Every month the Cornell Law Library adds new titles to its collection. The most recent additions for January 2014 are posted, here. A few highlights from this month’s additions are featured below.
Law and Social Theory – Reza Banakar; Max Travers
Research Methods in Law – Dawn Watkins; Mandy Burton
Neutrality and Theory of Law – Jordi F. Beltran; Jose J. Moreso; Diego M. Papayannis
Every month the Cornell Law Library adds new titles to its collection. The most recent additions for December 2013 are posted, here. A few highlights from this month’s additions are featured below.
Selected Titles
Law and Language : Effective Symbols of Community – Harold J. Berman; John Witte
Animal Cruelty :A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding – Mary P. Brewster; Cassandra Reyes
This month marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The speech is sometimes referred to as the greatest closing argument in history, in part because Lincoln himself spent his early career as a lawyer in Illinois.
The law library has numerous books available for checkout detailing Lincoln’s career as a lawyer and covering his skill as an orator. One of the more recent examples is Arthur Rizer’s Lincoln’s Counsel: Lessons from America’s Most Persuasive Speaker, published by the American Bar Association.
From the publisher’s website:
Before Abraham Lincoln was called “Mr. President,” he was called “counselor” and “esquire.” Some consider him to be one of the nation’s greatest attorneys and, at the very least, an enormously persuasive speaker. He spent more years practicing law than any other president, and his years in the legal profession were essential to his eventual election to the Presidency.
As a lawyer, Lincoln knew how to craft successful closing arguments. As a president–with his Gettysburg Address, perhaps the greatest closing argument in history–he knew how to persuade a bitterly divided country into ultimately doing what was right for all.
Through examples from Lincoln’s great speeches and closing arguments–included in their entirety are Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural Speeches, the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and more–this book instructs you in the art of persuasion in two simple ways: by providing lessons from Lincoln’s career as a lawyer and politician, and then by analyzing those lessons and discussing how to apply them to your own life. Lincoln’s Counsel gives important advice about advocacy straight from the very best.
Also, due to Cornell possessing one of the original copies of the address, be sure to check out the commemorative events taking place around campus this month by visiting the university’s events calendar here.
The law library has a new resource available designed to help researchers navigate international legislation and case law regarding the acquisition and ownership of artwork.
Art Law & Cultural Property from the International Foundation for Art Research contains resources and information covering legislation that governs the export and ownership of cultural property from dozens of countries with primarily a European focus. Additionally, it covers case law and hard-to-find out of court settlement documents pertaining to art ownership issues in the United States.
The database is available to all Cornell students, faculty, and staff both on and off campus with the link given above.
All law students are invited to an Open House at the Law Library on Tuesday, August 27, Noon-2pm.
Library resources and services will be featured, including:
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The False Prophet!” shrieks one cover. “Confession of Ann Walters, the Murderess!” proclaims another. “Death in the Mail” is the lurid title of a third.
These are all pamphlets digitized in the Cornell University Law Library Trial Pamphlets Collection, which has just received the American Association of Law Libraries’ Law Library Publications Award, Nonprint Division.
We call them trial pamphlets because most are contemporary accounts of trials of prominent citizens or that dealt with especially controversial or lurid topics. Some are confessions; some include “execution sermons” (in which readers were given a moral lecture). As the titles quoted suggest, they were sold to a public eager to learn the juicy details of a recent murder or other crime.
For present day scholars, the pamphlets offer not only valuable evidence, such as trial transcripts, frequently not available elsewhere, but also indications of the political, economic, and social transformation of the United States, especially in the 19th century.
The trial pamphlets are freely available for full-text searching or browsing on the Trial Pamphlets Collection site. Law Library staff responsible for the project are Thomas Mills, Associate Director for Collections and Administration and Rare Book Curator, and Janet Gillespie, Access Services Manager. Barbara Berger Eden, Cornell University Library’s Director of Preservation, and the entire project staff made the digital collection possible.
Just posted in Scholarship@Cornell Law is “Unborn Communities,” a working paper by Gregory S. Alexander, A. Robert Noll Professor of Law at Cornell. From the abstract:
Do property owners owe obligations to members of future generations? Although the question can be reframed in rights-terms so that it faces rights-oriented theories of property, it seems to pose a greater challenge to those theories of property that directly focus on the obligations that property owners owe to others rather than (or, better, along with) the rights of owner. The challenge is compounded where such theories emphasize the relationships between individual property owners and the various communities to which they belong. Do those communities include members of future generations? This paper addresses these questions as they apply to a property theory that I have developed in recent work, a theory that we can call the human-flourishing theory of property.
If you’re not familiar with Scholarship@Cornell Law, it’s Cornell Law Library’s digital repository of 1,000 scholarly articles, papers, and presentations, all available online, for free. Scholarship@Cornell Law is part of bePress’s Law Commons, where Cornell Law Library has one of the top five most popular repositories.
While both published and working papers by Cornell law faculty make up the bulk of Scholarship@Cornell Law, we also have papers by students, including winners of the Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research. Papers from many different law school centers and programs, the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence and the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative are also found at Scholarship@Cornell Law.
New things seem to keep happening here at the Law Library. First, we now have a Popular DVD Collection. It focuses on law, lawyers, public policy and government in feature films. While we currently have about 50 DVDs, we expect the size of the collection to increase. You can browse our collection in the soft seating area of the Reading Room or online at http://guides.library.cornell.edu/popular_law_dvds. DVDs can be checked out for seven days.
We also have a new self-serve online room reservation system for the Law School community. Easy access is available via your computer, phone, or tablet at http://lawschool.cornell.libcal.com/booking/rooms. Reservations may be made for the squash court and study rooms 471 and 473, for a maximum of two hours at a time.
Happy new year — welcome to 2013!
We’ve made a few changes in the law library’s database offerings:
We’re pleased to announce the publication of our annual report, Cornell University Law Library: A Year in Review 2011/2012. It includes a Message from the Director, reports on Collections, Information Management, Reference and Research Services, and Access Services, an in-depth discussion of our digitization of the Trial Pamphlets Collection, and a list of our librarians’ professional activities. Some of the highlights from the past year that you can learn more about in the annual report include new librarians and staff, a new popular reading collection (both print and online), library materials on the move, added Sunday reference desk staffing, increased circulation of library materials, and a visit from Cornell Companions, a pet visitation program sponsored by the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine (a picture of the llama is in the annual report).
For graphs, pictures, and more, visit Cornell University Law Library: A Year in Review 2011/2012.
