Perhaps you’ve heard the federal government is currently shut down?

With budget negotiations at an impasse, and another debt ceiling battle looming, the Scholarship@Cornell Law repository is featuring two articles published by members of the law faculty that touch on these respective issues.

Professor Josh Chafetz’s essay “The Phenomenology of Gridlock,” turns the conventional dysfunction narrative on its head, arguing that the hunt for causes of gridlock are misguided. Originally appearing in Notre Dame Law Review’s 2012 “The American Congress: Legal Implications of Gridlock” Symposium, Chafetz argues that gridlock itself is not a phenomenon, but an absence of it, and that looking at why and how legislation occurs is the more fruitful course of action in determining institutional dysfunction.

Also, Professor Michael Dorf and George Washington University’s Neil H. Buchanan tackled the debt ceiling fight last year in companion articles “How to Choose the Least Unconstitutional Option: Lessons for the President (and Others) from the Debt Ceiling Standoff” and “Nullifying the Debt Ceiling Threat Once and for All: Why the President Should Embrace the Least Unconstitutional Option” appearing the Columbia Law Review and Columbia Law Review Sidebar respectively. In the papers, Dorf and Buchanan examine the recent history of the debt ceiling brinksmanship between Congress and The White House and examine the options the President may have to prevent the ceiling from becoming a negotiation tactic every time it needs to be raised. Additionally, visit Professor Dorf’s blog, Dorf on Law, where he’s been posting on the current budget negotiations.

For more on the latest scholarly articles from these authors and the rest of the law school faculty visit the repository at Scholarship@Cornell Law. 

HOL_BlackonWhiteBackgroundThe Law Library is pleased to announce that HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library is now available to Cornell alumni. This database contains more than 1,700 law and law-related journals with a broad range of coverage.  Alumni can search the database by article title, author, subject, state or country published, or by using keywords. Articles can be downloaded in a searchable PDF format.

Cornell alumni can log in to Law Journal Library using their NetID.  A log-in link is also available on our website (on the home page, scroll down to the link for HeinOnline Alumni Access in Research Tools).  Don’t have a NetID?  Go to Cornell University NetIDs to set up alumni access to this and other electronic resources provided to alumni by Cornell University Library.

Currently, HeinOnline Alumni Access does not work with Internet Explorer 8 or earlier.  If you are having trouble logging in to HeinOnline, please try using Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Firefox, or Chrome.

For answers to questions about using Law Journal Library, please contact Nina Scholtz.

Cornell law students may be wondering whether they can use Westlaw, Lexis, or Bloomberg this summer.  Here’s some information to get you started:

Students may use Westlaw for academic-related work.  Otherwise, you may not use your Cornell Westlaw password over the summer.  Go to Westlaw’s Password Extension page for more information and to request extension.

Students may use their Cornell Lexis Advance and Bloomberg Law accounts over the summer for any purpose, academic or commercial.

Questions? Contact Law Library Reference for more information.

The Cornell Law Library is pleased to announce the 2013 recipients of The Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research:

First Place: Libor Integrity and Holistic Domestic Enforcement, by Milson C. Yu, 3L

Milson YuMilson Yu crafted a coherent and well-written note embracing a complex and wide range of sources.  He looked at the history and methodology of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), an estimate of the cost of short-term borrowing for large London banks; examined the limits of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s enforcement authority in the context of rigging Libor; and outlined “a two-part plan to engage the CFTC in active oversight and enforcement of Libor.”  His sources included a sophisticated collection of unpublished private reports, administrative regulations, decisions, and reports, briefs and orders from federal litigation, federal case and statutory law, legislative history materials, and articles and empirical studies in law reviews and business journals, among other sources.

Through extended research into his area of interest, Milson discovered that advanced research techniques such as combining search terms with Boolean connectors and tracking updates to his research significantly improved his search results.

Second Place: How to Kill Copyright: A Brute-Force Approach to Content Creation, by Kirk Sigmon, 3L

sigmon_kirk_kas468Kirk Sigmon’s idea and research were quite original; he wove a collection of very different sources together for an interesting thought experiment.   In the course of examining the topic of copyrightable content randomly generated by computer, he drew on both research in computer science and a mix of primary and secondary legal sources to support his discussion of whether copyrightable content could be generated, whether the content would be amenable to copyright, and the legal ramifications of generating this content.

