Law Librarian Blog

ABA's SafeBorrowing.com

From the site:

"Consumer credit can be complicated. From the unusual legal terms to the complex mathematical formulas, understanding how credit works can be a big task. The Committee on Consumer Financial Services of the Section on Business Law of the American Bar Association has created this website to provide you with the tools to help you on your way to financial success. This website covers the four basic types of consumer credit: financing your home, financing your car, financing your education, and credit cards. At some point in your life you will be faced with decisions about most, if not all, of these types of credit. By reading through this website and others that we point you to, you will be able to get a grasp on understanding these types of credit and how to use them safely and wisely."

Topics include:

• Mortgage loans
• Buying or Leasing a car
• Student loans
• Credit Cards

[RJ]

Will Lawyers Go the Way of Travel Agents?

Maybe not.  But an article in Sunday's New York Times (4/27/08) about a new web site, JDSupra.com might put one in mind of what happened to lots of small travel agencies when consumers began booking their own travel online.  The site hopes to persuade lawyers to upload their legal documents - briefs, complaints, forms - as well as personal profiles which will be linked to the documents.  The plan is that the ever-increasing number of pro se litigants will not only download the free legal documents, but follow up with the lawyers who drafted them.  On a related note - the first ever award for excellence in eLawyering at this year's ABA TechShow went to IllinoisDivorce.com, a web site that assists couples in uncoupling without ever having to sit-down with a lawyer. Denny Crane would be the perfect pitchman - if he can be pried away from that do-it-yourself travel web site! [gvd]

NISO's A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has issued SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (pdf) as part of its Recommended Practice series (NISO-RP-7-2008). The SERU document codifies best practices and offers publishers and librarians the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement by agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith.

Essentially SERU provides both parties with a set of common understandings to reference as an alternative to a formal license when conducting business. It's an excellent idea but but I doubt the U.S. legal publishing cartel will go for it without a vigorous campaign from AALL. [JH]

Regulatory Resource Center

New resource from OMB Watch: "The Resource Center provides tips for advocates who want to get involved in regulatory decision making and educational resources for anyone interested in how the federal regulatory process works."  [RJ]

EMMA - Electronic Municipal Market Access System

From the site:

"EMMA is a centralized on-line site to find key information about municipal securities, free of charge. The information on EMMA is presented in a manner specifically tailored for retail, non-professional investors who may not be experts in financial or investing matters. EMMA makes available official statements for most new offerings of municipal bonds, notes, 529 college savings plans and other municipal securities since 1990. EMMA also provides real-time access to prices at which bonds and notes are sold to or bought from customers, as well as prices paid in inter-dealer transactions, for most trades occurring on or after January 31, 2005. In addition, issuers sometimes issue new bonds to establish escrows to pay-off existing bonds (usually to refinance their debt at a lower interest rate), and EMMA provides access to advance refunding documents that set out the details of these escrow arrangements."  [RJ]

Global Database on the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement

From the site:

"The Global Database on the Guiding Principles provides instant access to official documents about the rights of the internally displaced and the application of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. The database includes relevant:

• National laws and policies;
• Regional and international instruments;
• Observations and recommendations of UN treaty-monitoring bodies;
• Reports of UN charter bodies;
• Resolutions of the UN General Assembly; and
• Statements of national authorities.
• When available, documents are provided in English, French and Spanish.

The Database is (i) a practical tool to assist policymakers, legislators and their advisers develop laws, policies and other instruments on internal displacement and to monitor their implementation based on the standards recognized in the Guiding Principles; (ii) an advocacy tool for lawyers, jurists and human rights and humanitarian activists arguing for implementation of the rights set out in the Guiding Principles; and (iii) a research tool for academics and students interested in the documents that formed the basis for the Guiding Principles and the subsequent impact of the Principles in protecting the rights of internally displaced persons."  [RJ]

English Medieval Legal Documents Wiki

Hazel Lord's (Senior Law Librarian, USC) bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1535) has been converted into the English Medieval Legal Documents Wiki!

The goal of this project is to create a collaborative database on the published sources of English medieval legal documents, and to provide links to the growing number of online sources currently being developed for the use of scholars and students of English medieval law. Emphasis in this wiki has been placed on sources published since 1950.

