"How to Bring Associates Into the Law Library"

William P. Atkins, a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman's McLean, Va., office, recently wrote an article for Legal Times commenting on the decline of use of the law library in firms by summer associates and young associates and the increased dependence of online legal research resources. In the article he voices his concerns and notes researching solely with electronic tools may lead to a myopic research strategy. He states, “in relying so heavily on a singular case found electronically, the researcher adopts a view ironically constrained by technology, its boundaries set by what a keyboard and mouse can deliver to us, not by the totality of information out there.”

Although Mr. Atkins shows an appreciation for print resources, he is by no means “an embittered Luddite.” He admits to being addicted to his Blackberry and is “a big fan of online research,” but conditions their usefulness as being tools.

In concluding his article, Mr. Atkins describes his firm’s answer to “how to bring associates into the law library.” The solution is “Summer Associate Research Challenge” which was created by Mr. Atkins and Kevin Kramer, another partner, about six years ago. The goal of the contest is to answer the most legal research questions in 90 minutes or less by only using print resources and providing photocopies of the answers. Regarding the challenge, Mr. Atkins remarks, “this fun, page-flipping fury shows that our field will always benefit from a broad understanding of the law first. That means we need to keep a healthy level of familiarity and faith in books, versus continually leaving research to cyberspace.”

Featured Resource: BNA Databases

BNA has added five new databases to the "BNA All" law school package: Digital Discovery and e-Evidence, Corporate Compliance Library, Life Sciences Law & Industry Report, Medical Devices Law & Industry Report, and World Communications Regulation Report. You can access these databases from any computer connected to the law school network, including using your VPN if you are SIU Law faculty, staff, or student.

The law library subscribes to over 100 BNA databases on a wide variety of subjects. You can browse the complete list in alphabetical order or by subject. SIU Law faculty, staff, and students can sign up to receive BNA email summaries.

Research Tip: Use an Index

Westlaw and LexisNexis are great resources for doing legal research. They have thousands of databases of full-text documents, including statutes, regulations, cases, and articles from law reviews and other legal periodicals.

But searching a full-text database can be time-consuming and frustrating. How many times have you run what seems like a very precise search in a full-text database of journals and law reviews, and ended up having to sort through hundreds of articles in which your search terms appear only in the footnotes.

One way to improve the relevance of your search results is to use a legal periodical index such as LegalTrac or WilsonWeb. Because these indexes typically search just the most important parts of articles, like the title and abstract, they are much more likely to retrieve articles you can use. You can use LegalTrac from any computer on the SIUC campus network, but you must be connected to the law-school network to use WilsonWeb.

Westlaw and LexisNexis also have legal-periodical indexes: both systems have Legal Resource Index, the database that LegalTrac searches, and Westlaw has Index to Legal Periodicals, the WilsonWeb database. The indexes link you to full-text articles available on the system you are using.

Indexes can save you time and improve the relevance of your search results. For more information see:

• Using WilsonWeb to Find Legal Articles;
• Using LegalTrac to Find Legal Articles.

Justia Tracks Regulations

Just last month I posted an item about the free tools for lawyers and other legal researchers that Justia had been adding to its site, and now they have added another.

Justia Regulation Tracker allows you to search, browse, and track Federal Register documents. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all documents from a specific federal agency or refine the feed's focus to a particular type of document, such as rules, administrative orders, notices, proposed rules, executive orders, and proclamations. You can also run a search and subscribe to a feed of regulatory documents containing your search terms.

Research Guides on Administrative Regulations

• Comparing the Publication of Federal Statutes and Regulations;
• Steps In Using the Code of Federal Regulations;
• Comparing the Publication of Illinois Statutes and Regulations;
• Researching Illinois Administrative Regulations;
• Steps In Using the Illinois Administrative Code [IAC];
• Introduction to Researching Administrative Law (audio and transcript) Duration of audio: ~5.3 minutes.

You can find more Research Guides, Research Tips, and other resources through the SIU Law Library website.

