Law Librarian Blog

Blank NSA Forms or How a FOIA Request Took 4 Years

Russ Kick, publisher and editor of The Memory Hole, reports that his FOIA request for copies of blank forms used by the National Security Agency only took about four years to be fulfilled. He finally received 400-plus forms. The NSA withheld 24 forms.

All released forms can be downloaded from this Memory Hole exclusive: Over 400 forms used by the National Security Agency. Great job Russ! [JH]

Military Jury Convicts Guantanamo Detainee

From WSJ.com:

"A U.S. military jury found a Yemeni national guilty in the first Guantanamo war-crimes trial. Salim Hamdan, a onetime driver for Osama bin Laden, had been charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. He was captured in November 2001 in Afghanistan by militiamen under American command. He faces a maximum life sentence." 

For more analysis see: 

• Bin Laden’s Former Driver Found Guilty in Split Decision, N.Y. Times
• Bin Laden's Former Driver Convicted by Military Tribunal, Washington Post
• Hamdan convicted in split verdict, SCOTUSblog
• Military Tribunal Convicts Salim Hamdan of Providing Material Support to Terrorism, Acquits of Conspiracy Charge, ACSBlog 

[RJ]

Is Your Library Blog Listed?

The Blogging Libraries Wiki has several great blog directories. Is your library blog listed in one of them?

• Academic Library Blogs
• Public Library Blogs
• Special Library Blogs
• Blogs for Internal Library Communication
• Library Association, Consortia, and Conference Blogs
• Library Director Blogs

Are You Using Blogger? If so, you may want to consider moving to a new platform. According to Sophos, a security research firm, Google's Blogger has become a significant distributer of malware. Details at Law X.0.

Technorati Solicits Survey Participants for Its 2008 State of the Blogosphere Study. From the announcement:

Bloggers,

Technorati has been tracking the Blogosphere for the past several years through our State of the Blogosphere study. This year we have decided to expand our study beyond the sheer size and characteristics of the blogosphere in order to hear more from you, the bloggers. How, when and why are you blogging? Is this a side business, full time job or something you do for fun? Our goal is to analyze the growth of the field as well as understand the people who make the space tick. Help us and join the study of the ongoing global conversation!

Click here to take the survey! http://v2.decipherinc.com/survey/mmc/mmc08001

[JH]

White House Aides Cannot Ignore Congressional Subpoenas

In Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives v. Miers, No. 08-0409, 2008 WL 2923350 (D.D.C., 2008), the court ruled that top advisers to the President cannot ignore Congressional subpoenas. Check out Balkinization's analysis of the decision for more info.   [RJ]

Slaw, the Canadian Cooperative Weblog on Things Legal

Slaw has been in my feed reader since the day I discovered the blog. Since its inception, Slaw has been a great Canadian blog covering legal research, legal information, and legal technology with an excellent line-up of contributors. Yesterday, Simon Fodden acknowledged what regular readers have known for some time. In An Expanding Slaw, Fodden wrote:

[I]n the three years of our existence we’ve opened our arms increasingly wide until we now embrace not simply the legal research and technology that were our original subjects but essentially anything of interest in law. It’s time to acknowledge this broader Slaw and to say, as our revised tagline does, “Slaw is a Canadian cooperative weblog on things legal.”

At the same time, I want to reassure those for whom legal research and technology are vitally interesting: we have no intention of abandoning these subjects and will continue to welcome contributors, entries and readers that focus on them.

No reassurance necessary! [JH]

Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree: Student Evaluations of Law Profs are Reliable

Despite the consensus among educational researchers that student evaluations are reliable and useful, law profs often complain that they are not and are impaired by student biases. In Student Evaluations of Law Teaching Work Well: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree [SSRN] Arthur Best (Denver) finds that educational research is correct; student evaluations of law profs are reliable and useful.

For some uses, such as guidance for students in course selection, shortcomings of the evaluations would be of slight consequence. For promotion or tenure decisions, despite law professors' skepticism, schools should use the data to identify outlier instructors. Basing conclusions only on large numerical differences among faculty should protect faculty members from unfair consequences caused by students' biases, since the effects of biases, if present, are likely to be relatively small.

