Dear 1L student,

No doubt friends, family, and complete strangers have given you advice about how to handle the law school experience.  The research attorneys at the law library have some advice for you too: using the study aids found in the library’s reserve collection will improve your study experience.

The books discussed below are available for two-hour checkout from the circulation desk, or overnight if you check them out within two hours of closing.  The library circulation desk closes at 8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and 5 p.m on Friday-Saturday.  You can renew the book when it is due if you are still using it.

Overview of law school.  What are my classes about?  How should I study and take notes?  How do I prepare for exams?  Cornell Law School Orientation does a great job answering these questions, but take a look at these resources for more info:

  • Law School Success: A Guide to Studying Law and Taking Law School Exams.  Call number KF 283 .B871x 2008  Easy to read and conversational in tone.  I recommend Chapter 10, Learning After Class, and Chapter 12 on Exams.  The last part of the book provides sample exams and answers.
  • Understanding Law School.  Call number KF 283 .U53 2004.  Provides a detailed overview of 1L classes.  I recommend Appendix B, American Legal Systems: A Resource and Reference Guide by Toni M. Fine.
  • Preview the available sample exams from your professor on the registrar’s Web site (login required; availability varies).

See the Big Picture: Nutshells.  The Nutshell series of books provide an overview of legal topics.  These books are helpful introductions to the topic before and after you study to help you get the perspective you need to put all the pieces together and make sure your outlines make sense.  They are brief, quick reads.  This semester you should look at:

Refine the Outline: Hornbooks.  Hornbooks are more detailed than Nutshells.  Basically, hornbooks are textbooks for studying law.  In contrast with the case books used in class, hornbooks provide detailed explanations.  Use hornbooks to help you review the finer points you may have misunderstood in class.  One caveat: your professor may emphasize points not found in the Hornbook and skip over others.  Pay attention to what is covered in class so you focus your efforts on the right topics.  Here are some hornbooks to use this semester:

Deepen Your Understanding With Examples & Explanations.  The Examples & Explanations series from Aspen Publishers provides hypothetical examples with explanations showing how legal principles apply to those examples.  These books are great for preparing for exams and helpful for those of us who learn better using concrete examples.  This semester you should look at:

Questions about study aids?  Ask a research attorney at the reference desk or email your Lawyering research instructor.

CFR app logoThe U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a non-profit dedicated to helping citizens better understand foreign policy throughout the world, has a handy iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app that brings CFR’s resources to your fingertips.  This app is FREE.  Keep current on the latest major world news, read analysis and expert briefs on foreign policy topics written by CFR’s staff, and learn background information about major issues in the world today.  Many articles are brief and to the point.  Here are some examples of what’s available from the app:

The app also offers access to transcripts of CFR meetings and interviews with international experts.  I recommend the CFR app to anyone interested in keeping up with international law and relations.

Between 1950 and 2008, about one out of every 23 opinions of the U.S. circuit courts of appeals cited at least one article from a law review or law journal.

That is one of the findings of a new article posted on SSRN entitled The Use of Legal Scholarship By the Federal Courts of Appeals: An Empirical Study by David L. Schwartz, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Lee Petherbridge, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles.

Surprised by that number?  Not only that, but the rate at which U.S. appellate courts cite law journals has been increasing over the past 59 years, from a rate of 3.4% of opinions during 1950-1970 to a rate of 6.21% of opinions during 1999-2008.  This finding challenges the conventional wisdom that courts have been paying less attention to legal scholarship lately (challenges–but doesn’t disprove).

Is the conventional wisdom just plain wrong?  Was it caused by several earlier empirical studies that found a decrease in citations (those studies were done on a much smaller scale)?  The authors of this new study found that about 14% of judges are responsible for about 50% of the citations but do not break this statistic out over time.  Could it be that the percentage of judges citing to legal scholarship is decreasing, and there are few judges now who cite to legal scholarship albeit citing more often?  Does the conventional view stem from negative statements about legal scholarship made by Justice Roberts, Judge Posner, and other prominent jurists?  Is it the result of some combination of these, or is something else going on?

The article makes several suggestions for future research, such as, how do judges really use legal scholarship?  As the authors point out, the methodology of the study isn’t adequate to making fine-tuned observations.  Then there is the even more difficult question: how should legal scholarship be used by the judicial system?  Knowing the answers to these questions will help lawyers and academics be more effective in 1) citing legal scholarship in pleadings submitted to the court; and 2) producing legal scholarship.

