Law Librarian Blog

Other Video Search Tools

Search Engine Watch has an informative article discussing alternatives to Google’s video search tool. 

Read all about it.

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

An Analysis on the Administration’s Social Security Plan

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released an overview of issues raised by the Administration's Social Security Plan.

Highlights include:

• Administration Acknowledges Private Accounts Would Do Nothing to Improve Social Security Solvency.
• Claimed $750 Billion Estimate Makes Borrowing Costs Look Much Lower Than They Actually Would Be.
• White House Declines to Propose Measures to Restore Solvency
• Private Accounts Would Provide No Gain to Workers Unless The Accounts Earned a Rate of Return Equal to More than 3 Percent Above the Inflation Rate.

Read the full report.

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

How to Conduct a Background Check

From The Virtual Chase-

How To Conduct a Background Check:

"Lawyers and clients use the phrase, background check, as a catchall for many types of investigative research involving people or companies. To some, it encompasses a criminal background check. To others, it means finding general information about a business' products and services, reputation, legal status and competitors. For this reason, it helps to understand the context of the request or the specific problem that needs to be solved. More importantly, if the research involves a person, there are legal and ethical reasons for knowing why someone wants a background check."

Read more about it.

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

Law & Politics Book Reviews

There's a little something for most everyone in the Janurary 2005 issue of Law & Politics Book Review. Here's the table of contents:

Pacelle, Richard L. Between Law & Politics: The Solicitor General and the Structuring of Race, Gender, and Reproductive Rights Litigation....pp.1-4.

Hull, N. E. H. and Williamjames Hoffer and Peter Charles Hoffer(eds.). The Abortion Rights Controversy in America: A Legal Reader....pp.5-7.

Shapiro, Susan P. Tangled Loyalties: Conflict of Interest in Legal Practice....pp.8-11.

Curthoys, Mark. Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britian: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s....pp.12-17.

Gregg, Benjamin G. Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism....pp.18-21.

Hazard, Geoffrey C. and Angelo Dondi. Legal Ethics: A Comparative Study....pp.22-26.

Tsesis, Alexander. The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom: A Legal History....pp.27-29.

Cheng, Sinkwan(ed.). Law, Justice, and Power: Between Reason and Will....pp.30-34.

Stuart, Gary L. Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent....pp.35-38.

Mitchell, Edward W. Self-Made Madness: Rethinking Illness and Criminal Responsibility....pp.39-41.

Tontti, Jarkko. Rights and Prejudice: Prolegomena to a Hermeneutical Philosophy of Law....pp.42-48.

Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action....pp.49-54.

Ferren, John M. Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court: The Story of Justice Wiley B. Rutledge....pp.55-57.

Kendall, Christopher N. Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination....pp.58-63.

Kennedy, Ellen. Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar....pp.64-67.

Kerr, Rachel. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: An Exercise in Law, Politics, and Diplomacy....pp.68-70.

Svensson, Eva-Maria and Anu Pylkkänen and Johanna Niemi-Kiesiläinen (eds.). Nordic Equality at a Crossroads. Feminist Legal Studies Coping with Difference....pp.71-73.

Malavet, Pedro A. America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict Between the United States and Puerto Rico....pp.74-77.

Nielsen, Laura Beth. License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech....pp.78-82.

Dershowitz, Alan M. Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights....pp.83-86.

McGarvie, Mark Douglas. One Nation Under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State....pp.87-89.

Fisher III, William W. Promises to Keep. Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment....pp.90-93.

Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress Now Available

The Library of Congress and Bernan Press recently published the "Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress: For Congress, the Nation & the World," an authoritative, one-volume reference work of newly written and researched essays, articles and statistical appendices. Edited by John Y. Cole and Jane Aikin, the volume describes the historical development of the collections, functions and services of the world’s largest library and research institution from its origin in 1800 through late 2004.

Initiated in 1995 by senior editor John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and an authority on the Library’s history, the volume is co-edited by library historian Jane Aikin, who is senior academic adviser, Division of Research Programs, at the National Endowment for the Humanities. More than 50 Library of Congress subject specialists contributed to the book, which includes biographies of the 13 Librarians of Congress, a section on "Further Research and Reading" and a 36-page index.

Librarian and historian Cole has headed the Library’s Center for the Book since it was established in 1977. Since 1970 he has published four books and more than 100 articles about the Library of Congress and its activities. His first book was "For Congress and the Nation: A Chronological History of the Library of Congress" (1979); the most recent, "The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building," (1997, co-edited with architectural historian Henry Hope Reed).

