The Public Access to Legal Information (PALI) Committee of the Southern California Association of Law Libraries (SOCALL) has posted online its handy and valuable:
Locating the Law: A Handbook for Non-Law Librarians
Fifth Edition, Revised (2011)
Cross-posted at Law Library Blog.
LexisNexis has announced that its docket service product CourtLink is now offering hourly alerts on newly-filed federal cases — please see:
Cross-posted at Law Library Blog.
Patrick Meyer
Thomas Jefferson School of Law
September 26, 2011
Abstract:
This article summarizes results from the author’s 2010 law firm legal research survey, which determined what research functions, and in what formats, law firms require new hires to be proficient. This survey updates the author’s 2009 article that is available at this site and which was based on this author’s earlier law firm legal research survey.
These new survey results confirm that law firms need schools to integrate the teaching of online and print-based research resources and to emphasize cost-effective research. The following federal and state specific print-based resources should be taught in an integrated manner: legislative codes, secondary source materials, reporters, administrative codes and digests.
Source: LSN Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal Vol. 6 No. 74, 11/16/2011
Here’s a White Paper from Cognizant 20-20 Insights (September 2011) that should be of interest to many readers of this blog:
Meeting Lawyer Requirements by Delivering More Contextually-Sensitive and Relevant Results
by Ambika Sagar
Some highlights:
Social media, crowdsourced data and other sources of information continue to generate volume and increase complexity.
Leveraging search history, information search providers can start analyzing how lawyers actually search to build artificial intelligence tools for constructing queries based on cases on which a lawyer is currently working.
Deriving context involves analyzing the pleadings to understand the legal issue.
Proactive search is an ideal opportunity to highlight the value of paid content. By providing relevant free content and abstracts of paid content, the legal information industry can target upgrading of customers.
Better value propositions such as pay-per-result and assistance in discovery of relevant results can improve conversion rates.
Ideally, a single-sign-in, cloud-based solution that provides access to various tools and ensures maximum integration of research and case data with litigation tools will benefit lawyers the most and also help to attract users and keep them loyal to one platform.
Be sure to check out the article itself and its many useful illustrations.
Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) , the electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, has just added a mobile Web version of the PACER case locator function. This new version is accessible using Apple computer devises such as iPads and iPhones, as well as using Android devices (version 2.2 or higher).
See here for the announcement of the Mobile PACER Case Locator, which can be obtained by visiting: here.
Cross-posted at Law Library Blog.
From time to time I will get a call or e-mail from a proud parent whose son or daughter has been admitted to Stanford Law School. The parent wants my advice on a book for their accomplished child to read upon the beginning of their new-found career. A wonderful book has just come along which fits the bill perfectly: Judge Ruggero Aldisert’s A Judge’s Advice: 50 Years on the Bench.
This slender volume packs a lot of punch. In less than 250 pages the judge offers answers to questions that have occupied his thoughts for decades: : “What is the bedrock of our common law system? What are trial and appellate judges really looking for? What is the logical configuration that is absolutely necessary in any legal argument? What practical challenges do judges face when deciding a case? What is the difference between the philosophy of law and a philosophy of law? What is the difference between a judge making a decision and a judge justifying it, and why does that difference matter to me? Precedent in the law: When do you kiss it and when do you kill it?”
The judge organizes his thoughts among the following five themes:
And within these themes are found the following chapters:
The house of the law — The role of the courts in contemporary society — Precedent : what it is and what it isn’t, when do we kiss it and when do we kill it? — Elements of legal thinking — Logic for law students : how to think like a lawyer — Formal and informal fallacies — State courts and federalism — Life in the raw in appellate courts — “The seniors” suggest a solution — Brief writing — Opinion writers and law review writers: a community and continuity of approach — Reading and evaluating an appellate opinion — Philosophy, jurisprudence and jurisprudential temperament of federal judges — Making the decision — Justifying the decision.
While I know that all law students would benefit greatly from reading this book, when I first saw it our international students immediately came to mind as no other single volume that I am aware of so neatly and clearly explains the American legal system. This book explains stare decisis better than anything else available.
Judge Aldisert writes about his particular passion — the law — with an enthusiasm that is almost exhausting. Through this book the law student can get a glimpse of just how enormously satisfying the next 60 or 70 years of his or her life can be.