Legal Research Instructors Revise Your Evaluations. Best recommends revising questionnaires. Virtually all of the forms he reviewed use phraseology that ignores the collaborative nature of teaching and learning. They focus attention on the professor, with the unintended consequence of portraying students as passive participants in their education. [JH]

Not Just Another Gitmo Book

Reviews such as the following make one sit up and take notice that Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamden v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 5, 2008) is not just another Gitmo book:

“I was in the Pentagon on 9-11, and in its aftermath, I witnessed the most remarkable and chilling attempt to consolidate and abuse executive power, circumvent and ignore the rule of law, and reverse engineer due process and the rules of evidence to deny our newest enemies a fair trial. The Challenge is the riveting and very inside story of an unlikely coupling of two lawyers from two very different legal worlds, one military and one academic, who joined forces to restore our jurisprudential values. Jonathan Mahler captures the essence of their personalities and the truly heroic battles that they fought in a way that is both informative and fascinating. Do not get too comfortable though. This struggle—of epic constitutional proportions--continues, and every American who holds freedom dear must be educated about the dangers of executive power run amok. The Challenge is the book that will anchor that education.”   — Donald Guter, retired Admiral and former Judge Advocate General, U.S. Navy; Dean, Duquense Law School

See also Mahler's recent NPR podcast, his New York Times Magazine article, The Fog of War-Crimes Trials and Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President. [JH]

New Bookmarking Tool From HeinOnline

Check out MyHein, a new feature from HeinOnline.  Once you create a user account, MyHein allows the you to bookmark search results as well as save their search queries. Check out the MyHein User's Guide and  MyHein Video Tutorial for more information. 

HeinOnline is now on Facebook! [RJ]

Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers

Interesting article from the Chronicle: "College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy."  [RJ]

First Malware Attack to Target Twitter Users Reported

The BBC is reporting what is believed to be the first attack to target Twitter. A fake Twitter profile with a malicious payload has been spotted by Kaspersky. Kaspersky Lab is also reporting that a new worm is spreading via Facebook and MySpace. Details on the Kaspersky site.  Earlier this year, Kaspersky Lab predicted that we'd see an increase in cybercriminals exploiting social networks. [JH]

Was Hamlet a Law Student?

Yes, according to Jonathan Uffelman (Georgetown Law Class of 2008) because "Hamlet questions, equivocates, and demands proof before he ultimately achieves his ends. Most importantly, he delays because, like the law, Hamlet deeply distrusts his emotions and works to suppress them." His note, Hamlet Was a Law Student: A "Dramatic" Look at Emotion's Effect on Analogical Reasoning, 96 Geo. L.J. 1725 (2008) [Westlaw] makes for interesting weekend reading.

Hopefully Uffelman will follow-up on an equally interesting topic: "Having nearly completed law school now, and having felt my own wits frayed to the breaking point, I am surprised to have found no one linking law school with Hamlet's insanity, but I, too, will leave that inquiry for another day."

From Hamlet to Lucifer in Law School. While we wait for Uffelman's next article, check out Rebecca Flanagan's Lucifer Goes to Law School: Towards Explaining and Minimizing Law Student Peer-to-Peer Harassment and Intimidation, 47 Washburn L.J. 453-469 (2008)[Westlaw]. Flanagan is the director of the Academic Success Program at Vermont Law School and co-editor of the Law School Academic Support Blog (profile). [JH]

LLB Poll: Are you satisfied with management's recent decisions regarding your library?

AmLaw's recent survey of firm law librarians included a question we thought would make an interesting survey open to all librarians. By "management decisions", we are referring to decisions that impact library operations and budgets made by executives and administrators who are not librarians.