Historian Jane Aikin has written widely about the Library of Congress and research libraries in general. Her publications include "The Nation’s Great Library: Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress, 1899-1939" (1993), and "High Culture, Low Culture: The Singular Duality of the Library of Congress," which appeared in American Studies (Fall 2001).

USC Law and Economics Working Paper Series

New at bepress Legal Repository:

New papers in the University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series.

Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo "A Theory of Influence: the Strategic Value of Public Ignorance".
Subject area: Agency

Jennifer Arlen and W. Bentley MacLeod "Beyond Master-Servant: A Critique of Vicarious Liability".
Subject area: Torts

Daniel M. Klerman and Paul G. Mahoney "The Value of Judicial Independence: Evidence from 18th Century England".
Subject area: Judges

Abel Cadenillas, Sudipto Sarkar, and Fernando Zapatero "Optimal Dividend Policy with Mean-Reverting Cash Reservoir".
Subject area: Economics

Jonathan Baron and Edward J. McCaffery "Starving the beast: The psychology of budget deficits".
Subject area: Taxation

Edward J. McCaffery and Joel Slemrod "Toward an Agenda for Behavioral Public Finance".
Subject area: Economics

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

Electronic Text Centre (New Brunswick) Summer Seminars

The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick is offering a summer seminar series of workshops exploring issues in scholarly communication from August 2-13, 2005. The series is designed to offer introductory and advanced level courses that effectively balance technical components with theoretical and practical "hands-on" learning opportunities in state-of-the-art facilities. Participants will gain a greater understanding of the latest techniques, tools and standards while expanding their communities of practice.

Seminar Offerings

Introduction to Text Encoding
Instructor: Lisa Charlong
August 2-3
Registration limited to 15
Course Fee: $450.00

Introduces participants to the issues and practices surrounding the transcription and markup of electronic texts. Through hands-on exercises and discussion, participants will learn the fundamentals of text transcription, text encoding, and displaying texts on the World Wide Web. The course is designed for editors, librarians, academics and others who would like to learn more about text encoding, a basis for electronic publishing, digital collections, and text analysis.

Participants will learn the fundamentals of XML, XSL, and CSS, the data standards used for text encoding, transformation and display. While the course will focus on the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines to Document Creation and Interchange (TEI), persons with an interest in other schemas (i.e. DocBook) are encouraged to attend.

Familiarity with HTML is a prerequisite and background-reading material will be provided.

Advanced Topics in Building Electronic Texts
Instructor: David Seaman
August 4-6
Registration limited to 20
Course Fee: $525.00

This course will further develop participant skills in the use of TEI, the presentation of data with CSS and XSL stylesheets, and in the manipulation of XML data.  Topics will include TEI document design, project management approaches, XML conversion to other formats, and a discussion of relevant digital library technologies, such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Building Metadata Application Profiles
Instructor: Diane Hillmann
August 4-6
Registration limited to 15
Course Fee: $525.00

Increasingly, projects with metadata requirements are looking at constructing application profiles to meet their metadata needs, where metadata, sometimes taken from more than one element set, is combined with local policies and guidelines. This course will provide a practical, hands-on investigation into application profiles and their issues. Topics will include investigating some sample profiles, such as the RSLP collection description schema; the concepts of namespaces and registries; data dictionaries; controlled vocabularies; and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) for metadata interchange. Participants will be expected to build a profile of their choosing, hopefully, related to a real life need.

Advanced Web Publishing
Instructor: Daniel Pitti
August 8-12
Registration limited to 20
Course Fee: $875.00

The course will focus on indexing and rendering of Extensible Markup Language (XML) texts for Web publishing. Topics covered will include Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) and Formatting Objects (XSL:FO), XQuery, rendering into HTML and PDF, and open source XML publishing tools. Students will receive hands on experience installing publishing software, and developing stylesheets and indexes.

Fundamentals of Digital Imaging
Instructor: Marc Bragdon
August 12-13
Registration limited to 15
Course Fee: $275.00

Digital Imaging combines technical infrastructure with people, policies, and techniques for capturing, processing, archiving and Web publishing collections of visual resources. Such resources might include manuscripts, photographs, maps, and paintings. Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, workshop participants will be introduced to the practical considerations of creating a digital imaging environment that meets the highest standards for preserving and making accessible visual resources.

