LUNO Law Library Blog

Mardi Gras Hours Announcement

2012-02-16T13:39:00.000-06:00

The Loyola New Orleans Law Library will be CLOSED next Monday and Tuesday (February 20 & 21) for Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras. Regular hours return 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning the 22nd.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The Legal History of Mardi Gras in Louisiana

2012-02-07T14:08:00.002-06:00

As the Carnival Season is gearing up to full speed, and with Fat Tuesday two weeks from today, the law library has a new exhibit, “The Legal History of Mardi Gras in Louisiana.” It features some historic items from our collection, a summary of the Mardi Gras Krewe de-segretation legal battle of 1991-1992, and some humorous examples of how lawyers and the law are often the subject of parody and satire during Mardi Gras.

For those who can’t stop by and see it (and the exhibit comes down promptly on Ash Wednesday!) here is a slide show of the exhibit and some of the specific items in it.

(You'll need to advance the slides manually.) You can also view a full side version of the slide show.

Happy Mardi Gras!!!

Interested in some non law school reading?

2012-01-05T10:39:00.000-06:00

If you are interested in some non law school reading perhaps you can check out Goodreads.com . Goodreads has been called "a book oriented social network" but maybe a better description is a digital bookclub. Goodreads combines ratings, reviews, recommendations, discussions, and a host of other neat options for those reading the same or similar books as the user. I will admit that I am a new user myself to Goodreads but from what I have seen so far I like it for helping determine that next possible reading selection.

Library Hours for Spring 2012

2012-01-05T10:32:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note that regular library hours return to the Law Library on Sunday, January 8th.

Regular Hours consist of

Sunday: 10 am - 11 pm
Monday - Thursday: 7:30 am - midnight
Friday: 7:30 am - 9 pm
Saturday: 9 am - 10 pm

Today in 1991: Mardi Gras Krewes Desegregated

2011-12-19T09:05:00.034-06:00

Twenty years ago today, the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that requires each Mardi Gras Krewe to provide an affidavit that they have:

“[N]o written or unwritten provision in its charter, bylaws, rules, regulations or policies which call for the refusal, withholding or denying of membership, or any of the services, accommodations, advantages, facilities or privilege offered by the respondent to members or others, because of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or ancestry...” New Orleans City Code 34-3.

This ordinance was the culmination of efforts by civil councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor. Three years earlier, the Supreme Court decided the case of New York Club Ass'n v. City of New York, 487 U.S. 1 (1988). That case held that the New York City’s Human Rights law which forbid discrimination in any “place of public accommodation, resort or amusement” applied to private clubs. Inspired by that case and several constituent complaints, Taylor drafted a resolution for the city council modeled on the New York City law upheld by the Supreme Court.

Though preceded by several years of public hearings and work by the newly-formed city Human Rights Commission, in the weeks leading up to the council’s adoption of the ordinance a fierce debate raged both throughout the city and in the pages of the Times-Picayune.

A typical letter to the editor opposing Taylor’s proposed ordinance read:

Attacking a Carnival Tradition

I urge you to not support Ms. Taylor's proposed ordinance. It is yet another arm of government reaching out to fix something that does not need fixing. ... Ms. Taylor's plan unnecessarily attacks a tradition.

If there is some group she feels has been ignored in the process, perhaps she should consider the possibility of those people forming their own krewe, instead of trying to muscle their way into krewes that have not invited them to join. Everyone, including Ms. Taylor and her constituents, will best be served by learning to earn things for themselves rather than to take from others.

(New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 12, 1991)

And a typical letter in support of the ordinance:

Taylor on Right Track with her Carnival Ordinance

I would like to strongly commend City Council member Dorothy Mae Taylor for her gallant step toward exorcising the demons that have torn apart our city over race and intolerance.

Her proposed Mardi Gras ordinance is needed now more than ever ... [t]he use of public funds to benefit even the appearance of discrimination should not and cannot be permitted.

(New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 11, 1991)

After passing the ordinance, the city council, in further negotiations with community leaders and the major Krewes, adjusted penalties and the schedule for the ordinance to take effect. Eventually, the substance of the original ordinance was preserved and all Krewes marching on public streets in Orleans Parish must now provide the non-discrimination affidavit required by section 34-3. Three of the oldest Mardi Gras Krewes, Momus, Comus, and Proteus, decided to no longer participate in parades rather than change their membership traditions, though Proteus eventually resumed parading in 2000, after, apparently, conforming to the city ordinance.

Also, one of the changes the city council made to Councilwoman Taylor’s ordinance in Spring 1992 provides an exception to the non-discrimination requirement; as it reads now, section 34-3 applies “except as otherwise authorized by chapter 86, section 86-39” which states:

"Nothing in this article shall prohibit any carnival krewe, parading carnival organization, or other organization organized or existing for the primary or dominant purpose of observing or participating in the carnival season from restricting its membership or any class of membership to classes based on sex." New Orleans City Code 86-39.

And, so far, apparently, no male plaintiffs have sued to become a member of Muses.

CALI Lessons and Reviewing for Final Exams

2011-12-08T20:39:00.002-06:00

If, now, at the end of the semester, you are scrambling for some additional materials to review and you’re thinking about using CALI Lessons, realize that thousands of students around the country may be having the same idea.

Last weekend, CALI turned to Facebook to let people know that the rush of end-of-semester students using the lesson had temporarily crashed the CALI web site:

These lessons from CALI - the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction - are a good resource to help yourself learn the substance of typical law courses. There are over 850 CALI Lessons on over forty-five different legal subjects, from torts, property, and civil procedure to more advanced subjects such as constitutional law, professional responsibility, and tax. These detailed, interactive tutorials were written by law professors from around the country who are among the top experts in their fields. The lessons can be run at your own pace and they offer immediate feedback through multiple-choice, matching, short answer and other types of questions.

If you’re having trouble running the CALI lessons from the web site, take the advice that CALI gave the student on Facebook above: pick up a free CALI DVD-Rom from the circulation desk here in the law library and install all the lessons on your computer: they’re run faster, more reliably, and regardless of whether you have an active connection to the internet.

Good luck with exams!

ABA Journal Blawg 100

2011-12-06T14:35:00.000-06:00

It is now time for the ABA to seek votes for the ABA Journal Blawg 100. If you are reading this blog you are obviously not opposed to reading blogs and there are lots of interesting legal based ones out there.

What I like about this process that the ABA Journal goes through is you not only get to see the results but lots of contenders so there might be something that interest you that could get trimmed BUT you still can find out about those possibilities in this process (see the blog directory for the master list of possibles).

Finals / Holiday Hours

2011-12-06T14:31:00.000-06:00

A quick note to reflect what our hours are this Finals and Holiday season

Sunday, December 4 - Sunday, December 18
7:30 a.m. - 1:00 a.m.

Monday, December 19
7:30 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.