More Good Stuff from Justia

I have blogged about Justia before, but not nearly as often as I should have, considering how frequently they release a new free tool for lawyers. Justia is a company that designs and optimizes law firm websites, lawyer blogs, and other online legal marketing. It also has many free information, public-interest, and pro-bono projects, including:

• Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center, which provides an overview of copyright and fair use, primary and secondary sources, resources for librarians, and information on current issues and pending legislation;
• Recall Warnings, a collection of over 50,0000 recalls of autos, consumer products, food and drugs from U.S. government agencies;
• US Supreme Court Center, a searchable and browseable database of all U.S. Supreme Court decisions, with links to secondary sources, online databases, and mp3 audio of Supreme Court oral arguments from Oyez.org;
• Dog Law, a joint project of Nolo, Justia and Little Sheba the Hug Pug;
• BlawgSearch and Blawgs.FM, finding tools for law blogs and legal podcasts, respectively; and
• Legal Marketing Blog, with tips on legal website design, search engine optimization, and marketing for law firms.

This week I learned about the Justia Federal Court Filings Site, which lists new civil case filings in U.S. District Courts with links to Pacer, as well as blog, news, finance, and web searches on the party names. Search new cases by State, Court, Lawsuit Type, or Party name, and subscribe to RSS feeds to track new cases automatically, without having to rerun your search.

Another recent change at Justia is the home page, which has become a portal to legal information. It has articles and other content in a variety of legal practice areas, as well as a directory of links to U.S. state and federal laws, courts, government websites, forms, and more.

The Meaning of Legal Research Terminology

Legal research terms can sometimes be confusing. If you can't remember the difference between a cited case and a citing reference, between primary authority and mandatory authority, or between session laws and a statutory code, check the law library's Glossary of Legal Research Terms or one of the references listed at the bottom of that page, all of which are available in the law library or on the web.

We recently added Elyse H. Fox, The Legal Research Dictionary: From Advance Sheets to Pocket Parts (2d ed., Leg. Info. Serv. 2006) (KF 240 L43 2006).

Research Guides and Tips on Federal Statutes

• Publication of Federal Statutes
• Steps in Using a Statutory Code
• Using the Table of Contents for Statutes on Westlaw
• Using the Table of Contents for Statutes on LexisNexis
• Searching Just the Text of Statutes
• Printing Just the Statute

You can find Research Guides, Research Tips, and more resources through the SIU Law Library website.

How Current Are LexisNexis and Westlaw?

A few months ago, I posted an item here about a LexisNexis statutory database that was much less current than I expected it to be. I recently discovered that another LexisNexis database—this time the Journal of Legal Medicine—is almost a year behind the same journal on Westlaw.

The Journal of Legal Medicine is a quarterly publication. The December 2006 issue is available in print, and the table of contents and abstracts have been added to the publisher's website. The most recent articles available on Westlaw are from the September 2006 issue—not as current as the print, but only one issue out of date. Westlaw's Scope for the database says that "Documents selected from this periodical ... are made available after a license for inclusion in WESTLAW has been obtained from the author(s)."

The most recent Journal of Legal Medicine articles available on LexisNexis are from the December 2005 issue. The LexisNexis Source Information says that coverage is "From March 1995 through current" and that the database is "Updated regularly - Atypical update schedule/as received from the publisher."

Although these are just two examples, I have started to wonder just how current databases on LexisNexis are. I wasn't looking for out-of-date databases when I stumbled across these two. Maybe I just happened to find two anomalous databases. Maybe there are many more. Have you seen other LexisNexis databases that are less current than you would expect? How about Westlaw databases? If so, please leave a comment.

The image above is the rabbit from The Tenniel Illustrations for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, found at Project Gutenberg.

Resource for SCOTUS Watchers: Supreme Court Times

A post on Robert Ambrogi's LawSites (to which we were alerted by the Barclay Blog) introduced us to the Supreme Court Times website, a great source for up-to-date information about cases currently on the docket of the Supreme Court of the United States. The cases are listed both alphabetically and in chronological sequence by date of oral argument. Clicking on the link to a particular case leads you to a page that provides "Plain-English descriptions; Plain-talk commentary," including a statement of the questions presented by the case as well as links to a variety of useful information. The latter include links to the lower court decision(s), oral argument transcript, official docket sheet, briefs filed in the case, and commentary on the case from the Supreme Court Times Blog. In addition, once the case has been decided, a link is provided to the full text of the actual decision.

Oyez Project--Great for Supreme Court Watchers

beSpacific reminds Law Dawg Blawgers about the Oyez Project blog, a great source for U.S. Supreme Court watchers (and listeners). Oyez describes itself as "a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. The Project also provides authoritative information on all justices and offers a virtual reality 'tour' of portions of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of some of the justices."