Who is Deep Throat?

Editor & Publisher has "joined in the fun" of the reinvigorated Deep Throat frenzy by soliciting opinions on the identity of Deep Throat. See my earlier post.

"Send us your pick for the most likely candidate (to: letters@editorandpublisher.com), and we will tabulate the results. We will also award a free subscription to whoever is first to submit the correct name -- assuming, that is, we ever learn who he/she/it is."

According to early returns the frontrunner is Chief Justice Willam Rehnquist, followed by Mark Felt with President Ford coming in third.

I'm sorry but when did Editor & Publisher stoop to tabloid journalism? We are talking about someone who is dying, about someone whose impact on this nation is immeasurable.

Internet Librarian 2005

Information Today, Inc. returns to Monterey in 2005 to present the ninth annual Internet Librarian conference on October 24-26, 2005. Tame the Web has the details.

Has Congressional Universe joined Lexis-Nexis Law School Subscriptions?

Perhaps it's an accident, perhaps it isn't. Without fanfare, the CIS Legislative Histories and CIS Historical Indexes are now available in the general legislative history group through the Lexis Law School menu. The databases are active, and have been tested with searches at three schools in two states. The description for the databases indicate, however, that these databases are not part of the academic subscriptions:

"This product should be excluded from all academic and academic law menus. This product will be sold to these markets via the Congressional Universe web product."

However, the databases are there, and they work. C'mon Lexis, what's up with that?

Mark Giangrande, DePaul Law Library

Clarke's Al-Qaeda Memo Declassified

The memo at the heart of Clarke-Rice Dispute on pre- 9/11 Bush terrorism policy, the one in which on January 25, 2001, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke stated "We urgently need ... a Principals level review on the al Qida network," has been declassifed. The memo is available from the National Security Archive. Also included are references and extracts relating to the Clarke memo from congressional debates and the 9/11 Commission testimonies of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice.

Small Orphan Bill Reintroduced

HR 24 (The PRO-USE Act) has been reintroduced. Mary, over at LibraryLaw Blog, provides context, content and full-text of the bill. Great job Mary!

Fall Titles from West: Creditors’ Rights

New Bankruptcy Law:  Teaching Materials
David G. Epstein, Southern Methodist University,
Steve H. Nickles, Wake Forest University,
Hon. Bruce A. Markell,
Hon. Elizabeth Perris

TOC for AALL Spectrum's February Issue

The February issue of the AALL Spectrum features the following articles

Public Relations: Innovative Ideas for Library Fundraising
Web sites that offer a wealth of advice for diversifying your library's revenue streams
by David Zopfi-Jordan

Out of the Jungle
Hot to get beyond the digital v. print debate-and deal with the fact that digital won
by James G. Milles

A World of Good
Law librarians share their skills and knowledge to improve the lives of people across the globe
by Paul D. Healey

Why I Need to Go to the AALL Annual Meeting this Year
It's that time of year again-time to write a request to attend the AALL Conference
by Lucy Curci-Gonzalez and Christine Graesser

Plus The CRIV Sheet

ASIS Bulletin Features Research on E-Government

The current issue of the ASIS Bulletin includes several articles on E-Government:

• Architectures for Digital Government by Allison Brueckner
• Michigan: A Recipe for E-Government Development by Eric Frederick
• Constructing a State Web Portal Through Design Alternatives, Measurement and Iterative Refinement by Tom Brinck
• The Next Wave of E-Government: The Challenges of Data Architecture by Charles H. Kaylor

One Step Closer to Book Burning?

The following annoucement appears of the website of the US Commission on Civil Rights:

On January 7th, 2005, the Commission adopted a new policy on the public release and posting of reports and Commission documents. To comply with that new policy, the website has been updated and several draft reports that failed to receive a majority of Commissioners' votes have been removed.

