Law Librarian Blog

Effects of Gasoline Prices on Driving Behavior and Vehicle Markets

New report from the Congressional Budget Office: "This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study—prepared at the request of the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee—relates rising gasoline prices to changes in how fast people drive, the volume of highway traffic, and rail transit ridership. It also examines the effects on market shares, fuel economy, and pricing of cars and light trucks purchased over the past several years. With the worldwide price of oil continuing to rise, this study provides an indication of the kinds of adjustments consumers would make if gasoline prices continue to rise, and of the implications of rising gasoline prices for policies that would discourage gasoline consumption and thus limit the growth in carbon dioxide emissions. In keeping with CBO’s mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, the study makes no recommendations."  [RJ]

UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 2007 Report

New report from UNICEF:

"The State of the World's Children 2007 examines the discrimination and disempowerment women face throughout their lives - and outlines what must be done to eliminate gender discrimination and empower women and girls. The report argues that investment in women's rights will ultimately produce a double dividend: advancing the rights of both women and children." 

See also:  The State of the World's Children 2007: Executive Summary 

[RJ]

Blawgs as Scholarship Up for Review, Again

Blawgs as scholarship is the hot topic of the day in the sphere.  Check out these posts:

• Balkanization reviews how many law review aricles cite to blawgs.
• Brian Leiter's thoughts on the subject, plus some links to previous commentary on the issue.
• Prawfsblawg discusses the ethics of blogging.
• Remarks by Legal Blog Watch here.
• And a general comment on the changing nature of the world we live in here.

[JJ]

Microsoft Bids $45 billion for Yahoo

CNN is reporting that Microsoft has made a cash and stock offer of $31 a share, a 62% premium from Yahoo's closing price on Thursday. Follow the possible acquisition using Google News and Google Blog Search. [JH]

Friday Fun: Can You Classify and Shelve Books

Check out this Tech Services game developed by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. You have to shelve books in the right spot. First you get books labeled with their LC call numbers. Then, as the game progresses, they disappear, leaving you with only book titles to go by. A very basic LC classification guide and a hint option are provided but this damn little game is still a challenge! Hat tip to Ron Jones for sharing the madness.

Also stacks-related, check out this video. Our law school students are too mature for this, right? [JH]

Obama v Clinton: Hot4 Video Competition on YouTube

Named the biggest web video of 2007 by People magazine...the AP...Newsweek...and AOL, "I Got a Crush...On Obama" By Obama Girl has created some humorous YouTube video competition. Here's the original and two pro-Clinton videos.

"I Got a Crush...On Obama"

"I Got a Crush...On Hillary" (take that Obama girl!)

"Hott 4 Hill"

Hat tip to Meev for sharing. [JH]

AALL's 2008 A Day in the Life Photo Contest Is Now Underway

...and US law librarian productivity comes crashing to a halt this month as staffers make plans to win this most cherished AALL award!

Six Category Winners and One Overall Winner. The 2007-2008 AALL Public Relations Committee, chaired by Law Librarian Blog contributing editor Julie Jones (Cornell), will judge the entries and select the top five winning entries for each of the following six categories, plus one overall winner:

• Librarians as Information Evaluators and Managers
• Librarians as Expert Researchers
• Librarians as Teachers and Trainers
• Librarians as Trailblazers in New Technology
• The Artistry of Librarianship
• Most Humorous

Deadline. Entry forms must be completed online or postmarked by February 29, 2008. [Details] Winners will be announced at the 2008 AALL Annual Meeting in Portland. [JH]

CRS Report on President's Authority to Instruct Federal Agencies to Ignore Congressional Earmarks

The President's Authority to Issue an Executive Order Governing Executive Agency Responses to "Earmarks" Contained in Committee Reports
CRS Publication Date:  12/18/2007
Document No.:  M-121807

Abstract:  This memorandum provides a legal analysis of the President's authority to issue an executive order that would instruct "federal agency officials to ignore Congressional Earmarks contained in committee report language. Additionally, the memorandum addresses whether, as a matter of law, earmarks contained only in committee report language are legally binding on federal agencies.