Tuesday, December 20 & Wednesday, December 21
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Thursday, December 22 - Sunday, January 1
CLOSED

Monday, January 2 - Thursday, January 5
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Friday, January 6
8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Saturday, January 7
10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Sunday, January 8
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. -- Resume normal hours

New SSRN Research Paper Series for Loyola Law Faculty

2011-11-22T16:40:00.003-06:00

Loyola University New Orleans College of Law is proud to announce their own Research Paper Series in Legal Studies, hosted by the Social Science Research Network. SSRN is the top digital repository of scholarly papers in the world, with over 300,000 full-text papers in both law and over a dozen other academic fields, such as economics, philosophy and cognitive science. Almost fifty million copies of these papers have been downloaded in SSRN's history, with almost 800,000 downloaded in the last month alone.

With the College of Law’s own Research Paper Series (“RPS”), we will have both our own page on SSRN with faculty scholarship consolidated on one site, and SSRN will send out periodic notifications of new faculty work to anyone who subscribes to our RPS. The College of Law’s page on SSRN is at:

http://www.ssrn.com/link/Loyola-U-LEG.html

The link at the top to “Subscribe to this eJournal” will allow anyone to subscribe to our RPS, which we expect to publish three to four times a year. Note that you will need to set up an account on SSRN to subscribe to the College of Law’s RPS; clicking on the “Subscribe” link will prompt you to either log in or create a new account.

But besides Research Paper Series from Loyola New Orleans and over 120 other law schools, you can also subscribe to subject-specific eJournals from SSRN. These are periodic e-mails with recent articles from SSRN grouped by subject, such as the Animal Law eJournal, shown here:

There are several hundred subject-specific eJournals you can subscribe to on SSRN, and all the RPS and eJournal issues you receive contain abstracts of the articles and links to their full text at SSRN.Com. You can browse these eJournals from the main SSRN eLibrary page by expanding the “Legal Scholarship Network” link and the “LSN Subject Matter eJournals”:

So consider registering with SSRN, browsing a while, then sign up for our faculty’s RPS and some of the eJournals that interest you, and see what’s being published by your professors and their colleagues across the country.

Law Professors in Halloween Costumes!

2011-11-01T10:28:00.009-05:00

An annual tradition here at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law is that our local chapter of Phi Alpha Delta raises money each fall by having students bid on their “favorite” professors to wear costumes in class for Halloween. This year’s money - almost $500 - is going to various children’s medical charities.

Of the fifteen professors who participated (and BOO!!! to the other twenty-plus profs who hate terminally-ill kids and didn’t throw their names into the pot), the three winners are:

Professor Chunlin Leonhard, dressed as a ladybug:

Professor James Klebba, as a penguin:

and Professor John Blevins, with his thumb on the pulse of this year’s hot costume trends, dressed up as Charlie Sheen:

Congrats to these three and to all our students (and competing faculty) for the money they raised. Let’s try to make it a full grand next year, guys!!!

Halloween and the Law of Masks

2011-10-27T20:27:00.016-05:00

Several states have statutes that prohibit the wearing of masks for nefarious purposes, like California:

or Michigan:

(93 days?)

But one state has a very broad, comprehensive law that makes masking a crime, regardless of the lack of any specific criminal intent. That state? Louisiana:

So, merely hiding your identity is a crime. But, after noting that the penalty for violating this statute is imprisonment for up to three years, the statute spells out the logical exceptions such as Halloween, circuses, minstrel troupes, and, of course, Mardi Gras.

Only one other state has an anti-masking law that is almost as broad, and which has a similar set of exceptions, albeit without specifying Mardi Gras, which never really caught on in Oklahoma. Here’s the main provision of the Oklahoma statute and the text of La. R.S. 14:313 that lays out the exceptions:

Too similar for coincidence, right? Most definitely. In fact, both laws were passed within six months of each other, back in 1924: Oklahoma’s in January (OK. Laws 1923-24, c. 2, p. 2, § 1, enacted January 28, 1924) and Louisiana’s in June (Acts of La. 1924, No. 3, §§ 1 to 4, enacted June 12, 1924). So was Louisiana’s law modeled on Oklahoma’s? Possible. Or were they were both drafted off of a common antecedent, possibly some recommended anti-KKK legislation, that being a logical source of such a broad prohibition against masking. Further research is required.

Incidentally, La. R.S. 14:313 was amended in 2008 (Acts. of La. No. 400 § 1). It now provides an exception to the exception to the prohibition against wearing masks. The exception for wearing masks on Halloween, Mardi Gras, in circuses, etc., shall not apply to:

Never thought about wearing a mask for Christmas or Easter! Happy Halloween! Be safe, and watch out for those people NOT wearing masks on Monday!

RIP Steve Jobs and Good Advice for Law Students

2011-10-05T20:52:00.000-05:00

Download the iPhone candle app, step outside, and hold it up to the sky tonight in memory of Steve Jobs . Then listen to his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. It was for their undergrads, but its good advice for law students and, well, anyone:

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

- Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement

If that excerpt is inspiring, you can read the full transcript of his commencement speech, or watch it here:

Casebook, Yes! Facebook, No!

2011-09-21T20:28:00.007-05:00

With the fall semester in full swing, students here at Loyola New Orleans College of Law are busy reading hundreds of pages a week of case law and other assignments. That is a lot of material to absorb. How can you learn all that material more efficiently? Here’s one suggestion: shut down your laptop and smartphone.

Studies show that very few people multi-task as well as they think they can. In one study, done in the United Kingdom for Hewlett-Packard, researchers studied the effects of multi-tasking on subjects taking IQ tests. One IQ test was administered to subjects in a quiet room with no interruptions in order to establish a baseline score. A week later, the subjects took another IQ test while multi-tasking by answering a telephone and responding to e-mail. On average, subjects’ IQ test scores dropped ten points when they were multi-tasking. Other studies of IQ tests have shown that marijuana reduced subjects’ IQ scores by only four points. The logical conclusion? Multi-tasking makes you stupider than smoking pot.

Even if you earned good grades in college doing your homework while texting, surfing the web, and updating your status on Facebook, success in law school requires mastering new subjects and concepts far more complex than what most students had to learn in college.

Mastering a new, complex subject requires extended periods of undistracted, focused concentration. Glancing up from the pages of a book to a computer screen, even for a split-second, causes your brain to make several instantaneous decisions: Is that new? Should I read that? Should I respond to that? Those involuntary decisions interrupt the deep reading process required for your brain to take new information and convert it from its active, working memory, to its long-term, retentive memory where comprehension of new subjects is formed.

As one law student - not from Loyola! - recently noted on Twitter:

Yes, law cases can be long. If she would stop tweeting for a while (she had at least a dozen tweets posted for the previous two hours), she could maybe finish reading that opinion.