One removed document is Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration (September 2004)! Here's the complete list of removed documents:

• Briefing on Boundaries of Justice: Immigration Policies Post-September 11 (October 2001)
• Briefing on Civil Rights Issues Facing Muslims and Arab Americans in Ohio Post-September 11 (November 2001)
• Briefing on Civil Rights Issues Facing Muslims and Arab Americans in Minnesota Post-September 11 (February 2002)
• Briefing on Civil Rights Issues Facing Muslims and Arab Americans in Wisconsin Post-September 11 (April 2002)
• Briefing on Civil Rights Issues Facing Muslims and Arab Americans in Indiana Post-September 11 (May 2002)
• Briefing on the Consequences of Government Race Data Collection Bans on Civil Rights (May 2002)
• Briefing on Civil Rights Issues Facing Muslims and Arab Americans in North Dakota Post-September 11 (May 2002)
• Haitian Asylum Seekers and U.S. Immigration Policy (June 2002)
• Voting Rights in Florida 2002: Briefing Summary (August 2002)
• Briefing on Tragedy Along the Arizona-Mexico Border: Undocumented Immigrants Face Death in the Desert (August 2002)
• Beyond Percentage Plans: The Challenge of Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (November 2002)
• Crossing Borders: The Administration of Justice and Civil Rights Protections in the Immigration and Asylum Context (January 2003)
• Education Accountability and High-Stakes Testing in the Carolinas (February 2003)
• The Supreme Court Revisits Affirmative Action: Will Grutter and Gratz Mean the End of Bakke? (April 2003)
• The U.S. Department of Education’s Race-Neutral Alternatives in Postsecondary Education: Innovative Approaches to Diversity-Are They Viable Substitutes for Affirmative Action? (May 2003)
• Anniversary Update on Commission Activities Related to September 11 (September 2003)
• Native American Health Care Disparities Briefing Summary (February 2004)
• Is America Ready to Vote? Election Readiness Briefing Paper (July 2004)
• Closing the Achievement Gap: The Impact of Standards Based Education Reform (July 2004)
• Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration (September 2004)!

The MemoryBlog, which may have been the first to report on this, calls the Commission's action a "purge of Bush-unfriendly reports. I don't disagree.

For example, in the "Redefining Rights in America: the Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration" the report states that President Bush "has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words" on the subject. The MemoryBlog reported that in the report the commission staff also found "fault with Bush's funding requests for civil rights enforcement agencies; his positions on voting rights, educational opportunity and affirmative action; and his actions against hate crimes."

Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers

From the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center:  Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers

"Now available to the public for the first time are Woodward and Bernstein's notes from source interviews, drafts of newspaper stories and books, memos, letters, tape recordings, research materials, and other Watergate papers. These materials document Woodward and Bernstein's four-year partnership telling the story of Watergate in Pulitzer Prize winning articles for The Washington Post, in two best-selling novels, All The President's Men and The Final Days, and in the multiple academy award-winning movie of All the Presidents Men. Purchased by The University of Texas at Austin in 2003, the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers provide students, scholars, and other researchers a unique resource for behind the scenes insight into the journalism, politics, and humanity of Watergate."

Read more about it.

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

Emory Legal Scholarship Working Paper Series

New at bepress Legal Repository-

Emory Legal Scholarship Working Paper Series

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Hugo M. Mialon and Thomas E. Wiseman "The Impact of Gun Laws: A Model of Crime and Self-Defense".
Subject area: Constitutional Law
http://law.bepress.com/emorylwps/papers/art4

Hugo M. Mialon, Paul H. Rubin, and Joel L. Schrag "Judicial Hierarchies and the Rule-Individual Tradeoff".
Subject area: Judges
http://law.bepress.com/emorylwps/papers/art3

Anita Bernstein "Whatever Happened to Law and Economics?".
Subject area: Law and Economics
http://law.bepress.com/emorylwps/papers/art2

Joanna M. Shepherd "Deterrence versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment’s Differing Impacts Among States".
Subject area: Criminal Law and Procedure, Law and Economics, Law Enforcement and Corrections
http://law.bepress.com/emorylwps/papers/art1

Ron Jones, Univ Cin Law Library

10 Things Archive from Smartmoney.com

A little humor for today...

Smartmoney.com now provides an archive of popular "10 Things" columns from magazine -- e.g., 10 Things Your Lawyer Won't Tell You, 10 Things Your Preschool Won't Tell You, 10 Things Your Cleaning Service Won't Tell You, etc.

Ron Jones, UC Law Library

Debating the Value of the Restatements

There's a debate going on at the Volokh Conspiracy. It started when Randy Barnett posted "The Questionable Value of Restatement." Check it out.

Obviously, the definitive word won't be spoken until Judge Posner dissects the issue on his blog. I expect this to happen sometime later today. At the moment Judge Posner and Professor Gary Becker are solving the problems of social security reform.