Law Librarian Blog

One in 100: Behind Bars in America in 2008

New report from the Pew Center on the States:

"For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.  According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study.  During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates.  In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety."  [RJ]

Encyclopedia of Life

From the site:

"Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:

• Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.
• Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.
• Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth's species.
• Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity."

Check it out!  [RJ]

Friday Fun: IT in Miss Teen South Carolina English

Remember the Miss Teen South Carolina interview? The creative folks at CommonCraft do in this parody of their series of IT in plain English videos. [JH]

WorldCat's New Blog

From the site:

"Welcome to the WorldCat Blog! – a fun spot to read about what’s happening on WorldCat.org and to share cool ways that people are using the site and their libraries.

What exactly is WorldCat you ask? It is the world’s largest network of library items. WorldCat lets you search many libraries at once to find books, articles, music, videos and more. And helps you locate items in a library near you.

The team here at WorldCat.org is working on new tools and new ways to allow you to make the most of all the resources WorldCat has to offer - to aid your interests, work, and library selections – and to collaborate and share with other WorldCat users. We will be sharing these things with you in this blog and hope that you will share your thoughts and ideas with us as well."  [RJ]

Climate Change White Paper: Appropriate Roles for Different Levels of Government

From the House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

"The Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality are issuing a series of Climate Change Legislation Design White Papers as the next step in the legislative process leading to enactment of a mandatory, economy-wide climate change program. While the hearings last year were designed to give the Committee an understanding of the status and projected path of climate change and potential ways to address it, these White Papers and the hearings on them will focus the Committee=s attention on crafting mandatory, economy-wide climate change legislation. The White Papers and related hearings will lay out basic design and key principles of a program, and also identify issues about which further information and discussion is needed.
A comprehensive national approach to climate change will be most effective when all levels of government -- Federal, State, Tribal, and local -- play active roles. This paper is intended to foster discussion of these issues by raising key factors that should be considered in determining what roles are appropriate for each level of government."  [RJ]

Justices to Focus on Paralegal Costs

Interesting article from the National Law Journal: "A small security business that waged a long and successful court battle with the federal government over back wages is asking the Supreme Court to hold that a federal law, enacted nearly 30 years ago, allows reimbursement of paralegal expenses at market rates and not at a law firm's cost. Attorney Brian Wolfman will argue before the high court that paralegal services should be considered "attorney fees" rather than "other expenses" for the purpose of reimbursement." 

See also:  Richlin Security Service v. Chertoff, ScotusWiki [RJ]

GW's Jacob Burns Law Library Acquires Rare French Law Collection

Acquired from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the collection contains 269 titles represented in nearly 600 volumes comprises the classic legal works of France from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Read more about it. [JH]

Imperiled Treasures: How Recent Supreme Court Decisions and Agency Actions Have Endangered Southwest Waters and Wildlife

New report from the National Wildlife Federation:

"For thirty years the federal Clean Water Act broadly protected waters in the nation and across the Southwest. It sought, with a great deal of success, to safeguard important waters from pollution and destruction. Historically, it applied to waters from the Rio Grande to playa lakes. However, now the protections of the Act are being whittled away. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2001) and Rapanos v. United States (2006), have placed protections of many of the nation’s waters, such as intermittent and ephemeral streams and so-called “isolated” wetlands, in doubt. While these Supreme Court decisions have not overturned any of the current regulations that broadly protect waters, they have created significant legal confusion over the scope of the Act’s protections."  [RJ]

Openings (Two): Reference and Public Services Librarian & Reference and Instructional Services Librarian, CUNY School of Law

We are currently seeking two enthusiastic, energetic candidates who are willing to be an integral part of the library management team at CUNY School of Law. The successful candidates will be joining a library that is committed to providing the highest level of research support to students and faculty.  Both candidates will be responsible for providing reference services to the library community, teaching in the first year Legal Research Program, and assisting the Faculty Research Services Program.  These positions will be filled at an entry or mid-level salary range depending on the experience of qualified candidates.

One position is primarily serving as a Reference and Public Services Librarian.  Self-motivated applicants interested in working towards developing new avenues of proactive service to a law school community are highly encouraged to apply.

A second opportunity exists for a Reference and Instructional Services Librarian whose focus will be on emerging technologies.  The ideal candidate will have experience in the investigation, creation, and incorporation of innovative technologies (e.g. online instructional materials, tutorial sessions and digital learning) in support of faculty and student research interests, or would be strongly interested in pursuing such a specialty.

