Law Librarian Blog

Party On

FindLaw's List of the Top 10 Legal Issues

The list was compiled from FindLaw’s most visited legal topics, the top consumer legal questions on FindLaw Answers and the most searched lawyers on FindLaw.

• Home Foreclosure & Renter’s Rights

• Politics & Obama

• Voters Rights

• Digital Distractions

• Dog Laws

• Highly Regulated Products

• Grandparents’ Rights

• Creating a Will

• Who keeps the Ring?

• Teen Rights

Details on Findlaw. [JH]

James Kent, Joseph Story and the Quest for Authoritative Reasoning

Daniel Hulsebosch (NYU) has posted to NELLCO, Debating the Transformation of American Law: James Kent, Joseph Story, and the Legacy of the Revolution. In the essay, he demonstrates that although Kent and Joseph Story agreed about the desirability of a strong Congress, an independent federal judiciary, and the need to control juries, they disagreed about the shape of each of these institutions. Together, these disagreements reveal not only the dynamism of American law in the early Republic but also illuminate the indeterminacy of federal authority and the judicial power. In addition, their disagreements illustrate the quest for authoritative reasoning that defined post-revolutionary American legal culture and the intertextuality of its formative literature. [JH]

Should Law Schools Add Legislation Course to the 1L Curriculum?

On Oct. 6, 2006, Harvard announced that it was adding a legislation and regulation course to its 1L curriculum. Ethan Leib (Hastings) commented on the development and its early critics on PrawfsBlawg. He has now published Adding Legislation Courses to the First-Year Curriculum, 58 J. Legal Ed. 166 (2008), in which he recommend that schools should seriously consider add a Legislation course to their 1L program. The article also starts the conversation about what the course should cover.

Unfortunately the Journal of Legal Education prohibits authors for uploading their articles to SSRN and the Journal does not provide copies online at its website. How 1980-ish of the Journal. [JH]

Symeonides Updates Private International Law and Conflict of Laws Bibliographies

Symeon C. Symeonides, Dean & Professor of Law, Willamette University College of Law, has posted the following two useful bibliographies on SSRN.

• Private International Law Bibliography 2007-08: U.S. and Foreign Sources in English
• Conflict of Laws Bibliography: U.S. Sources, 2006-2007

[JH]

Solove's List of Notable 2008 Books on Information Privacy

With brief annotations here. [JH]

What is the most important technology policy book of 2008?

Take the poll at The Technology Liberation Front. [JH]

Dennis Kennedy's 2008 Blawggie Award Winners Announced

Here's Dennis Kennedy's 2008 Blawggie Award winners by category.

1. Best Overall Law-Related Blog - SLAW

2. The Marty Schwimmer Best Practice-Specific Legal Blog - Evan Brown's Internet Cases

3. Best Law Practice Management Blog - Bruce MacEwen's Adam Smith, Esq.

4. Best Legal Blog Category - Canadian Law-related Blogs

5. Best Legal Blog Digest - Stark County Law Library Weblog

6. Best Blawg About Legal Blawgging - Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs

7. Best Legal Podcast - Tie, This Week in Law and Bob Ambrogi's and Craig Williams' Lawyer2Lawyer Podcast

8. The Sherry Fowler Best Writing on a Legal Blog Award - Chuck Newton Rides the Third Wave

9. Best Law Professor Blog - Jim Maule's Mauled Again

10. Best New Law-related Blog - Jordan Furlong's Law 21

11. The DennisKennedy.Blog Best Legal Technology Blog - Rick Georges' Futurelawyer

12. Most Important Trend in Law-related Blogging - Microblogging

Congratulations to all and particularly to SLAW and Stark County Law Library. Check out Kennedy's explanations of his choices and for his runners-up in each category here. [JH]

First Full-Length Biography of Judge Wisdom Published

John Minor Wisdom is one the least publicly recognized heroes of the US civil rights movement despite having written many of the landmark decisions instrumental in desegregating the American South. That has changed now. By writing Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom (Louisiana State University Press, January 2009), Joel William Friedman (Tulane) has performed a great service by documenting Judge Wisdom's substantial legal contributions and political work at a critical time in the history of the South.

