp Gen, Board of Contracts Appeals, etc.), US Code sections, CFR sections, and military regulations into databases. There was a staff of research attorneys who received calls from government lawyers for research and they would help formulate searches in the database.  The Finance Center did not use their computer mainframe at night so the searcher would run overnight and be printed.  The research attorneys would call back with the results the next day and sometimes mail the printouts to the requesting attorney.

More powerful minicomputers and the internet simplified the search process to ultimately be more like the commercial services thought FLITE kept the research attorneys for assistance with searches.  The office also continues to maintain unique databases of information use by military lawyers.  FLITE purchased the first PC computers for Air Force legal offices and began a program of law office automation using shareware software (PC Write for example), commercial software, and software specifically written by the office.

FLITE also was an early adopter of CD and DVD technology.  The goal was to have Judge Advocate General attorneys in the field with legal resources for a standalone law office.

The office still exists and is now located with the Air Force Judge Advocate School at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama.  In the 1980s I was one of the research attorneys as they made the transition from batch, overnight searching to real time searches and then user searching directly on the internet.  I also worked on the manuals for some of the software.

Denny will be contibuting more about his experiences as a CALR pioneer, so please stay tuned for later installments of this series.

And here’s the catalog record for Free the Market!

Author: Reback, Gary L., Stanford Law School graduate, J.D.(1974)
Title: Free the market! : why only government can keep the marketplace competitive / Gary L. Reback.
Related e-resource: Publisher description
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0906/200804668
Imprint: New York : Portfolio, 2009.
Physical Description: x, 416 p. ; 24 cm.
Note: Signed by the author. CSt-Law9-d.html

Note: Includes bibliographical references (p. [397]-403) and index.

Contents: Protecting competition — Product distribution –Patent and coypright limitations on competition –
Monopolies and market exclusion — Mergers and acquisitions.Subject (LC): Trade regulation–United States.
Subject (LC): Competition–United States.
ISBN: 9781591842460
ISBN: 1591842468

CALL NUMBER
HD3616 .U47 R136 2009

Researching Across the Curriculum: The Road Must Continue Beyond the First Year

Posted on by
Reply

“Researching Across the Curriculum: The Road Must Continue Beyond the First Year”


Oklahoma Law Review, Vol. 61, 2009

BROOKE J. BOWMAN, Stetson University College of Law

In the ever growing movement to integrate skills and values across the law school curriculum, research instruction cannot be overlooked or forgotten. Research serves as the fulcrum upon which “skills and values” such as ethics and practical application of doctrinal studies, rests. Therefore, research instruction cannot be limited to what the students learn in their first-year legal research and writing classes. A concentrated effort must be made in all classes to ensure that what the students learn in the first-year research and writing classes will be further developed, refined, revisited and reinforced. This Article, Research Across the Curriculum: The Road Must Continue Beyond the First Year, offers a new paradigm for how research instruction should change in the upper-level classes from requiring all students to take Advanced Legal Research courses, for example, to integrating research instruction into specialized areas such as international law and tax courses.

Source:  LSN Law Educator: Courses, Materials & Teaching Vol. 5 No. 5, 03/06/2009

Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship

Posted on by
6

Last November, at the time of the Duke Law building dedication, I joined with several of my colleagues for a terrific meeting in Durham, North Carolina.  One product of that meeting is the “Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship,” (copied below) which calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.

Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship 11 February 2009

 

Objective: The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. To accomplish this end, law schools should commit to making agreed-upon stable, open, digital formats, rather than print, the preferable formats for legal scholarship. If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. We believe that, in addition to their other benefits, these changes are particularly timely in light of the financial challenges currently facing many law schools.

 

Rationale: Researchers – whether students, faculty, or practitioners – now access legal information of all sorts through digital formats much more frequently than in printed formats. Print copies of law journals and other forms of legal scholarship are slower to arrive than the online digital versions and lack the flexibility needed by 21st century scholars. Yet, most law libraries perceive a continuing need also to acquire legal scholarship in print formats for citation and archiving. (Some libraries are canceling print editions if commercial digital versions are available; others continue to acquire print copies but throw them away after a period of time.)

 

It is increasingly uneconomical to keep two systems afloat simultaneously. The presumption of need for redundant printed journals adds costs to library budgets, takes up physical space in libraries pressed for space, and has a deleterious effect on the environment; if articles are uniformly available in stable digital formats, they can still be printed on demand. Some libraries may still choose to subscribe to certain journals in multiple formats if they are available. In general, however, we believe that, if law schools are willing to commit to stable and open digital storage for the journals they publish, there are no longer good reasons for individual libraries to rely on paper copies as the archival format. Agreed-upon stable, open, digital formats will ensure that legal scholarship will be preserved in the long-term.

 

In a time of extreme pressures on law school budgets, moving to all electronic publication of law journals will also eliminate the substantial costs borne by law schools for printing and mailing print editions of their school’s journals, and the costs borne by their libraries to purchase, process and preserve print versions.

 

Additionally, and potentially most importantly, a move toward digital files as the preferred format for legal scholarship will increase access to legal information and knowledge not only to those inside the legal academy and in practice, but to scholars in other disciplines and to international audiences, many of whom do not now have access either to print journals or to commercial databases.