Law Librarians are active participants in shaping the future of the institution.  They have full faculty status and are completely integrated into the governance processes of the Law School. Working with our colleagues outside of the Library, librarians add to the rich diversity of the law school experience by having their own scholarship interests, in addition to supporting those of the other members of the faculty.

All librarians must have a J.D. and M.L.S. in order to be considered for a tenure track faculty appointment.  Salary Range: Assistant Professor ($38,801 – $67,092); Associate Professor ($50,321 - $80,020). Further detailed information can be found at:

http://portal.cuny.edu/cms/id/cuny/documents/jobposting/023710.htm#P-11_0

We invite applications from candidates who are interested in working with us in the Law School’s unique mission of training lawyers who will work for social justice.

Please send a letter of application, including a detailed description of education and work experience, and curriculum vitae to:

Ms. Maureen McCafferty
Coordinator of Faculty Recruitment
CUNY School of Law
65-21 Main Street
Flushing, New York 11367

United Nations Data Access System (UNdata)

From the site:

"The new UN data access system (UNdata) will improve the dissemination of statistics by UNSD to the widest possible audience. An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.

Subsequent stages of the development of the UN data access system will extend to UN system data as well as to data of national statistical offices - providing the user with a simple single-entry point to global statistics."  [RJ]

Professional Reading: Rethinking Judicial Deference to Legislative Factfinding

Caitlin Bergman (CU NY Law School and Reproductive Rights Prof Blog editor) has deposited Rethinking Judicial Deference to Legislative Factfinding in SSRN. Here's the abstract for this very interesting article:

It is traditionally assumed that the role of ascertaining and evaluating the social facts underlying a statute belongs to the legislatures. The courts, in turn, are tasked with deciding the law and must defer to legislative factfinding on relevant issues of social fact. This simplistic formula, however, does not accurately describe the courts' confused approach to legislative factfinding. Although the courts often speak in terms of deference, they follow no consistent or predictable pattern in deciding whether or not to defer in a given case. Moreover, blanket judicial deference to legislative factfinding would not be a wise general rule. Because social factfinding plays a decisive role in constitutional analysis, blind judicial deference would undermine the courts' responsibility to protect individual rights. Judicial treatment of legislative factfinding is thus sorely in need of a coherent theory.

This Article proposes a new approach, a paradigm of selective independent judicial review of social facts. Under this model, the courts should independently review the factual foundation of all legislation that curtails individual rights, even when those rights do not receive strict or heightened scrutiny. This approach is unique in ensuring a baseline protection for all individual rights, including emerging rights, while respecting the division of power between the branches of government. The paradigm is needed because, this Article asserts, legislatures are poorly positioned to gather and assess facts dispassionately, especially when addressing laws that restrict controversial or minority rights. The process of factfinding in federal trial courts ensures a superior factual record when such rights are at stake. This Article illustrates the courts' and legislatures' contrasting capacities for factfinding through case studies, including "partial-birth abortion," gay parenting, and indecency on the Internet. Moreover, the Article argues, because of the courts' vital role in protecting individual rights, the proposed paradigm honors constitutional structural principles.

Seeking Nominations for the 2008 Spirit of Law Librarianship Award

Each year the Spirit of Law Librarianship Award Committee honors one law librarian for his or her service to the community. Please help us recognize law librarians by nominating a worthy individual who has made a meaningful contribution to a social or charitable cause or concern.

The committee believes that law librarians who contribute to society through volunteer work or by somehow serving their communities not only benefit the recipients of their hard work, but also the profession as a whole through their examples of service.

The award, established by Roy Mersky, Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and Richard Leiter, Schmid Law Library at the University of Nebraska, was created in order to give special recognition to individual law librarians who might not otherwise be recognized by their peers for their important work. The award was established in lieu of accepting royalties from their book, published in 1991 by the Fred B. Rothman Company (now a division of the Wm. S. Hein and Co. Inc.), The Spirit of Law Librarianship. The second edition was published in the spring of 2004 by Alert Publications Inc. The award is presented to the recipient at a reception during the AALL Annual Meeting.

An award will be given only when an outstanding individual is nominated. In its 16-year history, there has only been one year when an award has not been given because a worthy nominee was not brought to the committee’s attention. The committee encourages nominations from anyone with information regarding individuals who might fit the profile of an award recipient.

Please help the committee recognize the people who represent a special dimension of the Spirit of Law Librarianship. The deadline for nominations is June 1.