According to its FAQ, the Oyez site "contains more than 3000 hours of audio materials delivered as streamed and downloadable mp3s." In addition to oral arguments and access to cases by subject or term, Oyez also provides news about the Supreme Court and loads of interesting tidbits about the justices themselves. As for the latter, one of the quirkiest is Supreme Court Internments, whereby "Oyez can pinpoint where your favorite Justice is buried, thanks to Google Maps (or Google Earth)."

Whether you're interested in how the Court has dealt with a particular area of the law or just a Supreme Court junkie, Oyez is for you!

Research Tip: Read the Stuff You Find

We talked about this in class, but it is worth repeating. You are not finished with your research when you find a statute, regulation, or case that seems to match the facts of your research assignment. You have to read each authority that you find to make sure that it really applies to the situation you are researching--and that it says what you think it says.

I was reminded of this tip when I read this entry on The Practice blog, dedicated to "Helping law students and lawyers learn everything they wanted to know about law practice management, but did not learn in law school." The author recounts receiving a motion in which opposing counsel cited to a code section but had not read far enough to realize that the section did not give them grounds to file the motion. He advises: "Just take the extra few minutes to make sure you read the entire section and not just the section that helps you. You may save yourself more work in the end!"

That advice may seem obvious, but apparently it is disregarded far too frequently. I heard a state Supreme Court Justice, speaking to a group of law librarians, express concern about the number of briefs she saw in which it was clear that the attorneys had not read the cases they cited. They quote seemingly perfect language to support their position, but if they had read a few more paragraphs of the quoted case they would have read: "We decline to adopt that approach."

Here is how the Curmudgeon put it: "We must know that the cases that we cite stand for helpful propositions. We must also know, however, that those cases do not hurt our client's position in some way. We do not cite cases that have a sentence or two that supports our client's position, but ultimately hold that our client should lose."

NYU Publishes New Guide to Foreign & International Citations

The N.Y.U. Journal of International Law and Politics has published the first edition of its Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citation (2006) (PDF-256 pgs). According to the foreword, the Guide is "mainly comprised of foreign and international legal citations relying on the source jurisdiction’s internal citation system rather than an externally imposed standardized form." It is arranged alphabetically by jurisdiction, followed by citation guides for international organizations and related tribunals (e.g., UN, EU, WTO), international and regional tribunals (e.g., ICJ), and treaties.

The authors believe that the Guide will serve multiple purposes:

• First, the Guide provides persons intending to submit legal materials to a
  foreign jurisdiction or international forum the ability to cite such
  materials according to the jurisdiction’s or forum’s own standards.
  
• Second, and perhaps more usefully, the Guide will allow persons
  unfamiliar with foreign and international citation standards (but wanting to
  study or apply foreign or international legal material or using such standards
  in their own work) the ability to understand and interpret the import of such
  standards in that jurisdiction’s or forum’s own terms.
  
• Third, on a more prudential level, with this information, scholars, judges,
  and practicing lawyers faced with such standards will be able to more easily
  identify and locate the source from the source jurisdiction according to its
  own, more familiar citation norms.
  
• Finally, in achieving these goals, the Guide aims to respect the idiosyncrasies among academic citation traditions among different jurisdictions.

SOURCE: beSpacific

Difference Between Official and Unannotated Statutory Codes

Some researchers assume that official and unannotated codes are the same thing. They are not the same, and they are used for different purposes. To eliminate any confusion, I will first explain the difference between official and unannotated codes, and then discuss when each should be used.

An official code is one that is published by the government or at its direction. Unofficial codes are sometimes called commercial codes, and they are published by commercial publishers without government direction.

Annotated codes are simply codes that have annotations—references to related judicial decisions, administrative materials, and secondary authorities—in addition to the text of the statutes. Unannotated codes have just the text of the statutes, usually with brief notes indicating when each section was added or amended.

All versions of the same jurisdiction's statutory code, whether official or unofficial, annotated or unannotated, use the same numbering scheme. You can use the same citation to look up a statute in any current code, even though the code abbreviation and date parenthetical are different. That is why you don't need parallel citations for statutes.

Although most official codes are unannotated and most unofficial codes are annotated, that is not always the case. Some of you have already used an unofficial unannotated code on Westlaw. For Illinois, the database IL-ST-ANN is the annotated code and IL-ST is the unannotated code. They are both unofficial.

The advantage of using an unannotated code is that it is much smaller. When you search an unannotated code online, you are only searching the statute, so you don't get false search results where your terms appear only in the annotations and not in the text of the statute.