CRS Reports can be obtained from www.GalleryWatch.com. Individual reports are available from www.pennyhill.com. [RJ]

Racial Disparities in Drug Imprisonment in Large Counties

New report from the Justice Policy Institute:

"The Vortex: The Concentrated Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties is a new report that explores racial disparities in drug imprisonment at the county-level and the characteristics of counties that send people to prison for drug offenses."  [RJ]

New Empirical Legal Studies Bibliographic Database

Matt Morrison (Cornell Law Library) writes "Empirical legal studies are increasingly important in the legal academy as it evolves to become more interdisciplinary.  Moreover, empirical legal scholarship has direct relevance to the discussions of legal issues in today's public and political discourse. Through the collaborative efforts of Cornell and UCLA, there is now available a bibliographic database of empirical legal studies and scholarship: the ELS Bibliography. The database allows author, title, and subject searching, as well as limiting by year. For more information, see the database's About Page."

The database is a work-in-progress; suggestions are welcome. [JH]

New Book Explores Friendships Among Literary, Legal Giants

Friendships Across Ages: Johnson and Boswell; Holmes and Laski
by Jeffrey O'Connell and Thomas E. O'Connell

List Price: $60.00
Hardcover: 188 pages
Publisher: Lexington Books (December 2007)
ISBN-10: 0739120344
ISBN-13: 978-0739120347

From the UVa press release:

A new book exploring the friendships among 18th century literary figure Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell and 20th century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and British socialist Harold Laski reveals how the relationships helped establish the legacies of Johnson and Holmes.

All four men were fascinated by, and wrote about, the law, although only Boswell and Holmes were lawyers, according to Jeffrey O’Connell, Samuel McCoy II Professor of Law, who co-wrote Friendships Across Ages: Johnson and Boswell; Holmes and Laski, with his brother, Thomas E. O’Connell, president emeritus of Berkshire (Mass.) Community College.

[JH]

A Quick Look at the Annotated Justinian Code Website

In Tim Kearley's Justice Fred Blume and the Translation of Justinian’s Code, 99 Law Library J. 525 (2007), he mentioned the Annotated Justinian Code website.  The site went live late last year. Created with the support of an AALL/Aspen research grant, the site contains PDFs of Justice Blume’s copiously annotated English translation of Justinian’s Code—the only English translation made from the Latin version regarded as most authoritative. It also includes Blume’s scanned translation of the Novels; his 100+ page "The Code of Justinian, and it’s Value"—an address he delivered part of to the Riccobono Society in 1938 but which has never been published and several additional Blume-related items. [JH]

Resources on the History of Silicon Valley

The History of Silicon Valley, the Internet & the PC collects archived interviews with early innovators in all three fields, early photographs, and links to detailed research papers.

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

Pew Study Finds States Face $2.73 Trillion Bill for Retiree Benefits

New report from the The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Center:

"States have promised at least $2.73 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits for public employees over the next three decades, according to a report released today by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Center on the States. Promises with a Price, the first 50-state analysis of its kind, finds that states have saved enough to cover about 85 percent of their long-term pension costs, but only 3 percent of the funds needed for promised retiree health care and other non-pension benefits. All told, states already have set aside about $2 trillion to meet their long-term obligations. But they still need to come up with about $731 billion—a conservative figure that does not include all costs for teachers and local government employees."

View the Full Report and the individual state and national fact sheets.

[RJ]

Man Arrested for Painting Crosswalk

Whitney Stump, a Ball State University graduate student and father, took the law paint brush into his own hands when city officials refused to create a crosswalk at a dangerous intersection. He was, of course, arrested for criminal mischief and then arrested a second time when he went back to touch up the paint some six months later. In other words, the city never removed the crosswalk! [JH]

Transparency International's Global Corruption Report 2007

Transparency International's Global Corruption Report 2007 brings together scholars, judges and civil society activists from around the world to examine how, why and where corruption mars judicial processes, and to reflect on reforms and activism that help remedy a corruption-tainted system.