Twitter, Facebook, and other applications are all revolutionary communication tools that can be put to great use. But, like your mother always said, there’s a time and place for everything. And the time to check your friends’ Facebook statuses, Tweet what you’re doing to your followers, or check your e-mail again, is not while you’re trying to read fifty pages of Constitutional Law for tomorrow’s class.

Free Federal Rules eBooks from CALI’s eLangdell

2011-09-13T16:21:00.007-05:00

Last week, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (“CALI”), in partnership with the Legal Information Institute (“LII”) at Cornell University School of Law, unveiled three free eBooks: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Evidence.
These three eBooks are available for download through CALI’s eLangdell site. eLangdell (named after Christopher Columbus Langdell, the "father" of the case method of legal education) is CALI’s “open source” law book project, through which they hope to encourage more and more law faculty to create, share, and use casebooks and other legal resources that are covered by a Creative Commons license. These three books of Federal Court Rules are some of the first major releases from eLangdell. They are available in both an .epub for iPads, iPhones, and other devised using that format, and in the .mobi format for Kindle users.

So, OK, they’re free, but how do they compare with the commercial, print copies of these rules? Well, the eLangdell rules are up to date with all amendments as of December 1, 2010. The official West Publishing pamphlets containing these rules are only up to date as of May 1, 2010, so the eLangdell version is a full seven months more current than the West version. And, being an eBook, the eLangdell rules have hyperlinks for cross-references within each set of rules, and to cited U.S. Code sections via LII’s web site.

So if you have a eBook reader and want quick, easy access to Federal Court Rules, try these free eBooks from CALI, eLangdell, and LII and get a taste of what may be the future of open-source legal publishing in the 21st Century!

The start of a new academic year

2011-08-15T13:34:00.001-05:00

The Loyola New Orleans Law Library would like to welcome all the new 1L students in both the day and night programs and remind you to sign up for a tour. In addition to learning about library resources and the location of items you will recieve your free mug or water bottle and get enrolled in our computer system. - BB

Terry Stop Extension in Louisiana?

2011-06-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

This story came across the wires today with regards to what is and is not enough for "probable cause" regarding a police search. The La. Supreme Court rules in an interim appeal that what the police in this case (see link) was enough to suggest probable cause. For more information see this short article at theNewspaper.com .

New Law School Dean

2011-06-22T11:50:00.000-05:00

The Law Library would like to join in all of the other law school entities in welcoming our new Loyola University New Orleans Dean of the Law School, María Pabón López. For the official announcement see here. I've seen Dean López around the building this week so make sure and say hello when you get a chance to meet her.

Password Safety

2011-06-19T11:45:00.000-05:00

I ran across this site today that I thought was pretty interesting, http://howsecureismypassword.net/.You can type in your password and it will tell you how long it would take a standard program to crack your password. Give it a try, it may surprise you.- BB

law student thoughts ...

2011-05-16T14:07:00.010-05:00

For the first weekday after the 2011 Law Grads are no longer law students I thought I would post a "music video" entitled "I Hate Law School" that seems to be based on some real truisms.

On-Line Versus Print: The U.S.C.A.

2011-04-30T23:59:00.001-05:00

Why would you ever want to use print copies of the U.S. Code when Westlaw and Lexis are so easy and convenient? Sometimes the finding tools in the print statutes are the better option.

For example, 10 U.S.C.A §771 prohibits the unauthorized wearing of military uniforms. Here is that section on Westlaw:

Notice that this section doesn’t say what the punishment or penalty is for the unauthorized wearing of a military uniform. Most substantive sections of the criminal statutes like this don’t specify a punishment. Rather, general provisions on punishment elsewhere in the statutes apply to different classes of crimes, or to individually listed crimes in those provisions. Luckily, if you scroll down and read the research notes for 10 U.S.C.A. §771:

you’ll see that Westlaw provides you the cross-reference shown above: 18 U.S.C.A. §702 must give the punishment for this crime. Well, that’s half true:

OK, so up to six months in prison, but how much of a fine? Search for “fine” on the U.S.C.A. on Westlaw and you’ll get 1301 results. Combining it with the citation for 18 U.S.C.A. §702 gets you zero results because, the fine provision doesn’t mention this section.

But look in the index for Title 18 of the U.S.C.A. in print and you’ll eventually get to §3571, Sentence of Fine:

OK, the maximum fine amounts are broken down by felony and misdemeanor classes. But 18 U.S.C. §702 didn’t specify what class it was, or whether it was a felony or misdemeanor. Well, a little more time with the print U.S.C.A. index and some hunting around will lead you to 18 U.S.C.A. §3559, Sentencing Classification of Offenses:

Yes, its sort of circular, but felonies and misdemeanors are classified by the maximum length of imprisonment. A crime with a maximum sentence of six months, like 18 U.S.C. §702, then, is a Class B misdemeanor and so is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000. Westlaw and Lexis are great for many things, but for some tasks, particularly when working with statutes, a print set of books with an index created by actual human beings is very often the much better option.

Oh, and the penalties for the unauthorized wearing of a military uniform are the same for the fraudulent use of a 4-H Club emblem:

David Foster Wallace, Zen, and the Internal Revenue Code

2011-04-28T16:28:00.013-05:00

The drama of this year’s tax day is two weeks behind us, and unless they filled for an extension, most people don’t give a thought to income taxes under the following year’s April 15th (or 16th, 17th, or, as this year, 18th) is looming in the near future. Most people besides, of course, IRS agents and cutting-edge popular-darling “post-post-modernist” writers who’ve been dead for three years.

David Foster’s Wallace’s post-morten novel The Pale King is about, to some extent, IRS agents finding zen in the tedium and complexity of the Internal Revenue Code. According to one article about Wallace and his “latest” work, he was fascinated by our tax system, took accounting classes after he was already a literary superstar, and corresponded with real-life IRS employees about the minutiae of tax collection. One of them sent him a copy of IRC § 509(a), a brief sub-section that is apparently renown as one of the most difficult passages of the tax code to understand and which, in an apparent inspiration for one of the “plot” points in The Pale King, can bring on Nirvana if you meditate on it as if it were a koan.

Even routine parts of the tax code can be difficult to tweeze apart - the home mortgage deduction, one of the most commonly-claimed deductions, is an exception to an exception to a main rule: 1) interest is deductible; see IRC §163(a); except for “personal interest”; see IRC § 163(h); except for personal interest that is “any qualified residence interest”; see IRC § 163(h)(2)(D).

As complicated as that is, IRC § 509(a) leaves that double-exception and all its attending cross-references and definitions behind in a cloud of dust. Its about the general rule for the definition of a private foundation and starts out like this:

Then, in the rest of the 430 words of § 509(a) it has eleven references to other sections of the IRC, 16 internal references to § 509 itself, sixteen instances of the word “organization” and over thirty instances of terms related to income, fees, receipts or other financial terms.