Highly recommended. [JH]

Report on the Privileges or Immunities Clause

The Constitutional Accountability Center has released The Gem of the Constitution: The Text and History of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by David H. Gans and Douglas T. Kendall. The report, according to the announcement, "tells the sad story of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Fourteenth Amendment and the critical constitutional language that guarantees the fundamental rights of all Americans. Instead, the Supreme Court wrote it out of the Constitution in 1873 and it has lain dormant ever since. The report argues for a reconsideration of the Clause and its critical role of protecting fundamental rights and liberties." Hat tip to Steven Schwinn (John Marshall, Chicago), Constitutional Law Prof Blog. [JH]

Closing Guantánamo Bay

The Boston Review website now features a forum on the prospects and problems of closing Guantánamo Bay. In the lead article, David Cole, Nation legal affairs correspondent and Georgetown law professor, argues for a surprisingly middle of the road position, acknowledging both the need to stop ongoing abuses and maintain flexibility in the fight against al Qaeda and other threats. Cole's approach permits preventive detention, but restricts it to a limited class of enemy fighters—not extending it to "suspected terrorists." This policy is, he says, "sensitive to both security and liberty."

The forum also features three responses to Cole's proposal. Joanne Mariner, director of Human Rights Watch's Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program, rejects preventive detention and suggests some alternatives. Eric Posner, professor of law at the University of Chicago, criticizes the limited scope of Cole's approach to detention and attempts to justify the restriction on civil liberties by the Bush administration. Finally, Robert Chesney, professor of law at Wake Forest University, agrees philosophically with that Cole proposes but criticizes Cole's legal method for tackling the issue. [JH]

Service By Facebook

And now for something completely different...

Carolyn Elefant reports that Australia's supreme court allowed lawyers from the Canberra-based firm Meyer Vandenberg to serve defendants with a default judgement via Facebook, after being satisfied that the profiles the lawyers had found did in fact belong to the defendants in question. The lawyers were unable to find the defendants to allow for personal service, but the defendants' Facebook profiles contained enough information to satisfy the court that it would provide a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants. [JH]

GAO and GPO Reach Agreement on Hosting GAO Reports and GAO Comptroller General Decisions

The GPO and the GAO  have reached an agreement where GAO will now provide public access to the GAO Reports and GAO Comptroller General Decisions databases from its website. The GPO will maintain archives of both databases, but no new content will be added to the GPO Access versions of these databases. This agreement will eliminate duplication of effort on these databases, as well as minimizing version control issues. Under the partnership agreement, if for any reason GAO is not able to provide access to these materials, GPO will resume the responsibility.

Coverage of the databases:

The GAO Reports database contains reports on audits, surveys, investigations, and evaluations of Federal programs conducted by GAO. The content in this database dates back to 1970 and earlier.

The Comptroller General Decisions database contains decisions and opinions issued by the Comptroller General in areas of Federal law such as appropriations, bid protests, and Federal agency rulemaking. It also contains historic material dating back to 1970. GAO is actively working on digitizing its legacy collection so historic material will continue to be added to the two databases.

[JH]

From Content Consumers to Content Creators

In his D-Lib Magazine article (November/December 2008), Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections, Rich Gazan describes a case study in which social annotations were integrated with digital items in a question and answer site because digital libraries must recast users not just as content consumers, but as content creators in order to incorporate Web 2.0 functionality effectively. The results of a study of a Web 2.0 question and answer site that has made the transition from factual to social content are analyzed, and eight decision points for digital libraries to consider when integrating social annotations with digital collection items are proposed. [JH]

Free Access to the English Reports, 1220-1873

The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute is now providing free access to the English Reports (1220-1873).  CommonLII aims to provide one central Internet location from which it is possible to search - for free - core legal information from all Commonwealth countries.  Along with the Reports, Privy Council Decisions (1914-present), Commonwealth Human Rights Law decisions, Commonwealth Declarations and Agreements and Law Reform Commission Reports are all freely available.

Hat tip to WisBlawg. [RJ]

Brackett Library Christmas Promo

IPv6 101

Judi Hasson's provides a brief non-technical overview of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) which will expand the Internet with new coding, ways to transmit data and provide more web addresses, many, many more web addresses. Using 32-bit addresses, the current protocol, IPv4, can only provide about 4.3 billion addresses. Only? Yes, apparently we're running out.

IPv6 offers 128-bit addresses and will provide 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses. That's 3.4 followed by 37 zeroes. Should be enough until every person in China has a desktop, laptop, printer, cell phone and iPod. [JH]

Florida State Senator Disses Dewey, "little old librarians" and LC

The Tampa Tribune reports this wisdom from a local state senator who thinks the Dewey Decimal System is "anachronistic," "costly", "ridiculous" and "just plain frustrating."   She also wants to ban Seinfeld.  H/T to Montana's Fritz Snyder and his library staff.  [RG]

Friday Fun on Tuesday: Up on the Housetop: The Risks for Santa

Check out the 25th Podcast episode of King County Law Library’s SideBar entitled: Up on the Housetop: The Risks for Santa. In it Santa finds out about the potential liabilities and risks he might encounter during his annual trip. [JH]

Pew/Internet Releases The Future of the Internet III Report

The Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020. Here's the key findings:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

Text of Announcement | Text of Report. [JH]