Kirk comments about his paper:  “It is a fusion of cryptanalytic science, computer science, and intellectual property law – a sort of hybrid that does not easily lend itself to research in a standard library.  But that was what made it a fun paper to write.”

A review panel comprised of Librarians Amy Emerson, Matt Morrison, Nina Scholtz, and Carissa Vogel selected the winners from among 19 competitive entries.

Funding for the Prize is provided by an endowment given to the Law Library by Barbara Cantwell in honor of her late husband, Robert Cantwell, a 1956 graduate of Cornell Law School.

In addition to receiving a monetary award, the winners are also invited to publish their papers in Scholarship@Cornell Law, the Law Library’s digital repository, and to feature their papers in Reading Room displays.

Cornell Law students

As the semester draws to a close, we recommend scheduling a customized research consultation with a librarian to prepare for summer employment.  Tailored advice includes, but is not limited to, specific jurisdictional sources, key resources in substantive practice areas, and advanced research skills and strategies. Consultations can be as short as 15 minutes or last up to 60 minutes. Our registration form allows you to specify your interests and needs, and request a particular Research Services Librarian if desired. Forms are available at the Circulation Desk in the Reading Room.

Reading Room_2The Law Library invites Cornell Law 2Ls, 3Ls, and LLMs to submit scholarly research papers to be considered for the annual Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research.

Entries may include, but are not limited to, papers written for a class or journal notes.  All papers must have been written in the time period spanning May, 2012 – May, 2013.  Work product generated through summer or other employment will not be accepted.  Papers must be a minimum of 10 pages in length, must be written in proper Bluebook format, and must be properly footnoted.

First prize is $500, second prize is $250, and both winners will be invited to publish their papers in Scholarship@Cornell Law, our digital repository.  For submission procedure and selection criteria, please see Prize for Exemplary Student Research.

Papers will be accepted on an ongoing basis through May 1, 2013.  The winners will be announced May 8, 2013.

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 ResearchPapers 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.

We have two new Hein databases available for use by all Cornell faculty, students, and staff.

This database includes reports, decisions, and records of several of the most important federal agencies, including the  Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  Complete collections of case reports from these and other agencies are included.  The documents are images of the originals.

This database includes the entirety of Cheryl Nyberg and Carol Boast Robertson’s Subject Compilations Bibliography Series, previously available at Cornell Law Library in print only.  Users can now search the full text and link directly to articles in HeinOnline and many freely available web resources.  The database also includes many other multistate surveys of law.

If you have any questions about using these databases, please contact Cornell Law Library Reference.  For information about other new databases at Cornell Law Library, see Update on law library databases.

Monday is the federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.  His birthday was this past Tuesday, January 15.

If you are interested in finding out more about Dr. King, you’re in luck!  Eric Kofi Acree, the Director of Cornell University’s John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, has created a research guide.  For more information about the Law Library’s holdings about Martin Luther King, Jr., search the library catalog or contact Cornell Law Library Reference for assistance.

To get you started on your research, here is a video clip from an interview with Dr. King:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Attention Cornell students:  Are you researching in the area of European communities or identities?  Would you like to qualify for a cash prize of up to $1,000?  If so, we have the contest for you.

Cornell University Library and the Cornell Institute for European Studies are sponsoring Europe in the World: Perspectives on Communities, a contest offering cash prizes for the best creative scholarship on the communities and identities of Europe.  Build on your research about Europe by preparing and submitting a project with data or information visualization, spatial analysis, mixed media illustration, time-lapse visualization,l or other creative work.

Cash prizes will be offered in both graduate and undergraduate categories:

  • First prize, $1,000
  • Second prize, $500
  • Third prize, $250

For details about the contest, visit olinuris.library.cornell.edu/europe2013.  Olin Library will have a workshop about the contest on Thursday, October 25, 4:30-5:30 pm in Olin Library 106G.  For more information about European statistics, see Cornell University Library’s research guide, which includes information about data visualization tools.  For more help with data visualization, e-mail CUL’s Visual Resources Help.

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