How can someone make sense of all this? Luckily, we have several good tax resources that help to explain complicated sections of the tax code like § 509. One is the CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter, a multi-volume looseleaf set available on reserve at the circulation desk at KF 6285 .C67. As a looseleaf, it is updated weekly with new pages so it is always very up to date.

Here is the beginning of the four-page “CCH Explanation” for IRC § 509:

An explanation like this helps to unwrap the tangled web of dense text in a section like 509 and attempts to explain it in something more resembling the English language. Even this explanation is still pretty dense, but one other source may be more helpful and straightforward.

The BNA Tax Management Portfolios are a series of looseleaf pamphlets and is located in the stacks at KF 6289.A1 T35. Like the CCH set, it is always kept up to date with new material. An index volume lets you find the pamphlet that discusses specific sections of the tax code: here is the beginning of the sixty-nine page “Detailed Analysis” from the main pamphlet that covers IRC §509:

This is an even more “plain language” explanation of this provision of the tax code, but it would still take a lot of reading to understand what, ultimately, the definition of a private foundation is. Secondary resources like these can be very helpful for many reasons: court decisions can be confusing because its not the judge’s job to break down the legal concepts involved in a case into understandable chunks of information, and, as we’ve seen here, Congress often seems to write statutes, particularly the tax code, in a way that seems deliberately confusing. Oh, and neither the Standard Federal Tax Reporter nor the Tax Management Portfolios are available to us on Westlaw or Lexis. Westlaw does have the Portfolios on-line, but not as part of their academic accounts.

For any assistance you may need in locating or using resources like these, find one of the reference librarians, either at the reference desk or in our offices. We’ll be glad to help!

Library of Congress Twitter Feed

2011-04-27T14:00:00.002-05:00

The Law Library of Congress has announced its newest Twitter account: @THOMASdotgov http://twitter.com/THOMASdotgov.

The @THOMASdotgov account will provide alerts on THOMAS.gov updates, bills being considered on the floor of Congress, and will serve as a venue for feedback on THOMAS.gov. To read more about it, see our In Custodia Legis blog post http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2011/04/thomasdotgov/.

In addition to the @THOMASdotgov Twitter account, the Law Library can also be found on:

- In Custodia Legis blog: http://blogs.loc.gov/law/

- Twitter: http://twitter.com/LawLibCongress

- iTunes U: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/loc.gov.3061529668

- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lawlibraryofcongress

- YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress#g/c/96401BE3402149B9

(Information via Emily Carr, Senior Legal Research Specialist, Law Library of Congress)

Finals Hours for the Law Library

2011-04-15T15:50:00.000-05:00

the Loyola New Orleans Law Library will be open extended hours beginning April 15th as follows:

Friday, April 15 : 7:30 am – 12:00 am

Saturday, April 16 : 9:00 am – 12:00 am

Sunday, April 17 : 10:00 am – 12:00 am

Monday April 18 – Thursday, April 21: 7:30 am – 12:00 am

Friday, April 22 : CLOSED

Saturday, April 23 : CLOSED

Sunday, April 24 : 12:00 pm – 11:00 pm

Monday, April 25 - Thursday, May 5 : 7:30 am – 1:00 am

Friday, May 6 : 7:30 am – 9:00 pm

Saturday, May 7 : 9:00 am – 10:00 pm

Sunday, May 8 : 10:00 am – 11:00 pm

Monday, May 9 : 7:30 am – 12:00 am

Tuesday, May 10 : 7:30 am – 12:00 am

Wednesday, May 11 – Saturday, May 28

INTERIM SCHEDULE

Monday – Thursday 8:30 am – 6:00 pm

Friday 8:30 am - 5:00 pm

Saturday 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Sunday CLOSED

Sunday, May 29 : 10:00 am – 11:00 pm

Monday, May 30 : 7:30 am – 12:00 am

NOTE: SUMMER 2011 SESSION BEGINS TUESDAY, MAY 31

Positive Law Experience

2011-04-04T10:56:00.003-05:00

Once passed by Congress and enacted, a piece of legislation is ready to be integrated into the United States Code. That is the function of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel.

For most of my life, there were only 50 titles in the U.S. Code. Just recently, you may have read, a 51st title was added. Well, more are on the way. The Office is working on adding titles 52 through 55. The new titles will be:

Title 52, "Voting and Elections"

Title 53, "Small Business"

Title 54, "National Park System"

Title 55, "Environment"

Be sure to check out these new titles, as well as your old favorites.

Finals Help

2011-04-01T10:10:00.003-05:00

Since finals are fast approaching, we would like to remind students that the library has a collection of old finals which they may use in preparation for their exams. We have books of old exams located in the third floor copy room. We have sets of newer exams which may be checked out at the Reserve Desk. Of course, we also have many exams online, available to students through our catalog.

For a very limited time, we will have several professor's upcoming Spring 2011 exams available at the Circulation Desk, along with sample answers.

Tulane's Curriculum Cited by Supreme Court

2011-03-31T11:44:00.005-05:00

In the recent Supreme Court case Connick v. Thompson, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office conceded that in prosecuting Thompson for attempted armed robbery, prosecutors violated Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83, by failing to disclose a crime lab report.

In her dissent, Justice Ginsberg noted her displeasure with the training a prosecutor had received at Tulane University Law School:

On what basis can one be confident that law schools acquaint students with prosecutors’ unique obligation under Brady? Whittaker told the jury he did not recall covering Brady in his criminal procedure class in law school. Tr. 335. Dubelier’s alma mater, like most other law faculties, does not make criminal procedure a required course.21

—————— 21See Tulane University Law School, Curriculum, http://www.law.tulane.edu (select “Academics”; select “Curriculum”) (as visited Mar.21, 2011, and in Clerk of Court’s case file).

Ouch.
Connick v. Thompson, 563 U. S. ____ (2011), at 29

Loyola Law School in the Early 1920s

2011-03-31T09:05:00.082-05:00

Prior to the Loyola Law Review, our flagship law review here at Loyola New Orleans was the Loyola Law Journal. Begun in 1920, when the law school had been open only six years, it was published up until 1932 but wasn’t replaced by the Review until almost a decade later, in 1941 (perhaps such publications were an unnecessary luxury for the law school during the depression).

Law reviews were very different eighty years ago. The scholarly articles in the early Loyola Law Journal were shorter - eight to ten pages seems to be average - and footnotes are rare. But what is really different about older law reviews like the Journal is what else they published. The Loyola Law Journal and other schools’ early law reviews seemed to have served a dual purpose as both a forum for serious scholarship and a place for general law school news and, surprisingly, funny poems and other humorous items. And these other miscellanea can be an interesting window into the history of both legal education and the legal profession.