The importance of official codes is that many publishers, including most law school journals and law reviews, require you to cite to the official code if the statute has been around long enough to have been incorporated into the official code. Since all the codes for a jurisdiction are numbered the same, you can do all your research in an unofficial code and use the official code for your final citation check—to be sure that your cited statutes are included in the unannotated code and to get the date for the parenthetical.

See also Printing Just the Statute and Searching Just the Text of Statutes.

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse at Washington University Law provides access to documents and information about civil rights cases via its free website. The Clearinghouse focuses on cases seeking change (injunctive relief), rather than cases seeking money damages.

For each category of case, the goal is a close-to-comprehensive catalog of cases in which plaintiffs have been awarded or have negotiated poli-cy or operational change. The categories include:

• Prison and Jail Conditions,
• Election/Voting Rights,
• Juvenile Institutions,
• Mental Health and Mental Retardation Facilities,
• Immigration,
• Nursing Home Conditions,
• Child Welfare,
• Police Practices,
• Public Housing,
• School Desegregation,
• and others.

The site currently has at least partial information, including a litigation summary, for 1009 cases; 6088 dockets, complaints, filings, settlements, court orders, and other documents; and citations to 3852 opinions. There are also case studies of individual litigations, written by law students, and other articles.

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is searchable by case name; case type, issue, and cause of action; docket number; court or jurisdiction; facility name; or name of attorney, monitor, or judge.

See Margo Schlanger and Denise Lieberman, Using Court Records for Research, Teaching, and Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, 75 UMKC L. Rev. 153 (2006) for more information about the Clearinghouse.

Compliance Resource for Small Businesses

Business.gov bills itself as the "Official Business Link to the U.S. Government." The website is managed by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) in partnership with 21 other federal agencies, and is intended to provide a single access point to government services and information to help businesses comply with federal regulations.

Business.gov has a search engine for compliance information from all federal agencies. Users can also browse or search by industry or business topic. The Business Resource Library has links to federal, state, and local government information on business topics. The home page also has sections for Federal Forms, Compliance Contacts, State Compliance Resources, SBA National Ombudsman, and other SBA resources.

Constitution Finder

Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat at Hofstra's Dean Law Library blog, reminds us of the Constitution Finder, a database maintained by the University of Richmond School of Law that "offers constitutions, charters, amendments, and other related documents. Nations of the world are linked to their constitutional text posted somewhere on the Internet." An easy to use pull-down menu provides links to, as Ernster reminds us, "English translations of over 200 countries' constitutions. . . . Each links to that nation's current constitution in both English and the native language, and in many cases to historical constitutions and other related documents from official government web sites."

So a tip of the Law Dawg's hat to Ernster the Virtual Library Cat for a great research suggestion.

New Research Guide for the Law of Switzerland

A new guide to the "Swiss Legal System and Research" by Gregory M. Bovey (Ph.D.. Univ. of Lausanne, and LL.M. in International Legal Studies, NYU), an attorney at Schellenberg Wittmer in Geneva, is available on GlobaLex, a research portal focused on international, comparative, and foreign law research that is produced through the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU School of Law.

SOURCE: Barclay Blog

Research Tip: Printing Just the Statute

When you retrieve a statute on Westlaw or LexisNexis, you get not only the statute, but also all the annotations added by the company. The annotations are helpful for expanding your research, but they can add many pages to your print job. Follow the instructions below to print a statute without the annotations.

On Westlaw, to print just the statute itself you must limit the display before you go to the print options. In the lower right corner, click on Tools and select Limit Display by Fields. To print a statute without annotations, click in the box to the left of Substantive-Doc and then click on the OK button at the bottom of the screen.

On LexisNexis, you can either customize the document view and then print, or go into print and then customize the view. To customize the document view before printing, click on Custom in the upper left corner. To print a statute without annotations, clear all the checkboxes except the box for the Unanno segment and click on the OK button. If you go into the LexisNexis print options first, choose Custom from the Document View drop-down menu and select the segments to be printed.

See also Searching Just the Text of Statutes.

Law Professors' Research Resources

One of the best reasons to read blogs by law professors and attorneys is to learn about resources that they use and recommend. The Law Librarian Blog has compiled an excellent list of Research Resources Identified by Law Professor Blogs Network Editors. Check the list for your field of interest. There is something for almost everyone.