As a side note, I was really impressed with the search query the authors used to search for opinions that cite law review and journal articles in Westlaw:

da(YYYY) & ((“l.j.” “l. rev.” “l.rev.” “j.l.” “law review”) /10 (20** 19** 18**)) % ((j.l. /4 v.) ti((j. /2 l.) lj jl j.l. l.j.) (at(lj jl l.j. j.l.)) (“nat! l.j.” “national law journal”))

 The first part of the query looks for opinions published during a year period that cite law reviews or journals, the second part after % (BUT NOT) limits the query from retrieving cases where L and J are cited as someone’s initials and citations to the National Law Journal (not an academic publication). The query is not perfect, but it is about as close as you can reasonably get.

Hat tip to Legal Informatics Blog for the SSRN posting.

Last week Ken Strutin, the Director of Legal Information Services for the New York State Defenders Association and a contributor to the New York Law Journal, published an annotated bibliography on solitary confinement. The bibliography provides links to reports, law review articles, expert statements, standards, books, news, and organizations pertaining to solitary confinement. Here are a few examples:

LLRX publishes many bibliographies on a wide variety of topics to help jumpstart your research. Browse or search here.

Law.gov logo

“The primary legal materials of the United States are the raw materials of our democracy. They should be made more broadly available to enable an informed citizenry.”

From Law.gov’s declaration and 10 supporting principles. Here are the 10 principles, in my words:

  1. No direct fees for accessing the law. (Indirect fees, primarily taxes,  are preferred because the cost of providing access is shared by many.)
  2. Copyright on legal materials must be done away with; this practice limits access. (Some states and local governments assert copyright on their laws!)
  3. People should be able to download the law in bulk (e.g., the entire U.S. Code, not just a section here and there.)
  4. Online law needs to be authenticated so we can trust that it hasn’t been messed with by mischievous or angry hackers (or worse).
  5. Old stuff is important too! Earlier versions of the law need to remain online in a stable location.
  6. We shouldn’t be required to cite to commercially-produced versions of the law, which creates a burden for those who don’t have access to Lexis or Westlaw.
  7. We need good technical standards for online versions of the law. We need some uniformity in those standards.
  8. Governments need to make the law available in a format that can be processed by computers. That way web designers can use the law to develop useful Web sites. The law also must be the official, definitive version.
  9. Government needs to fund research into the challenges of putting the law online, including privacy issues.
  10. Some government entities, especially at the state and local level, need help complying with these principles. We need a program to educate and train them.

Click here for more on Law.gov.

U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq“Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world.”  So begins a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) entitled Costs of Major U.S. Wars.  The report, dated June 29, 2010, provides cost estimates in historic and current dollar amounts for all major U.S. wars beginning with the American Revolution.

Two things from the report stand out to me:

  1. The report provides a valuable discussion of the difficulties inherent in comparing costs over time.  Inflation, GDP growth, and increasing sophistication in military technology, combined with the challenge of developing an accurate cost estimate for war, cast an unavoidable shadow of inaccuracy over the figures. Nevertheless, the statistics are valuable provided we remember their limitations.  The report itself is an excellent example of how to provide proper context for statistics–something we rarely get in mainstream reporting.
  2. The war cost calculated as a percentage of GDP during the peak year of the war is the most interesting statistic in the report.  Looking at the figures, it is obvious why World War II left such a mark on the generation that survived it.

CRS publishes many reports on a wide variety of topics of interest to Congress and the public (including attorneys).  Locating the reports can be a challenge.  Some are available here.  A guide to locating CRS reports is available here.

Image from the U.S. Army’s Flickr stream

Google Wave logoIn a surprise move, Google announced it plans to shut down Google Wave at the end of this year.  Google Wave combines character-by-character live typing with saved messages to create an instant-messaging-meets-email technology great for distance collaboration.  Wave is more conversational than Google Docs and allows for dragging and dropping images and video into the text.  Much of Wave’s code will continue to be open source and available for incorporation into other applications.

I am honestly surprised that Google has given up on Wave so quickly.  Wave adoption has been slow but that is common with new technology.  Google search and Twitter took several years to go viral.  If Google has an idea for a bigger, better application, I would have expected the company to continue promoting Wave until the new app was ready for release.  More likely Google’s expectations for Wave were too ambitious.  Google did not do a stellar job marketing Wave and what Wave can do because Google didn’t understand itself how Wave would fit into our lives.  Google relied too much on third-party developers to create add-ons that would make Wave an “I can’t live without it” tool.  Remember how Google released Wave to developers before anyone else last year, encouraging them to create add-ons?  When the Wave “killer apps” didn’t materialize, Google realized it still didn’t know how to position Wave in the market.