A typical example of a humorous poem, “Tale of Two Lawyers”, is a good piece of doggerel that holds up well today. One verse goes like this:

2 Loy. L.J. 29 (Nov. 1920)

Published without attribution and introduced as just a small piece of filler that someone sent to the editors, it was published elsewhere a few years later, also un-attributed, so probably had been bouncing around for a while, an early twentieth-century, legal-humor equivalent of the funny jokes, pictures, and stories that people forward by e-mail and post on-line now. Most issues of the Loyola Law Journal had at least one or two pages of jokes or other humorous items, some which must have been as tired and worn-out back then as they sound today:

3 Loy. L.J. 32 (Nov. 1921)

Browsing the old journal issues offers many other interesting tidbits. Apparently it wasn’t that unusual to have law students playing on Loyola’s football team - this piece notes several law students who played for Loyola during the fall 1922 season:

3 Loy. L.J. 68 (October 1922)

You’ll also discover that the law school, in 1920, “conferred the Degree of Doctor of Laws on Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic of Ireland” (see 1 Loy. L.J. 38 (May 1920), for the full citation.) And the Loyola Law Journal, like most early law reviews, had ads in all the issues, and not all of them were for law-related goods and services:

2 Loy. L.J. 76 (June 1921)

But perhaps the strangest thing you’ll find in the early volumes of the Loyola Law Journal is a custom drawing by one of the leading cartoonist of the day. George McManus, creator of the comic strip Bringing Up Father, was in New Orleans when one of the Journal editors handed him a copy of a recent issue, which the “most popular pictorial artist in the world” quickly thumbed through. Noticing the photo of Marquette Hall, then the home of the law school, in the front of the issue, McManus began to sketch a cartoon for the editor and the Journal that, as they said, was believed to be “unique in magazines of law”. (See 2 Loy. L.J. 58 (June 1921), for the full story of this encounter.)

The cartoon, below, featured the pater familias of Bringing Up Father, Jiggs, in a mournful reflection on married life, which was a major theme of the strip:

2 Loy. L.J. iv (March 1921)

McManus and Jiggs are a distant memory in our collective popular culture, though after McManus’ death in 1954, successors continued publishing Bringing up Father until 2000. But the original strip was one of the most popular of its day and its author was well-known enough that the Journal editors were excited to publish the custom cartoon they drew for him.

You can find a full run of both the Loyola Law Journal and the Loyola Law Review on the third floor of the law library, at K12.O867 and K12.O868, respectively. Hein On-line also has both the Journal and the Review, and all articles are available in PDF. For access to Hein On-line from off campus, contact one of the reference librarians in the law library. Also, note that Westlaw and Lexis have full coverage of articles from the Loyola Law Review as far back as only the early 1990s.

Scalia Rear-Ends Car

2011-03-30T09:25:00.002-05:00

Justice Scalia was cited for driving too close, thereby causing a four car accident on the way to work yesterday.

BMW

Therapy for Law Students

2011-03-23T13:48:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting development at Yale. We do not have therapy dogs available yet, but we do have dog-eared books on therapy.

For Law Students With Everything, Dog Therapy for Stress

Mardi Gras Parades, Krewe Liability, and Assumption of Risk

2011-03-04T14:59:00.000-06:00

Louisiana has a statute that may be unique in American law. Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:2796, “Limitation of liability for loss connected with Mardi Gras parades and festivities; fair and festival parades,” does just that: it states that “no person shall have a cause of action against any krewe or organization” that participates in a Mardi Gras parade. It goes on to also state that anyone attending a parade “assumes the risk of being struck by any missile whatsoever which has been traditionally thrown, tossed, or hurled by members of the krewe” and that those “items shall include but are not limited to beads, cups, coconuts, and doubloons.” The only exception to both parts of this statute is if an injury is caused by “the deliberate and wanton act or gross negligence of the krewe or organization.”

Examples of types of injuries resulting from a Mardi Gras parade that were held not to be grossly negligent include getting hit by an entire bag of beads (Isidore v. Victory Club, Inc., 923 So.2d 747 (La. Ct. App. 2005)) and getting hit in the head by a coconut during the Zulu parade (Pierre v. Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Inc., 885 So.2d 1261 (La. Ct. App. 2004)).

How can you find out whether this statute is truly unique to Louisiana? The easiest way may be with Westlaw’s combined state statutes database, STAT-ALL. This is the combined, un-annotated text of the statutes from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. You can use the “caption” field restrictor on Westlaw to only seach the text of the heading - or “caption”, in Westlaw parlance - of all state statutes:

ca(parades & liability)

This turns up only three Louisiana statutes - the one about Mardi Gras parades, a related statute about St. Patrick’s day parades (R.S. § 9:2796.1), and one about parading without a permit (R.S. § 14:326). Casting a wider net and searching the full text of all state statutes for:

parades and liability

brings up sixty statutes throughout the country, most of which appear to be about horses and parades, such as Missouri Statutes § 537.325, “Definitions--liability for equine activities, limitations, exceptions--signs required, contents,” which defines “equine activities” to include “[e]quine shows, fairs, competitions, performances or parades that involve any or all breeds of equines." So it looks like Louisiana’s Mardi Gras parade limitation of liability statute is indeed unique.

Louisiana courts rarely delve into legislative intent because Article 9 of the Civil Code mandates that:

When a law is clear and unambiguous and its application does not lead to absurd consequences, the law shall be applied as written and no further interpretation may be made in search of the intent of the legislature.

But when the insurance company for a Mardi Gras Krewe tried to stretch the limitation of liability found in section 2796, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit felt that an examination of the relevant legislative intent was appropriate. In Medine v. Geico General Ins. Co., 748 So.2d 532 (La. Ct. App. 4 Cir.,1999), an eager defense attorney argued that 2796 should apply when a truck, driven by Krewe members, had left a parade early because of mechanical problems and while en route back to the Krewe’s headquarters the truck’s brakes failed and an accident occurred.

The court looked at the committee minutes for the original bill and found that it was “intended to provide that no spectator would have a cause of action,” (emphasis added). They even mention that Mr. Mardi Gras himself, Blain Kern, testified before the committee on behalf of several krewes about how this bill was needed to help address the problems the krewes were having with the high cost of liability insurance. The court noted that the truck was no longer part of the parade and that the injured parties were not even spectators of the parade. The court held that extending section 2796 to acts such as this would be, quoting Article 9, "patently absurd" and thus it was wrong for the trial court to have granted summary judgment against the plaintiffs because of the limitation of liability in section 2796.

The court also made one minor point to keep in mind during Mardi Gras: it summarized the assumption of risk component of section 2796 in a footnote by saying “[i]n other words, one who invites a krewe member to ‘throw me something, mister,’ assumes the risk that mister’s aim will not be true.” Medine, at 536 (footnote 1).