GCR 2007 includes:

• analysis of the causes of judicial corruption and its consequences, including an exploration of the particular impact on women
• reports on judicial corruption in 35 countries
• evaluation of efforts to reduce judicial corruption
• recommendations for action against judicial corruption directed at judges, political powers, prosecutors, lawyers and civil society
• a specially commissioned survey on citizens' experiences of court corruption around the world
• the latest empirical research on judicial corruption, for example on the determinants of judicial corruption and the relationship between immunity laws and corruption
• detailed assessments of the state of corruption in countries by national chapters of Transparency International plus essays by experts and practitioners.

Hat tip to Law & Development Blog. [JH]

Jimmy Wales Summons Librarians to Helps Improve Wikipedia

"Librarians are not engaging with the academies," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "If libraries throughout the world formed regional groups and made an effort, they would be playing a positive role within Wikipedia. The job of the librarian is about highlighting the weaknesses and strengths of information." Read Mark Chillingworth's Information World Review article for more and check out Phil Bradley's thoughts. [JH]

First Study on Voting Technology Innovations Prompted by the Help America Vote Act

Voting Technology
The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot
Paul S. Herrnson, Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hanmer,
Benjamin B. Bederson and Frederick C. Conrad

Brookings Institution Press, 2008
Paper Text: 978-0-8157-3563-2, $19.95
Cloth Text: 978-0-8157-3564-9, $49.95

Description: Voting difficulties hung over America's presidential election in 2000 like a dark cloud. Passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002 sparked further interest in the physical act of casting a vote, leading to a number of technological innovations. Voting Technology is the first book to investigate in a scientific and authoritative manner how voters respond to the new equipment.

An interdisciplinary group, the authors synthesize their work in American politics, campaigns, human and computer interaction, and human factors. They employ their collective expertise in evaluating five commercially available voting systems, each one representing a specific class based on shared design principles, as well as one prototype system not currently available. They evaluate each system according to key criteria such as accuracy, speed, and ease of use. The results reveal the good and bad about the systems, including specific features that contribute to greater clarity as well as those leading to confusion and error.

The concluding chapter of Voting Technology pulls together best practices that will guide voting-system manufacturers, ballot designers, election officials, political analysts, and voters. In a political system based on free and informed exercise of personal choice, the least we can do is make sure those choices are being correctly cast and accurately recorded and counted.

Active Legislation List Produced by US Senate

Excellent resource from the U.S. Senate: Active Legislation is a list of current bills, arranged by subject, that have been receiving legislative or media attention.  Check it out!  [RJ] 

Average Starting Salaries of Law School Grads

Average starting salaries for law school grads range from $135K to $38K in The National Jurist's recent ranking of law schools. Chicago, Duke, Michigan and Northwestern are tied for the top spot. See How Much Will You Earn?

Hat tip to TaxProf Blog. [JH]

Law Prof as Toolmaker: An Interview with PreCYdent's Thomas A. Smith (San Diego)

Joe Hodnicki: On Law Librarian Blog, I've been fairly critical of law professors who venture into the field of bibliometrics without an understanding of the theory and techniques information scientists use to produce citation studies, without in many cases even an inkling of the work of Eugene Garfield, the founder of modern citation indexing and citation analysis. Most studies are more info antics than metrics but not your landmark The Web of Law study [our post, The Mother of All Law Review Citation Studies Finds Dead Papers Abound]. What made you venture into these murky waters?

Recommended Readings

Fred Shapiro, Origins of Bibliometrics, Citation Indexing, and Citation Analysis: The Neglected Legal Literature, 43 Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 337 (1992) James F. Spriggs, II and Thomas G. Hansford, Measuring Legal Change: The Reliability and Validity of Shepard's Citations, 53 Political Research Quarterly 327 (2000) J. H. Fowler, T. R. Johnson, J. F. Spriggs II, S. Jeon, and P. J. Wahlbeck, Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court, 15 Political Analysis 324 (2007)

Tom Smith: In 2005, I read Albert-Laszlo Baribasi's book Linked and it struck me that legal citations must form a network like those Barabasi discussed in his book.  In fact, citation networks, especially of science articles, have been studied for many years, but I did not know this at the time.  I decided I wanted write a paper on this topic, and went searching for data.  I was able to contact a sympathetic person at Lexis/Nexis, and after much negotiation was able to get from them a license for some citation frequency data of US federal and state cases.  This was strictly numerical data that told me that in California, for example, how many cases had been cited once, how many twice, how many 3 times, and so on.  I did not get any network data regarding what case cited what case.  Using the citation frequency data I wrote The Web of Law, which got a gratifying response among other law professors and law librarians on SSRN.