I may follow up with a more detailed survey in the future so please feel free to add comments to this post to explain your response.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Results from AmLaw's law firm librarian survey here. [JH]

Preparing Job-Ready Attorneys: Bridging the Gap Between Desired and Actual Research Skills

With the new academic year just around the corner, it may be worthwhile to review some of the results of West's 2008 Expectations for New Associates survey. The survey sought to answer two key questions: 1) What do law school librarians need to teach law students to help them be successful in practice; and 2) What do law firm attorneys wish they had known when they graduated from law school? The most common suggestions for law schools to better prepare students included the following:

• Using both print and online research sources
• Taking a more practical approach, use real-world examples instead of theory
• Offering an optional or required internship, apprenticeship, clinical experience
• Teaching the entire litigation process including drafting motions, discovery and depositions
• Enhancing writing skills, more writing practice

Research-related survey findings included the following:

Most Important Skills New Associates Need to Possess:

• Effective and efficient use of primary authority, including statutes and cases
• Clear, concise use of research findings in writing memoranda
• Identifying the legal issue in a research problem
• Effective and efficient use of online legal research materials

Largest Skill Gaps of New Associates:

• Effective and efficient use of printed legal research materials
• Effective and efficient use of online legal research materials
• Identifying the legal issue in a research problem
• Clear, concise use of research findings in writing memoranda
• Effective and efficient use of primary authority, including statutes and cases
• Preparation of briefs and motions using legal research effectively and complying with court requirements
• Tracking the legislative history of a statute

New Associate Research Proficiency: Most Important Sources

• Electronic citation verification and validation tools
• Federal statutes
• State annotated code
• Treatises
• Code of Federal Regulations

New Associate Research Proficiency: Largest Gaps

• State annotated code
• Digests
• Electronic citation verification and validation tools

Over 200 individuals, including law firm librarians, development directors, attorney supervisors and newer attorneys at organizations ranging from solo practitioners to large law firms were interviewed in the survey. Additional survey results can be found at Partnership and Solutions for Preparing Job-Ready Attorneys (July 2008), a Thomson West white paper that also features perspectives on legal research instruction issues by Karl Gruben (Law Library Director and Professor of Law, St. Thomas University Law Library), Schelle Simcox (Law Librarian, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker), Susan Nevelow Mart (Faculty Services Librarian and Adjunct Professor of Law, UC Hastings College of the Law), Monice Kaczorowski (Director of Library Services, Neal Gerber & Eisenberg) and Chris Mickus (Partner, Neal Gerber & Eisenberg).

See also: Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students (2007), a Thomson West white paper documenting the gap between desired and actual research skills among new associates. [JH]

Will Online Collaboration Rewrite How Governments Govern?

In a recent op-ed on Politico.com, Expecting More from Your E-government, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry (founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, respectively) make the case for why Americans should demand more from government Websites. Two recent publications look at the issue from national and state-level perspectives.

The issue of e-records management has emerged as a high-priority policy and technology issue for state CIOs. This issue is now driven by emerging trends such as new Web 2.0 collaboration tools that create e-records in forms that are transitory, yet still document the business of government according to the National Association of State Chief Information Officers' Electronic Records and Digital Preservation Working Group's recent research brief: Ready for the Challenge? State CIOs and Electronic Records: Issues, Opportunities and Best Practices. (pdf)

Deloitte and the National Academy of Public Administration convened a group of government leaders and subject matter experts to develop a road map to help the next administration navigate the changes that need to occur to move to a more collaborative model of government in June. Download the Deloitte Report: Change Your World or the World Will Change You: The Future of Collaborative Government and Web 2.0. (pdf)

[JH]

A Critique of National Security Courts

New report from the Constitution Project:

"Recently, some scholars and government officials have called for the creation of “national security courts”—specialized hybrid tribunals that would review the preventive detention of suspected terrorists (both within and outside of the territorial United States), conduct the detainees’ criminal trials, or, in some cases, both. Advocates for these courts claim that they offer an attractive middle ground between adherence to traditional criminal processes and radical departures from those processes.