Scotistics

2011-03-02T10:47:00.003-06:00

Are you interested in the U.S. Supreme Court? Do you enjoy statistics? Then this website will prove to be both fascinating and invaluable to you:

http://www.scotusblog.com/reference/stat-pack/

How many unanimous majority opinions did Roberts write in the October 2005 Term? Which circuit had the most cases affirmed by the Court? How many appellants had blue eyes? The answers to these questions and many more may be found at this website.

Tom Goldstein has compiled and posted Supreme Court statistics since OT95. That's a lot of material to explore.

Malcolm Gladwell and the Law School Rankings Game

2011-02-28T16:38:00.000-06:00

A hot topic recently in the legal education blogosphere has been Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article, The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us (subscription required). He focuses on the U.S. News and World Report rankings for colleges but uses their law school rankings for a particular example. His main point is that its impossible to make comprehensive, useful rankings between institutions as different as a big state law schools and small, urban law schools who serve two entirely different student demographics.

Another point is that the current rankings are more permanently calcified the higher you go. One anecdote Gladwell relates proves this: several years ago, a judge asked some colleagues to rank ten law schools he listed. The rankings were no surprise, except that Pennsylvania State was ranked solidly in the middle. The punch line is Penn State did not have a law school at the time, though it does now. If Penn State is a good university, it must have a good law schools, whatever the facts, or even if it, in fact, did not have a law school at all.

Gladwell mentions the Law School Rankings Game, a web page run by Indiana U, Bloomington law professor Jeffrey Stake. This is an interactive page with the raw ABA data that users can weight in any combination to produce their own rankings through an endless possible combination of criteria. This is what Gladwell uses to give law school tuition a much higher weight than the U.S. News rankings gives it, producing a significantly different list of top ten schools.

I played with the possible factors and weights at the Rankings Game to see if I could find a combination that would get Loyola up in the top quarter of law schools, but the closest I could get was 79th, by giving an even four-way weight to these factors:

states where grads get jobs
% employed in state
hours library is open
library square feet/student

Here’s the results:

I knew our library square feet (per student) and hours open are pretty good, and though the first two factors would seem to balance each other out, I know around half our students are from, or stay in, Louisiana, and that the rest of our students are from all over, with only tiny clusters in any one other state.

Incidentally, our “152nd” ranking is unofficial: the ABA does not rank schools in the lower tiers, but this is Prof. Stake’s reverse-engineering of the ABA rankings (according to Gladwell), using a four-way weight of:

academic reputation
LSAT scores at the 75th percentile
student-faculty ratio
faculty law-review publication

The last of the four, faculty publication, I know for a fact the ABA doesn’t collect in its annual questionnaire (which is one of the sources of the U.S. News rankings data), so I don’t know where the U.S. News gets those numbers from. Prof. Stake’s Rankings Game indicates that the publications numbers are “very old data” so either U.S News uses one of the ratings of faculty publications that get published every few years, or asks its survey takers for a subjective evaluation of faculty publication, which means this is just another flavor of “academic reputation.”

So give it a try and play the Rankings Game yourself and see what results you can create!

Mardi Gras

2011-02-23T09:23:00.000-06:00

As the season of Mardi Gras is upon us we would be remiss if we did not remind our patrons to beware of New Orleans Code 154-1036 - Parking in violation of Mardi Gras traffic plan.

(a)

No person shall stop or park a vehicle or other conveyance upon any street in the area of the Vieux Carre determined by the superintendent of police to be restricted as part of the Mardi Gras traffic plan between 6:00 p.m. on the Friday prior to Mardi Gras Day and 6:00 a.m. on the Wednesday after Mardi Gras Day. This violation shall be enforced only after the following conditions are met by the superintendent of police: Barricades shall be erected at intersections entering the restricted area; due notice shall be published in the city's official journal; any flyers outlining the Mardi Gras traffic plan, its boundaries, and restrictions shall be distributed to the public.

(b)

Any person stopping or parking a vehicle or other conveyance on-street in violation of the Mardi Gras traffic plan shall be subject to a fine, as set forth in section 154-699.

(c)

Unoccupied vehicles of whatever kind or description may be immediately removed or impounded by any police officer or other person duly authorized when found stopped or parked in violation of the Mardi Gras traffic plan, as set forth in section 154-777.

For many other New Orleans Code sections please see our hard copy code near the reference desk or Municode.com

Five Years

2011-02-21T14:58:00.003-06:00

An odd anniversary has not gone unnoticed. Many newspaper stories and blogs have commented upon it. There has been much discussion of a rather singular silence. Tomorrow will mark the fifth anniversary of the last time that Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during oral arguments.

Here are a few links to some of the stories:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/16/does-clarence-thomass-silence-matter?ref=us

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/13thomas.html?_r=1

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-16/when-keeping-your-mouth-shut-doesn-t-make-sense-commentary-by-ann-woolner.html

What to do with the law degree

2011-02-15T08:55:00.000-06:00

Most people come to law school to become lawyers but there are many alternatives to the JD career path. One of our most used resources in the library is What can you do with a law degree? : a lawyer's guide to career alternatives inside, outside & around the law found at KF 297. A875. This post is about a specific alternative, law librarianship.

I admit I am a law librarian, and as such I'm biased, but these jobs really are an excellent alternative career for many. I will list a few of the general benefits

- Generally very static hours, which is excellent for the family centric
- No need to worry about being able to move from state to state and having to keep taking new bar exams (some jobs don't even require the bar license)
- No clients, while we do have students who are somewhat client like they rarely come with the emotion and perspective loss (think jail time, loss of child custody, bankruptcy) for practicing
- No 3 a.m. calls - if you have not practiced you probably don't understand that your clients will call you at ANY TIME since they have paid you to be their lawyer
- Generally work in a larger institution that worries about insurance, vacation, etc. - I know that many like to be independent figure out these decisions on their own but others take comfort of being part of the larger group which can spread risk and lower administrative costs

I have dozens more reasons but if you are interested I'm sure that any of our law librarians would be more than willing to talk with you about what the job consist of on a daily basis. Additionally, here are a couple of links for investigation on your own American Association of Law Librarians and Southeastern Chapter of AALL.

2011-02-09T16:45:00.006-06:00

Attorney Advertising

The Fifth Circuit has struck down many of the Louisiana Bar's new, more stringent rules on advertising while upholding others. In Public Citizen v. Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board, the Court found that certain restrictions violated an attorney's right to commercial speech under the First Amendment. The LADB argued that the new rules were necessary to protect the public from deceptive advertising, but the Court rejected the Board's "assumption that Louisianians are insufficiently sophisticated to avoid being misled" by some of the ads in question. The opinion and related materials can be found on the Louisiana Bar's web site, http://www.lsba.org/2007MemberServices/lawyeradvertising.asp

New Title in the U.S. Code: Hello, 51 U.S.C. !!!