Joe Hodnicki: Your Web of Law research led you to develop your search engine, PreCYdent. How did that start?

Tom Smith: It occurred to me that if Google worked by mining information in the link structure of the Web, why couldn't a search engine be built which mined the information latent in the Web of Law? I wrote many emails to mathematicians around the country, and received one kind response from Prof. Steve Strogatz at Cornell, who said while he was no longer working on complex networks himself, he had a graduate student who might be interested.  He introduced me to Antonio Tomarchio, a visiting student from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy's largest and probably most prestigious technical university. Antonio and I (mostly Antonio) wrote a long, technical monograph on the mathematical properties of the Web of Law, using such limited data as we had. At the end of 2005 I suggested we build a legal search engine, and Antonio agreed enthusiastically. 

We went looking for financing. In a few months we were fortunate to find in San Diego a former aerospace engineer and entrepreneur who was willing to provide some seed money.  Antonio recruited friends from among his network of friends in computer science and math grad students in Italy, and Piero Fraternali, a computer science professor at the Politecnico, agreed to be our scientific advisor and arranged for incubator space in a Politecnico building in Como.

Antonio and I formed PreCYdent as an LLC in April, 2006. Antonio and our team began designing and testing our algorithm on a database of US Supreme Court and US Court of Appeals cases assembled from various public domain sources.

Joe Hodnicki: The key to any search engine is the algorithm used to generate search results. What can you tell us about it.

Tom Smith: The PreCYdent algorithm was developed over about 18 months of intensive work by team members. Because it is the core of our intellectual property, I obviously cannot describe it in detail, but it is fair to say that it is another branch off the trunk of Cornell Professor and MacArthur Prize winner Jon Kleinberg's path breaking work in the mathematics of networks, just as many would argue Google's PageRank is. However, we found that no straightforward application of Kleinberg authority scores, for instance, worked at all well on the legal citation network, and PreCYdent team members devoted much effort to coming up with a mix of mathematical techniques that was suited to legal search. These efforts paid off handsomely though, in that in our tests the PreCYdent algorithm outperforms by a wide margin in search recall and precision (standard measures in the industry) the Westlaw natural language search engine, which is clearly the natural language search engine to beat in the industry. This means that if you were to ask an expert to list the top 20 cases he would want to see in response to a five-word query in a "Google-style" search, you would be a lot more likely to find a number of those cases in the first 20 PreCYdent search results than in the Westlaw natural language results. Of course, this is subject to the caveat that search quality is difficult to measure, and search quality is better measured by an independent consultant. So this is just our good faith, best efforts measure of our relative search quality.

Joe Hodnicki: What else should we know about PreCYdent?

Tom Smith:  Currently our website has all US Supreme Court cases and US Court of Appeals cases back to the 1950s. We plan to soon have state cases going back 10 years or more from all 50 states, and ultimately all state and federal cases back to the beginning, as well as statutory and administrative materials.

You may notice that the site has ads in the margins. This is because our plan is to make all US federal and state law available free to users, and to generate revenue by advertising.  We believe legal materials in the public domain ought to be public in practice as well as in theory, and to us that means available free and with effective search to anybody with an internet connection. We believe this model is commercially viable, but we also think it will make American and later other law available to interested persons all over the world, and promote the spread of the rule of law.

Joe Hodnicki: PreCYdent is currently alpha. It already contains over 300,000 opinions and 2,500 statutes. In addition to growing the database, what's on your To Do list?

Tom Smith: This is a true alpha; we are very much still in development and we will study the comments we receive carefully. We think law librarians and law professors play a critical role in the American legal system and value their feedback highly.