To make a nomination, please contact:

• Professor Roy Mersky, Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas, 727 E. Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78705; rmersky@mail.law.utexas.edu; or
• Professor Richard Leiter, Schmid Law Library, University of Nebraska College of Law, Lincoln, NE 68583-0902.

2008 In-House Law Departments at the Top 500 Companies

Updated for 2008 with expanded biographical data and more photos, In-House Law Departments at the Top 500 Companies (ALM: $185) includes information on:

• General Counsel at the Fortune 500 including contact information, biographies and photos
• Chief In-House Counsel in practice areas: Corporate Transactions / Mergers & Acquisitions; Litigation; Labor & Employment; Intellectual Property; Securities plus sections covering Canada and International
• The General Counsels Go-To Law Firms for each practice area
• Go-To Law Firm profiles
• Indexes for cross-referencing including top legal officer by last name and by law school; companies by rank, location and industry; in-house chief counsel by last name and practice area
• Company information including contact details, revenue rank, industry, company size and law department size

2007 US Sentencing Commission Annual Report and Sourcebook

From the US Sentencing Commission:

"The 2007 Annual Report presents an overview of major Commission activities and accomplishments for fiscal year 2007. See the Commission's 2007 Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics for descriptive figures, tables, and charts, and selected district, circuit, and national sentencing data."  [RJ]

$100 Million Donation to NYC Public Library

Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman has pledged $100 million dollars to the NYC Public Library which will rename its main Manhattan building after him. Schwarzman's donation is the first step in a $1 billion dollar plan to expand and rebuild the library system. [BB]

Friday Fun On Wednesday! The Law Accordion To Hanson Bridgett

This hilarious YouTube video by the San Francisco firm of Hanson Bridgett, LLP, has been burning up the legal blogosphere. Hat tip to Mitchell Rubinstein, Adjunct Law Prof Blog, and Bill Childs, TortsProf Blog. [JH]

Professional Reading: Farkas on Why Tech-savvy Librarians Are Needed in Public Services Positions

Meredith Farkas is one of the very best librarian-bloggers on the planet. On her blog, Information Wants To Be Free, you will find this recent post: Building 21st century librarians AND libraries. In it Farkas calls attention to the blurring between IT and public services and identifies a skills set --public services technologies -- that public services librarians need to provide patron services. I agree; public services librarians should know how to create, implement, and maintain features of social networking web communications that are pertinent to their library's mission and relevant for their patrons. [JH]

Hoeflich Launches The Legal Antiquarian Blog

Michael H. Hoeflich, the John H. & John M. Kane Professor of Law and former dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, is an internationally recognized authority on legal history, Roman law, and the history of the legal profession.  He is the author of An Inquiry into the Origin of the Laws And Political Institutions of Modern Europe, Particularly Those of England (2006) (with George Spence) and Roman and Civil Law and the Development of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in the Nineteenth Century (1997) and editor of Sources of the History of the American Law of Lawyering (2008) [our post] and The Gladsome Light of Jurisprudence: Learning the Law in England and the United States in the 18th and 19th Centuries (1988). In 2004, he delivered the first Tarlton Law Library Rare Books Lecture, now available for purchase [details].

Professor Hoeflich has just launched a blog, The Legal Antiquarian. The Legal Antiquarian is devoted to the history of the material culture of the law, i.e. to the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used by legal historians to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past. Among the subjects Professor Hoeflich intends to cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and read, etc.

These are perfect topics for a blog and something I believe most law librarians will find very interesting. Check it out! [JH]

Cornell Law Library's InSITE Website Reviews

Reviews published in the February 25, 2008 issue of InSITE:

• Iraq: the War Card
• Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
• Lincoln and His Circle
• OAKList Database
• State of Public School Integration

[RJ]

Iraq: the War Card
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

Iraq: The War Card is a product of the Center for Public Integrity, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern.” Beginning with a detailed overview, which includes a chart of false statements by month, the project analyzes every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials leading up to the U.S. war on Iraq, from September 11, 2001 through September 11, 2003.  Every direct and indirect false statement, defined in the site’s Methodology section, made during this time relating to Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and potential links between Iraq and Al Qaeda was counted.  The result is a searchable database of “380,000 words of Iraq-related public pronouncements by top Bush Administration officials.”  The site also features information on the officials at issue, highlights key false statements, provides an interactive timeline, reports public opinion poll results, and includes a bibliography.  The project has been extensively covered by the news media and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the U.S. war in Iraq. [JJ]