2011-01-31T09:54:00.006-06:00

For over eighty years, the statutory law of the United States has been arranged into fifty titles of the U.S. Code. Fifty is a nice, even number, but there’s nothing legally significant about it. One of the titles, Title 34, has been empty since 1956 and no one seemed to care. Or notice.

And Title 42 is so full that they ran out of sections and just did things like add multiple sections of 2000, delineated with over two runs of the alphabet, like 42 U.S.C. § 2000ff. That’s NOT subsection (f)(f) of section 2000, but rather is one of the fifty or so sections following section 2000: section 2000a, section 2000b, section 2000aa, section 2000ff, etc. Parts of the U.S. Code, in other words, are a mess.

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Congress enacted a new title, Title 51, of the U.S. Code, last month. Public Law 111-314, signed into law on December 18, re-codified numerous existing sections of the U.S. Code “related to national and commercial space programs” and enact them as a “positive law title of the United States Code”. Pub. L. 111-314 (2)(a). For more information about “positive law”, see the brief discussion about positive law titles of the U.S. Code at the House of Representative’s Office of the Law Revision Counsel.

A few blogs and other sites have mentioned the new U.S. Code Title 51, and we’re all similarly underwhelmed. But no one has answered the next burning question that is keeping us all up at night: does this mean that there will now have to be a new Title 51 of the Code of Federal Regulations?

Well, probably not. While there are some deliberate correspondences between titles of the U.S. Code and titles of the CFR - such as titles 26, the tax code in the U.S. Code and IRS regulations in the CFR - these are the exception rather than the rule. Also, the titles of the U.S. Code are organized by subject matter and the titles of the CFR are organized by agency or other federal governmental entity. The CFR already has a title, Title 14, for Aeronautics and Space, with an entire volume, volume 5, for current and future regulations that fall under NASA’s jurisdiction. So I don’t think we’ll see a new title of the CFR any time soon.

Oh, but one final point about the new Title 51 of the U.S. Code. As of this writing, Lexis has Title 51 up and running as part of its U.S.C.S. database:

But Westlaw seems to be lagging behind - neither Westlaw “classic” or WestlawNEXT has this new title that is a good six weeks old. Come on, Westlaw - get it together, guys!

Challenger Disaster Anniversary and Presidential Documents

2011-01-28T10:39:00.004-06:00

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The Challenger disintegrated seventy-three seconds after launch and that evening President Reagan, in lieu of his scheduled State of the Union address, spoke to the nation on the loss of the shuttle and its seven astronauts. His remarks, written by then-speechwriter and now-Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, comforted the nation and evoked the tenuous nature of life with the words of WWII-era pilot and poet John Gillespie Magee, quoting his poem High Flight to say that the Challenger crew had “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”.

The text of Reagan’s address to the nation twenty-five years ago is available for free on the internet in many places, including at the Reagan Presidential Library and on other web pages. But what if you wanted to cite it? The Bluebook "requires the use and citation of traditional printed sources" but allows for citing to a "digital copy of the source available that is authenticated, official, or an exact copy of the printed source". The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation R. 18.2, at 165 (19th ed. 2010) [hereinafter Bluebook]. (Yes, the Bluebook requires any citation to itself to include, at least initially, its full, formal title; Bluebook R.15.8 at 145.) None of the free web sites where Reagan's remarks appear meet this criteria for being an authentic, official, or exact copy.

The official repository of speeches, press conferences, and other public pronouncements of presidents since Herbert Hoover is the series Public Papers of the Presidents, located in the stacks at J 80 .A284. It is essentially an archival edition of the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, for presidents up through Bush the 2nd, and of the new Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, for President Obama and his successors.

An on-line version of the Public Papers series is available through the official web site for this series at GPOAccess.Gov, but it only covers presidential documents back to the second half of the Bush Senior administration. (Note: the GPOAccess system of official, on-line documents from the federal government is soon to be replaced by the Federal Digital System, or "FDSys". Hopefully old links in blog posts like this will be automatically re-directed when the change-over is complete.)

Thus, for older volumes of the Public Papers series, you would need to use the print edition we have here in the law library, or find it through the Presidential Library on Hein On-Line, if you’re at a library that has access to Hein, like we do. So the correct Bluebook citation for Reagan’s address that day would be to the Public Papers series by volume and page, with the date in parenthesis:

Address to the Nation on the Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, 1 Pub. Papers 94 (January 28, 1986).

See Bluebook 224 tbl. T1.

Reagan’s post-Challenger remarks recall another, earlier presidential speech that, luckily, the nation never heard. In the summer of 1969 as America watched Apollo 11's voyage to mankind’s first landing on the moon, an address to the nation was prepared for President Nixon to use in case of a tragedy that would strand the astronauts on the lunar surface with no hope of rescue. Of course, the speech wasn't needed and was forgotten until its author, White House speechwriter and future New York Times columnist/word maven William Safire, was reminded of it by a researcher who found it in the Nixon papers at the National Archives. It is not, obviously, part of the Public Papers set for the Nixon administration, but the National Archives has it online as two large JPEG images, and the Smoking Gun has it in a format that is a bit more convenient to read.

How would you cite Safire’s never-used speech? When a document is not available in an official resource, such as is the case here, the Bluebook allows for citing to web pages like the National Archives or the Smoking Gun, so a good citation that incorporates the title of the memo containing the speech, its author (as it is given on the memo), and the URL for the web page, might look something like this:

Bill Safire, In Event of Moon Disaster (July 18, 1969), http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/white-house-lost-space-scenarios

See Bluebook R. 18.2.2.

And, of course, Reagan's address back in 1986 is available on YouTube, here courtesy of the Reagan Presidential Library:

2011-01-28T09:53:00.002-06:00

Politics and the Financial Meltdown

Congress established the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in May of 2009 to conduct a bipartisan investigation into the financial and economic crisis. Yesterday, the FCIC issued its final report which concluded that the financial meltdown was "avoidable—the result of human actions, inactions, and misjudgments." It is no surprise that the Commission split along party lines in what commentators describe as routine partisan bickering. All of the Democrat members supported the final report, while the Republican members wrote dissenting reports. At least for now, the political drama threatens to overshadow the substantive work of the Commission. The report, the dissents, and background materials are available on the FCIC web site http://fcic.gov.

Not so funny ...

2011-01-27T14:59:00.000-06:00

The National Law Journal is reporting that a certain unnamed bar applicant has been denied admission after (finally) passing the bar exam because of extenuating circumstances. Specifically cited are his criminal record and his failure to repay his student loans to this point.

What makes this story interesting is the applicant was one of his convictions was for "reckless conduct" involving an incident in which he pulled a seven inch knife on a store clerk in what the applicant claims was an "April's Fools Day" joke. The court does not cite to this as the sole reason for denying him based on character and fitness but it is definitely a story to be cognizant of when planning your "fun".

For more information on this particular story I recommend the NLJ article by Leigh Jones that is linked above.