We are very interested in vendor-neutral citation systems, and that is on our to do list. You may also notice various Web 2.0 features of the site, such as tagging and rating of cases. We believe users may contribute useful content to a site such as ours.

Joe Hodnicki: Legal citation indexing originated with tables of cases cited which, according to Fred Shapiro, date at least as far back as 1743. Joseph Story contributed to early American efforts by supplying toolmakers with citations in the 19th century. In your own way, you are asking the legal community to follow in Story's footprints. I hope my colleagues answer your call by checking out PreCYdent. Good luck with your project and thank you for this interview.

IALL 2008 Website Award Competition Now Underway

The International Association of Law Libraries recently announced that the competition for its annual website award is now open. The winner will be announced at the 27th Annual Course in International Law Librarianship in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 30 to December 3, 2008. The 2007 IALL Website Award Winner was GlobaLex.

From the announcement:

IALL wants to recognize valuable freely accessible legal information websites by this award. The Association would like to encourage the development of useful, authoritative, reliable, and user-friendly sites, that represent new thinking in the area. The selection panel will make its decision on this basis. Selection is not restricted to English language sites and sites based on all languages are encouraged to apply.

The selection panel for this year's Award is Ligita Gjortlere (Riga Graduate School of Law), Halvor Kongshavn (University of Bergen), and Xihn Luu (University of Virginia).

Please send the name and address of your suggested website and your argumentation for how the website meets IALL's criteria by the closing date of 30 September 30, 2008 by mail or e-mail to:

Ligita Gjortlere
Riga Graduate School of Law - Library
Strelnieku 4K-2
Riga LV-1010
LATVIA
E-mail: ligita@rgsl.edu.lv

[JH]

Professional Reading: The Lost Meaning of the Criminal Jury Trial Right

Laura I. Appleman's (Willamette) The Lost Meaning of the Jury Trial Right is available from SSRN. Here's the abstract to this interesting and timely article:

The time has come to reevaluate the origins and historical meaning of the criminal jury trial right. The Supreme Court's most recent sentencing reforms have reaffirmed the role of the jury trial right in criminal justice, relying on the jury's historical and constitutional origins as reasons why juries must determine all aspects of punishment. Based on these reforms and the Court's underlying jurisprudence, it may be time to share the criminal jury trial right with the people, restoring some of its lost connotations. Doing so will ensure not only a proper fidelity to both the Constitution and the common law, but also a more engaged and effective use of criminal punishment in sentencing.

The question of the original meaning of the jury trial right is both timely and important. In light of the Court's most recent sentencing decisions reinvigorating the right to a jury trial, both the history and the provenance of the jury trial right take on crucial importance. In the Apprendi-Blakely line of cases, the Court held that the jury must find all facts that increase a criminal offender's punishment, focusing on the role of the community as long-standing moral arbiters. To do so, the Court relied on a thin historical gloss of the 6th Amendment and jury trial right, one that has been challenged by scholars. In response, this Article shows how a more complete understanding of the jury trial right, one that fully acknowledges the community's importance, supports the Court's new sentencing law and policy.

The central claim of this Article is that the individual liberties conception of the jury trial right, as explicated in Article III and the Sixth Amendment, is only a small part of the story. Although the Sixth Amendment ended up expanding and protecting the criminal jury trial right for defendants, the history of and the Founding-era debates over the prerogatives of the jury trial argue for a broader meaning, one encompassing the people's jury trial right.

[JH]

Crafting Bipartisian Support for Legislation: A Case Study by a Washington Insider

Washington power broker John Hilley argues in The Challenge of Legislation that bipartisanship can succeed even under the toughest conditions. [JH]

The Challenge of Legislation
Bipartisanship in a Partisan World
John L. Hilley

Brookings Institution Press, 2007
Paper Text: 978-0-8157-3653-0, $22.95
Cloth Text: 978-0-8157-3654-7, $54.95

Description: In the mid-1990s, the outlook for bipartisanship looked equally bleak. The budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans forced the government to shut down, not once, but twice. Yet two years later, a Democratic White House and a Republican-controlled Congress passed the first balanced budget in a generation. This historic legislation not only brought an end to a period of massive federal budget deficits, but it also provided health insurance for five million children, created the HOPE scholarship for postsecondary education, enacted a child tax credit, increased funding for environmental programs, strengthened incentives to move people from welfare to work, and provided new incentives for saving and investing.