For the reasons that follow, we, the undersigned members of the Constitution Project’s Liberty and Security Committee and its Coalition to Defend Checks and Balances, believe that the proposals to create these courts should be resisted. The proposals are surprisingly—indeed alarmingly—underdeveloped. More seriously, they neglect basic and fundamental principles of American constitutional law, and they assume incorrectly that the traditional processes have proven ineffective."   [RJ]

ACS Conference Panel on the U.S. Supreme Court Term Review

From C-Span: Journalists who cover the Supreme Court discuss major decisions from the recent term in  America & the Courts. See also:  DC Bar Panel Discussion on 2007-2008 Supreme Court Term, C-Span. [RJ]
   

Virtual Law Firms, the Next Big Thing?

The world went on Twitter alert (Pownce and Jaiku too) when Craig Johnson unveiled his new virtual law firm but will this forge a new business model for the legal industry?

Johnson hopes to employ hundreds of lawyers working from home doing all kinds of legal work for companies, except for litigation. Johnson estimates that the average billing rate will be about $400 an hour and says lawyers will get 85 percent of what they bill. Heads-up to BigLaw associates: there will be no billable hour requirements.

Is this the next big thing? According to a LawDragon article, yes.

Memo to BigLaw: Virtual Law Partners is one of the first shots across the bow of your business model, which may be facing a perfect storm of unhappy, overbilled clients, opportunistic lawyers establishing a variety of models to fill their needs and GenXers who just really aren't that interested in your Holy Grail of partnership.

According Peter Zeughauser, a law firm consultant and founder of the Zeughauser Group, nope. (reported by The Recorder).

Check out the Craig Johnson interview on WiredGC and the firm's website Virtual Law Partners (note the "Green" statement). [JH]

William Patry Shuts Down His Blog

After some 800 postings over the course of about 4 years, the Paltry Copyright Blog is shutting down. Why? Two reasons according to William Patry's post:

The Inability or Refusal to Accept the Blog for What it is: A Personal Blog. "While in private practice I never had the experience of people attributing my views to my firm or to my clients. I moved from private practice to Google I put a disclaimer to the effect that the views in the blog (as in the past) were strictly mine. ... I cannot see what more I could have done to make what was a personal blog more separate from my employer. ... For the first year after joining Google, with some exceptions, people honored the personal nature of the blog, but no longer."

The Current State of Copyright Law is Too Depressing: "It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent."

[JH]

UNLV's Dream of Delivering a World Class Legal Education In Serious Jeopardy

Expected state budget cuts could put UNLV's Boyd School of Law into a free-fall, causing the law school to drop out of national rankings, lose vital community legal aid programs and leave students paying much more for a lot less education according to a recent InBusiness article. "The combination of higher tuition and decreased state funding could turn the now well-regarded Boyd School into a "diploma mill," informed sources said."

Law school tuition could double, increasing from $10,300 this academic year, to $20,000 in 2011, under the Governor's proposed 14.12 percent budget cut for the next biennium (2009-2011). According to the Las Vegas Sun, the law school's night program and other offerings are in serious jeopardy.

University-wide 500 fewer classes will be offered at UNLV this academic year. Nearly 100 employees recently learned they were losing their jobs, many due to the 4.5 percent budget cut in the State's current biennium. The proposed 14.12 percent budget cut, which is designed to balance the State budget, would cost $60 million in biennial cuts for UNLV ($30 million per year).

The University has launched a budget update website. In a recent memo, distributed to the press by the chancellor of Nevada’s public college system, UNLV Executive Vice President and Provost Neal Smatresk wrote: “UNLV remains committed to offering its students a world class education, but its ability to deliver the dream is in serious jeopardy.” [JH]

Local Legal Community in Uproar Over "Anti-Gay Marriage" North Dakota Law Review Issue

It's pretty rare that the contents of a law review will make headlines in the local press, but that's what  happened in the Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota) newspaper. [link, free registration required] Why? Because the latest issue of the North Dakota Law Review  features a "future of the family" symposium that includes articles from religious right activists and scholars. Five of the six articles are written by authors who are affiliated with church-based law schools or organizations that oppose gay marriage.

Protests from North Dakota lawyers have been so passionate and widespread that North Dakota Law School Dean Paul LeBel posted a disclaimer on the school’s Web site assuring the legal community that “the university and the School of Law are welcoming and inclusive educational communities.” [JH]