As the judge states in his Introduction: “. . . These pages flesh out the instruments and implements of lawyers with a far-ranging ‘view from above’ with one objective in mind: to enrich the skills of these men and women so that each may bear — to borrow from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler — the noble title of ‘compleat lawyer.’
This book really should be required reading for all law students, lawyers and others too. Judge Aldisert is one of my heroes, along with others who inspire me such as Roger Ebert, Vin Scully, Tony Bennett and Keiko Fukuda (Google her) — people who, while they may have stopped buying green bananas, they have not stopped working and never will. These are people who make no distinction between work and play and who will be carried off the job feet-first. They know the secret. People who I want to be like when I grow up.
Full disclosure: I was first charmed by Judge Aldisert when I met him during my daughter’s clerkship for him.
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.
Anyone teaching the importance of legislative history in legal research need only point to a single punctuation mark: the mighty comma. As a disclaimer, I strive to put my years of Latin classes to good use, but do not profess to be punctuationally-perfect. (Interestingly, the Romans did not use modern punctuation, but I digress…) One thing I do know, however, is that other people’s grammatical shortcomings sure can wreak a lot of havoc… making them a great teaching tool.
This past week, I was researching a state statute that, among many other things, imposed conditions on persons who had committed a “felony or misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” At first blush, one would read this to mean that the conditions apply to persons involved in domestic violence felonies and misdemeanors. Get this: That provision actually governs anyone who commits either a “felony” or a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” In other words, we should really be reading a comma into the statute between “felony” and “misdemeanor” where the legislators neglected to put one!
Uncovering the latent comma was not easy. News articles referred to the imposition of the conditions on felons, but without citing the supporting statutory clause. Secondary sources referred to conditions emanating from the “domestic violence clause” of the statute, failing to illuminate that the clause also covers all felonies. Case law cited the statute as creating certain conditions, but decided matters on other grounds.
The best recourse was to trace the historical progression of the clause, which I was able to do through older versions of the statute and the legislators’ own analysis. Earlier iterations made no reference to domestic violence whatsoever, as the clause originally pertained to persons who had committed any felony. Years later, the legislature added “or misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” but failed to demarcate this clause with a comma that would have resolved ambiguity. If the legislators had simply written “any felony, or misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” I would have spent fifteen minutes on a project that instead took five hours! (Note: I do not require legislators to bold, italicize, or underscore the comma; any font or stylization will do!)
Do you have any grammar-related teachable moments you’d like to share? We’d love to hear them and pass them along to our classes. To that end, I particularly enjoyed Prof. Susan J. Hankin’s “Statutory Interpretation in the Age of Grammatical Permissiveness: An Object Lesson for Teaching Why Grammar Matters,” which references recent literature on the subject and also offers some great case law examples to use in class.
Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.
http://educatingtomorrowslawyers.du.edu/
The site includes examples of innovative courses and and a respurces page with strategic plans, teaching strategies, and surveys.
From the description and press release:
“Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers” provides a platform to encourage law schools in the U.S. to showcase innovative teaching to produce more practice-ready lawyers who can better meet the needs of an evolving profession.
Rebecca Love Kourlis is the Executive Director of IAALS and a former Colorado Supreme Court justice.
“Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers leverages the Carnegie Model of learning,” Kourlis says. “Our project provides support for shared learning, innovation, ongoing measurement and collective implementation. We are very excited to launch this project to encourage new ways to train law students and to measure innovation in the years to come.”
William M. Sullivan is the Director of “Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers.” He also is the lead author of the 2007 Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers.
“Our goal is to encourage law schools that are already committed to innovation to share what they know in a structured, collaborative place so that other law professors may discuss and develop new teaching techniques,” Sullivan says.
IAALS will manage this initiative, the first of its kind in the country. The initiative is partnering with a growing number of law schools (including Stanford Law School) in a consortium committed to innovative teaching The initiative is fully funded by IAALS, the consortium, and the University of Denver.
Martin J. Katz, Dean of the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver serves with Kourlis and Sullivan on the initiative’s Executive Committee.
“We want to help law schools integrate three sets of values or what the Carnegie Foundation calls ‘apprenticeships,’” Katz says. “They are knowledge, practice, and professionalism. We believe this initiative can change how law professors and deans, students, and ultimately the legal profession respond to our changing world.”
Bloomberg has released its latest version of Bloomberg Law (BLAW), featuring, among other things:
See: Bloomberg Law Releases Latest Evolution of its Web Platform