Hilley tells the inside story of this dramatic turnaround, drawing on his experience as the Clinton administration's chief liaison to Congress. He offers vivid portraits of the key players—including then Speaker Of the House Newt Gingrich, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, and President Bill Clinton—as well as unique insight into the legislative process. Equally at home with the arcane rules of Congress and the realities of political combat, he explores the highly charged relationship between party leaders and their rank-and-file, the interplay between elected officials and their professional staff, the delicate art of partisan negotiations, and the role of uncertainty and surprise. The result is a compelling look at how public policy is made, rich in lessons for both policymakers and students of legislative politics.

Thanks to YouTube, Professors are Finding New Audiences

Interesting article from the Chronicle: "Professors are the new YouTube stars: Video-sharing Web sites take scholars and their ideas out from behind ivy-covered walls and into the media mainstream."  [RJ]

In the Name of Entrepreneurship?

New report from the RAND Corporation:

"There has been ongoing concern that some regulations, rules, and government policies place a disproportionate burden on small businesses and entrepreneurs. For this reason, small businesses often receive special regulatory treatment, such as exemptions from legislation or extended deadlines for compliance. However, the desire to support small businesses can come into conflict with the interest in addressing the concerns that led to the regulation or policy in the first place. Moreover, it is often unclear whether special regulatory treatment for small businesses is having the intended effect. This book sheds light on these issues through analysis of the regulatory and public policy environment with regard to small businesses, including focused studies in four key areas: health insurance, workplace safety, corporate governance, and business organization. The authors offer support for the idea that the regulatory environment has a different effect on the behavior of small businesses than it has on that of large ones. However, they also demonstrate that policies designed specifically to help small businesses do not always have the intended effect. The lack of a consistent definition of small business confounds our understanding of these issues. The book suggests possible directions for future policy that achieves a better balance between the interest in restricting firm behavior through regulation and the desire to encourage small businesses and entrepreneurs."  [RJ]

2008 State of the Union Speech

Transcript of President Bush's last State of the Union speech (by CNN). See also 2008 State of the Union Policy Initiatives (White House). [JH]

OMB's Wiki Used to Compile Earmark Data

Today's Washington Post profiles OMB's in-house wiki, The MAX Federal Community, in Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia. The wiki has 5,500 members and is growing by hundreds each month. A number of federal agencies are creating their own pages on the wiki, taking advantage of its automated tools and services that can perform multiple budget scenarios and analyze data. [JH]

Professional Reading: First Comprehensive Study of the Credentials of Today's Legal Writing Faculty

Susan Liemer and Hollee Temple's Did Your Legal Writing Professor Go to Harvard?: The Credentials of Legal Writing Faculty at Hiring Time is now availabe from SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

"In this article, we share the results of the first comprehensive study of the credentials of today's legal writing professors. Legal writing professors have been working for many years to improve their status within the academy, and this study confirms that many legal writing professors hold impressive credentials comparable to typical tenure-track hires. The article situates our findings within the context of the previous research on the credentials of law professors, and calls upon the academy to explain why it has not conferred the privileges of membership (e.g., equal salary and status) upon a group of professors who have traditional professorship credentials. It also suggests that gender bias and purposeful mommy-tracking of women faculty candidates may explain some of the discrepancies." 

[RJ]

2007 Gold Mouse Report: Lessons from the Best Web Sites on Capitol Hill

From the press release:

"A new report from the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) on congressional Web sites says the overall quality “continues to be disappointing,” with more than 40% of congressional Web sites earning a substandard or failing grade. The report also contains recognition and praise for the best Web sites on Capitol Hill with the announcement of the winners of the 2007 Gold, Silver, and Bronze Mouse Awards. 