PACER is an online database for downloading copies of federal court filings: complaints, answers, motions, etc.  Trouble is, it costs 8 cents per page to download a document.  8 cents may not seem like a lot, but it adds up quickly.  PACER also charges 8 cents to look at a page of search results.  PACER isn’t the most user-friendly database–you can’t search the full text of documents.  You can pretty much only search by party name, court, and docket number, so you have to know what you are looking for.  Critics of PACER think the government is overcharging for the service because it makes a sizable profit off documents that are public record (one of the rare government services that actually makes money).

A team of talented people at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton developed RECAP (PACER spelled backwards) to help researchers get federal filings for free.  RECAP is a Firefox extension (a bit of code that adds functionality to an Internet browser) that automatically archives PACER documents when people who have RECAP download them.  Then, if you have RECAP, you can search PACER to see which documents have already been downloaded and are available for free.

Now it is even easier to find free federal case filings because the stand-alone RECAP Archive is available–no PACER account or RECAP add-on needed.  Pulling up the docket for a case lets you see which documents are available to download for free and which must be purchased through PACER.  The Archive is easy to use.  Let the RECAP team know if you encounter a bug or have an idea to improve the site. Note that you still can’t search the full text of the filings, only the docket (Hat tip to Erika Wayne at Stanford for posting the clarification).

The Archive has some interesting features, like the ability to add tags to dockets and link related cases together.  The tags didn’t seem very helpful because I could not limit my search to specific tags.  I’m not sure that people will add enough tags to make tags useful for finding cases.

An important problem to consider when using court filings from PACER is the availability of personal information like bank accounts and social security numbers in some documents.  Sensitive information should be redacted before documents are uploaded into the system but often isn’t due to the huge volume of documents handled by the courts.  RECAP’s servers scan documents for social security numbers, but other sensitive information is difficult to identify through automated processes (e.g., names of minor children).  RECAP asks that documents with sensitive information be brought to their attention.  Ultimately this problem is best fixed by the courts, possibly by limiting the inclusion of sensitive information to one designated filing type for all cases and keeping those documents in a separate, secure system.  Courts should also consider abandoning entirely the use of paper documents for sensitive information in favor of an electronic database.

If you download documents from PACER, consider installing the RECAP add-on so you can contribute to the open access of information.

FederalRegister.govLast week the Government Printing Office (GPO), the Office of the Federal Register (OFR), and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) jointly released a new, XML-based version of the Federal Register at FederalRegister.gov.

This new site is important because much of the business of the United States government is conducted by federal agencies—in addition to Congress and the United States courts.  The Federal Register is the news magazine of the federal agencies.  Published Monday through Friday, the Federal Register provides notice of new regulations, requests for comment on proposed regulations, and news about actions taken by agencies and the President.  Attorneys who have clients involved in regulated industries (basically everything!) monitor the register for news affecting their clients.  Here are two examples from today’s Federal Register:

  1. The Department of Housing and Urban Development released application information for the FY2010 Housing Counseling Grant;
  2. The Environmental Protection Agency corrected the text of its July 15, 2010 Call for Information on accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from bioenergy sources.

The new site is in beta.  It is an unofficial version of the Federal Register for now, but the site provides links to the official PDF version in FDsys.gov.

The advantages of the new site include:

My favorite new feature is the RSS feed.  Feeds are available for all of the index topics like bankruptcy, solar energy, and Iraq.

We already know that apps are everywhere, but Online MBA has aggregated some numbers into a slick graphical presentation (below), doing a great job noting its sources at the bottom (albeit in tiny, tiny text). Some of the highlights:

  • Apple maintains a hefty lead with 225,000 apps in its store, but Droid now offers a very respectable 70,000 apps
  • Average price for an app: $3.10
  • Blackberry, still the smart device of choice for lawyers, sells more phones than Apple but has far fewer apps, I think because Blackberry is less developer friendly and the device itself is less conducive to apps (smaller screen, not as good for games, is viewed more as a workhorse and less as a “fun” device)
  • Most downloaded: Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D

Online MBA
Via: MBA Online

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