The wiki has organized the material into broad categories, such as court records, statutory records, etc. Within these categories, wherever it seemed appropriate, the entries have been arranged first by material type, plea rolls, courts reports, calendars, etc., and then chronologically by regnal year. When the resource covers the reigns of several monarchs, or even the entire period, it is listed separately under each monarch. [JH]

New Service for Congressional Videos

From the site: "CapNews.Net is an Internet News Service covering Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and executive agencies.  In 2008 CapNews.Net will launch its full operations and begin offering news video syndication services to media organizations and others, and also continue posting videos directly to the public via YouTube.com and other video platforms."  [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]

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]

PACER Recycling Page

Check out Public.Resource.org's PACER recycling page.   There you can can provide free access to your old PACER court documents as well as access other PACER documents that have been uploaded.  Very nice.  [RJ] 

New Empirical Legal Studies Db

Not officially launched, but now live is the fabulous Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography. A joint product of UCLA and Cornell law schools (with much of the indexing and literature review to create the database done by librarians at those two schools, namely Matt Morrison, Jill Fukunaga, and June Kim), users can search for ELS articles by author, title, subject, or year.  For those of us who have grappled with requests for ELS articles in a particular subject, we know how difficult these projects can be.  This new product is much needed and provides an important service in this expanding area of legal scholarship. 

Background and more information about the project:

This database grew out of a conversation between Ted Eisenberg and Joe Doherty at the 2006 AALS meeting. The plan was to create an annual bibliography for publication in JELS; in the process it evolved into this online database. The project was made possible by the support of Dean Mike Schill of UCLA Law, and by the hard work of Matt Morrison of the Cornell Law Library, Jill Fukunaga and June Kim of the UCLA Law Library, and many research assistants. Please contact Joe Doherty (doherty@law.ucla.edu) to report errors, omissions and suggestions, and to express your interest in helping us extend the database back to 2000.

Kudos!  [JJ]

NCSL 50-State Legislative Tracking Web Resources

From the site: "At the request of NCSL's Legislative Research Librarians (LRL) staff section, NCSL has developed this resource of 50-state compilations covering various issues that concern state legislators and legislative staff. Here you will find a topical, alphabetical listing of legislative and statutory databases, compilations and state charts/maps."  Check it out!  [RJ]

State Court Organization, 1987-2004

From the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

"Presents trend data from State Court Organization data collections covering the years 1987-2004. The report examines changes in the organization and operations of the Nation’s state trial and appellate courts over this time period. Topics include the selection and educational requirements of judges, regulations of criminal and civil juries, the development of unified court systems, and adjustments in court management and staffing to address growing caseloads."

Highlights include the following:

• Total trial court case filings increased by approximately 45% in limited jurisdiction courts and 43% in general jurisdiction courts.
• Specialty jurisdiction or problem-solving courts, such as drugs, family, mental health, and domestic violence courts, became more common.
• The ratio of trial judges to the population nationwide decreased slightly from 10 to 9 judges per 100,000 persons.

[RJ]

Metavid, Archive of Legislative Proceedings

From the site:

"Metavid is a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings. Metavid makes use of entirely free and open source software and video codecs to make both the footage and the architecture of the site available, accessible and recontextualizable."

• Search the archive
• Access an early version of the metavid remediator system
• Check out project news our blog
• And finally check out our wiki for more detailed explanation of the project

[RJ]

2007 Global Faculty E-book Survey

From the introduction: 

"In Fall 2007, ebrary worked with more than 200 librarians from around the world to develop an informal survey to better understand faculty experience with e-resources and print materials. The survey focused on the higher education community, and key learning objectives included the following:

• Usage for research and instruction
• Attitudes
• Perceived strengths and weaknesses
• Instruction experience and preferences

Check out the results of the survey.  [RJ]

Electronic Databases from the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence

From CSPV, University of Colorado at Boulder:

Search VioLit

• This database stores bibliographic information and CSPV abstracts of violence related research and literature. This literature primarily includes journal articles, books, reports and literature reviews on the topics related to juvenile violence.

Search VioPro

• This database contains a national listing of violence prevention, intervention, and treatment programs.

Search VioSource

• This database stores information about violence-related curricula, videos, and other resource materials.

Search VioEval

• This instrument database is a compilation of data collection tools available on violence-related topics for program evaluation purposes.

[RJ]