"The good news is that 19 more offices won awards in 2007 than did in 2006, including 16 freshmen Members.  The bad news is that there were 20 more D's and F's," said Beverly Bell, Executive Director of CMF, a non-profit, non-partisan organization founded 30 years ago to promote a more effective Congress.  "We were glad to see good sites getting better, but discouraged to see the bad getting worse."

Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, The 2007 Gold Mouse Report: Lessons from the Best Web Sites on Capitol Hill evaluated 618 congressional Web sites, including those of all Senate and House Members and Delegates, committees (both majority and minority sites) and official leadership sites.  Providing invaluable assistance for the 2007 report were research partners from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the University of California-Riverside, and Ohio State University."  [RJ]

Bookmark LLSDC's Legislative Source Book New URL

The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC)  has transitioned its website to a new server and nearly all parts of its very useful Legislative Source Book have been assigned new URLs. The temporary site at http://www.llsdc.net/sourcebook/  will be taken off line. Here's the link to the Table of Contents for LLSDC's Legislative Source Book and here's a sampling of some of the great resources you will find in the Source Book:

Resources

• Electronic Sources for Federal Legislative History Documents With Years/Congresses Available (pdf)
• Quick Links to House and Senate Committee Hearings and Other Publications
• Internet and Online Sources of U.S. Legislative and Regulatory Information (pdf)
• Laws and Links Related to General Federal Agency Operations

Research Guides

• Federal Legislative History Research: A Practitioner's Guide
• Questions and Answers in Legislative and Regulatory Research
• A Research Guide to the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations

Directories

• Selected Telephone Numbers and Web Sites with Useful Legislative Information
• State Legislatures, State Laws, and State Regulations: Web Site Links and Telephone Numbers

[JH]

Future Choices: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Law

From the Center for American Progress:

"In our modern world, sex is no longer the exclusive method for humans to reproduce. A new group of medical options, known as “assisted reproductive technologies,” are challenging our understanding of parenthood and biological relationships.

Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby,” was born in 1978. Since then, the field of assisted reproduction has taken off, bringing increasingly new and innovative ways to create children—as well as increasingly more complex family relationships and ethically fraught medical practices.

The relationship between technology and the law in this context is symbiotic. If we think of the new technologies as plants, growing toward the sky and leading us into new medical, scientific, and ethical realms, then the legal terrain is the soil, dictating which practices can develop and thrive and which must wither away. Every decision to regulate or not creates unique incentives and disincentives for the fertility industry a! nd those it serves.

For now, the fertility industry remains largely unregulated in the United States. Where regulation of these technologies has occurred, however, it has had real-life consequences for thousands of people and ripple effects on multiple areas of the law, from adoption to abortion, from health insurance to inheritance."  [RJ]

WSJ.com to Retain Subscription Component

Well...I guess the rumors were too good to be true.

"The Wall Street Journal's Web site, WSJ.com, will keep a significant portion of its content behind its paid-subscription wall, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.

Speculation had been rife in recent months that News Corp., which owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal, would make WSJ.com a completely free site. Mr. Murdoch had signaled he was contemplating dropping the subscription model to broaden the Journal's online audience and boost its Web-advertising revenue. This, he said, could offset any loss in subscription revenue.

Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."

[RJ]

Journalism in Iraq

Two new studies from the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines: "After four years of war in Iraq, the journalists reporting from that country give their coverage a mixed but generally positive assessment, but they believe they have done a better job of covering the American military and the insurgency than they have the lives of ordinary Iraqis. And they do not believe the coverage of Iraq over time has been too negative. If anything, many believe the situation over the course of the war has been worse than the American public has perceived, according to a new survey of journalists covering the war from Iraq.

How the Press Has Covered Events on the Ground: "What image of war did journalists—challenged with reporting events from Iraq—portray to the American public in the first 10 months of 2007? What role did violence play in the coverage? Who did reporters rely on for information?"

[RJ]

Security and Stability in the Greater Middle East

From the Center for Strategic & International Studies: This briefing provides an overview of the major security problems facing the Middle East. [RJ]