 

Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print. We also urge every law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format. Some law schools may choose to use a shared regional online repository or to offer their own repositories as places for other law schools to archive the scholarship published at their school.

 

Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship.

 

As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. All law journals should rely upon the AALS model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship.

 

Richard A. Danner

Duke Law School

 

Taylor Fitchett

University of Virginia

 

Margaret A. Fry

Georgetown University Law Center

 

Paul M. George

University of Pennsylvania School of Law

 

Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law School

 

S. Blair Kauffman

Yale Law School

 

J. Paul Lomio

Stanford Law School

 

Harry S. (Terry) Martin III

University of Texas Law School

 

Kent McKeever

Columbia Law School

 

Jim McMasters

Northwestern University School of Law

 

John G. Palfrey

Harvard Law School

 

Radu Popa

New York University Law School

 

Judith M. Wright University of Chicago Law School

Data on Chinese Legal System and Law Schools

Posted on by
Reply

Steve Roses and Chang Wang of  Thomson Reuters recently offered a Webinar on the Chinese Legal System and their WestlawChina database. As part of their presentation, they reported the following information about China:

1986 = 989,409 civil cases

2007 = 5,333,546 civil cases

 

40,000 laws and regulations issued since 1978.

 

Over 800 international arbitral awards each year.

 

143,000 attorneys in 2008 (up from 40,000 in 1993)

 

Lawyers per population

China  1:8.500

U.S. 1:300

 

Over 630 law schools and law departments with 244,121 law students.

 

12% pass rate for the Chinese bar exam.

 

Unfortunately, they did not provide sources for the information, but it does paint an interesting picture of the legal system and legal education in China. Many thanks to Steve and Chang for sharing their expertise and data.

 

 

Social Security Numbers & Other Confidential Info Still Available in Federal Court Opinions

Posted on by
Reply

As mentioned in today’s Law Librarian Blog, it appears — per a helpful investigatory audit of Public.Resource.org, an organization headed up by Carl Malamud, who recently (October 20, 2008) presented to the Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law School — that Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and other confidential and sensitive personal identification information remain available in federal court opinions contrary to the E-Government Act of 2002.

The Laptop-Free Zone

Posted on by
Reply

 

“The Laptop-Free Zone”

Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 43, 2009

JANA R. MCCREARY, Florida Coastal School of Law

This new article, “The Laptop-Free Zone,” addresses the hotly debated issue of laptops in law school classroom; those debates are ongoing on countless blogs, on NPR, in national newspapers, and across law school campuses. This article reports and analyzes the data collected through an IRB-approved survey of almost 450 law school students at three different law schools regarding the students’ views of laptops and reported distractions caused by laptops. To provide context, the article also addresses the current arguments against laptops, negating those points as being outweighed by the proper and beneficial use of laptops. Additionally, the article provides information to be considered in teaching adults and to different learning styles, namely, global and analytic learners, and how those concerns are matters to consider in the laptop debate.

According to the survey results, students who do not use a laptop are overwhelmingly more likely to be distracted by others’ laptops than students who are using their own laptops. In other words, yes, laptops cause distractions, but that primarily affects students who are not using a laptop. Accordingly, based on the learning style information and my survey results, I suggest that laptops not be banned from law school classrooms. Instead, I argue that professors must do their best to teach to all students – to those who feel they learn best by using a laptop as an aid and to those who complain of the distractions caused. I do this by implementing a laptop-free zone, restricting the first or first few rows in my classrooms to no laptops. This creates an area where students who are distracted by neighboring screens and nearby typing are free (as possible without an all-out ban) from those distractions. Further, doing so still respects those students who have learned to use a laptop as an educational tool.

As a surprise to me, the survey also showed that many students make the decision to give up their laptop after experiencing attending a class without one, noting they would not have been willing to go through such an experience by their own decision. However, once they experience not using a laptop in the law school classroom environment, they often change their method of taking notes and report improved learning and classroom experiences. Accordingly, I also suggest that instead of banning laptops, we provide beginning students with only a week or two of a laptop ban at some time during the first semester of school. This compromise will serve the interest of the most students most effectively, respecting them as adults while providing supportive guidance to their own decisions about their learning environment.

 

 Source: LSN Educator: Courses, Materials & Teaching Vol. 4 No. 23, 10/24/2008

China-EU School of Law

Posted on by
Reply

The new China-EU School of Law (CESL) in Beijing was created by a consortium of Chinese and EU institutions, lead by the University of Hamburg and the China University of Political Science and Law.  This offers students another opportunity for cross-cultural and international legal education.

Description from the CESL Web site:

By employing comparative approaches of legal studies and bringing international experience of legal education into China, CESL carries its mission to cultivate a new generation of legal professionals who are proficient in both Chinese and international law.
CESL offers (1) the program of Chinese Juris Master and LL. M. of EU Law (Master Programs); (2) the Professional Training Program for lawyers, judges and prosecutors and (3) Research and Consultancy Program, i.e. joint training for Ph.D. students.

China-EU School of Law

http://www.cesl.edu.cn/eng/index.asp

Hat tip to Knut Pissler of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law.