The Library of Congress

2011-01-26T10:14:00.000-06:00

The Library of Congress has many things that this library does not, including historical artifacts, murals, and a dome. And now, it has something that no other library in the country has--a resident raptor.

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2011/01/and-watch-a-hawk-makin-lazy-circles-in-the-dome/

Publish Post

Justices Laugh at Scalia

2011-01-18T16:11:00.000-06:00

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/scalia_is_funniest_and_grouchiest_justice_laughter_study_concludes/

Yes, someone conducted a study on who gets the most laughs.

This Washington Post chart shows from where the humor flows:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2011/01/16/GR2011011604725.html?sid=ST2011011700433

A New Semester and A New Westlaw

2011-01-13T10:18:00.000-06:00

If you haven’t noticed yet, Westlaw has unveiled a new version of its legal research service, “WestlawNext”. Westlaw has been slowly rolling out WestlawNext during the past year, and it is now available for law students around the country and here at Loyola New Orleans. But, at least for the time being, you still have the option of using either WestlawNext or Westlaw “Classic”, the version we’re all familiar with. What's the difference? Let’s take a look.

First of all, when you log in at the main law school Westlaw page, you’ll see links at the top of the screen for both WestlawNext and “Plain Vanilla” Westlaw (see the screen shot below). Click either link for the version of Westlaw you want to use, but realize that you can’t switch between the two in the middle of a research session: you’ll have to log out and log back in to switch to the other flavor of Westlaw.

The biggest difference between the two versions of Westlaw is that WestlawNext was designed with a “one stop shopping” philosophy. Everything you need is on the main screen, shown below. You no longer have to select a specific database before you start searching - just type in what you’re looking for in the main search box:

If you need to search others jurisdictions, click on the jurisdictions button, the one that says “Louisiana” (the default jurisdiction for us here at Loyola). You can also select specific types of content and legal topics to search, or access various Westlaw research tools, by using the tabs in the “Browse” panel below the search box.

WestlawNext also has some enhanced features that make it easier to save documents in personalized folders and to tweak your search experience in other ways. Westlaw has plenty of information and how-to instructions about WestlawNext, so give those a look if your want to learn more (follow the link on that page for “WestlawNext”). Also, our law school Westlaw rep, Anna Guerro, will provide some training for WestlawNext in February, so be on the lookout for announcements about the time and place for those sessions.

There has been a good bit of healthy debate about the benefits and/or drawbacks of WestlawNext vs “Original Westlaw”, but upon its initial release last spring to law firms and academic law librarians, the reviews were generally positive. In my personal opinion, WestlawNext makes doing basic Westlaw searches easier, but makes doing more advanced Westlaw tasks trickier. The bottom line is that for 80%+ of the legal research that attorneys and law students use Westlaw for, the new WestlawNext interface will be a welcomed streamlining of the legal research process. But beware of this: there are still some open questions about how WestlawNext charges for certain resources and types of searches. So, after graduation, when you, or your firm, are paying serious money to use Westlaw, double check with your Westlaw rep or you firm’s Westlaw contact person to make sure you’re not racking up excessive amounts of search fees when using WestlawNext.

Until then, while you're still in law school, give WestlawNext a thorough test drive, play around with it, compare it with Westlaw "Classic", and see what you think. If you have any questions about Westlaw/WestlawNext, Lexis, or any other electronic or print resources in Loyola's law library, ask one of the reference librarians - we’ll be glad to help in any way we can!

Elizabeth Moore

2011-01-12T12:36:00.000-06:00

http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2011/01/interview-with-elizabeth-moore/

Here is an interview with Elizabeth Moore, now at the Library of Congress, who was our library's Deputy Director until 2008

2011-01-06T15:52:00.000-06:00

The Public Library of Law

The Public Library of Law, http://www.plol.org, is a comprehensive source of primary law for both federal and state governments. PLOL contains the largest free database of U.S. case law, but registration is required to use the database. This web site also provides access to: constitutions, statutes and codes, regulations, and court rules. PLOL is powered by Fastcase.

2011-01-06T15:16:00.000-06:00

The Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research

This new web site, http://freelaw.classcaster.net, is an excellent resource for conducting legal research on the Internet. It is especially designed for students but also contains materials for law librarians, research instructors and other legal researchers. The Guide currently includes research guides, links to primary and secondary sources, and teaching tools. And there is more to come.

Max Planck Encyclopedia

2011-01-05T11:35:00.000-06:00

Do you need an idea for a paper or a project that involves an aspect of public international law? Browse through the wide range of articles in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law.

No, it is not on Lexis or Westlaw! It is an electronic resource subscribed to by the law library.

Access it through Research Quick Links at our online catalog page:

http://law.loyno.edu/library/research-quick-links

Start by using the "Quick Search" feature to put in a topic. A list of articles will appear, which are scholarly, give links to other articles, and provide a bibliography and list of documents to lead to further research.

JURIST;LEGAL NEWS AND RESEARCH

2011-01-05T11:00:00.000-06:00

A web-based news source that is the only law-school based service in the world. Led by Professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and his staff of law students, this is a comprehensive source to get up to date legal news of U.S. and world events.
Go to http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/currentawareness/
for insight into hot topics around the world! Read commentary, find actual documents, video clips and more at this valuable resource.

Interview with SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia

2011-01-04T10:33:00.000-06:00

California Lawyer has released a short interview with Justice Anonin Scalia that might be of interest to some readers.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2010-12-22T13:37:00.000-06:00

Here is the final version (Enrolled Bill) of H.R. 2965, as passed by both Houses:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr2965enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr2965enr.pdf

also known as the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 201." For detailed information about the bill, please visit Thomas.

GPO Access to be retired

2010-12-20T13:48:00.000-06:00

http://www.fdlp.gov/home/about/823-gpoaccess-to-fdsys-migration

'In January 2009 GPO unveiled the next generation of Government information online with its Federal Digital System (FDsys). December 20, 2010 begins the countdown to the sunset of GPO Access. For the next several months, GPO Access will continue to be updated in parallel with FDsys, and in mid-2011, GPO Access will be officially retired.'

Library Hours

2010-12-13T11:29:00.000-06:00

EXAM SCHEDULE

Sun. Dec. 5 - Tuesday, December 21
7:30 am - 1:00 am

Wednesday, December 22
7:30 am - 6:00 pm

CLOSED FOR HOLIDAYS
Thursday, December 23 - Sunday, January 2

BREAK SCHEDULE
Monday, January 3 - Thursday, January 6
8:30 am - 6:00 pm

Friday, January 7
8:30 am - 5:00 pm

Saturday, January 8
10:00 am - 6:00 pm

RESUME REGULAR SCHEDULE
Sunday, January 9

Disclaimer

2010-12-13T08:31:00.000-06:00

The contents of this blog are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of Loyola University New Orleans. Each author retains full copyright of their individual postings.