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) is a digital collection within the Tobacco Control Archives at the University of California at San Francisco.  With more than forty-three million pages, the LTDL offers documents "created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities."  The collection provides documents dating from the late 1800s, with the bulk of the material from the latter half of the twentieth century.  The collections in the library are organized by company or industry group, including Lorillard, Philip Morris, and the Tobacco Institute.  The site offers basic, advanced, and expert searching options with all three allowing searches to be narrowed by collection.  Basic searches can be limited to author, document type, text, metadata, and title.  Advanced searching provides additional features of basic Boolean operators and date restrictions.  Expert searching allows more complex search queries with the notable addition of searching by field.  The number of fields available is extensive so users will want to consult the Field Descriptions page.  Another way to access material is through the Popular Documents section.  In this section, selected documents are made available under the categories of Industry Activity, Marketing to Women, Secondhand Smoke, and Smoking in Movies. [MM]

Lincoln and His Circle
http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379      

Lincoln and His Circle is a project of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Rochester (New York).  The project is digitizing for online access the “letters to, from, and about Abraham Lincoln” held in the Department’s collections.  Project materials have been taken from the papers of William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, as well as materials donated by the Fred L. Emerson Foundation of Auburn, New York.  The collection includes letters written by Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, and Edwin M. Stanton, who served as Secretary of War.  The index to the collection may be browsed or searched by writer of the letter, recipient of the letter, or date.  Each index record includes the place of writing and the name of the collection from which it was drawn.  Each page of the letter is a separate image file linked from the index record.  The project is a work-in-progress and will be expanded in the future. [MM]

OAKList Database
http://www.oaklist.qut.edu.au/

The OAKList (Open Access to Knowledge), led by a team of law professors at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, aims to "facilitate better access to research, especially that which is publically [sic] funded … "  The OAKList database allows anyone to search for a publisher or particular publication to discover that organization’s open access archiving policy, i.e. whether authors may also publish or "archive" their work in an open access repository, such as SSRN or an institutional repository.  Policies are color coded: green allows both pre- and post-print archiving, blue allows post-print archiving, yellow allows pre-print archiving, and white indicates archiving is not formally supported.  The database draws upon a number of sources for information, including SHERPA/RoMEO and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  For academic authors interested in open access to their work, this is a great resource to help them select OA- friendly publishers.  Currently, there are few U.S. law reviews included in the database, so its usefulness to U.S. law faculty is limited. [JJ]

State of Public School Integration
http://www.s4.brown.edu/schoolsegregation/

Brown University’s interdisciplinary initiative, the American Communities Project, provides information to scholars and the public about trends that affect neighborhoods, cities, and regions around the country.  It utilizes data from the U.S. Census and other specialized sources to provide visitors with demographic information over time.  The "State of Public School Integration" web pages provide analysis of trends in court-ordered desegregation in relation to the racial and ethnic composition of U.S. public school districts between the years 1968 to 2000.  Visitors may browse the site by school district to view ethnic and racial composition data along with cases (if any) that involved that district.  The visual representation of the demographic data allows for quick comprehension of changes over time.  This site also provides several reports on the state of school segregation in the present time.  Researchers and educators interested in the Brown decision will appreciate the site’s history and timeline of this landmark court case. [BWK]

InSITE contributors: J. Jones, B. Kreisler, M. Morrison, J. Pajerek (editor)

InSITE highlights selected law-related Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and, as a keyword-searchable database. The law librarians at Cornell
evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. This information can be accessed via the channels below,  in addition to this mailing list:

1. Searchable database or by browsing current and archived
   issues on the web:

        InSITE home page ( http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/insiteasp/)

2. RSS feed ( http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawlibrary/insiteasp/public/rss.asp )

3. Print format for the Cornell Law School community.

***A note to our readers: The InSITE website has been revamped and now features a quick search on the home page, in addition to the advanced search previously available.  We've also added a great new feature that allows anyone to search all the websites ever annotated by InSITE with a single click.   It's updated with each new issue of InSITE.  We hope you enjoy these new features of InSITE.

Georgetown Law Conference on Sexual Orientation and Military Preparedness

Since 1990, many U.S. allies have allowed gay and lesbian individuals to serve openly in their militaries. This is the first international conference to examine the effects of these policy changes on military preparedness.

Sexual Orientation and Military Preparedness: An International Perspective
Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Georgetown University Law Center

A Webcast will be available at https://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/.

Details. [JH]