University of Baltimore Law Library Blog

News and links of interest to the law school community

November 19, 2009 • 7:53 pm 1

♫♫ Google Killed the Altlaw Star ♫♫

But the death is…amicable. Altlaw.com announces that they will be shutting down in early 2010.

Filed under: Cool links, Courts, News, Technology, U.S. Law, legal research

November 17, 2009 • 6:43 pm 0

Google Scholar Now Includes Law Journals and Cases

From Google’s Official Blog:

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

Filed under: Cool links, Courts, News, Technology, U.S. Law, legal research

October 8, 2009 • 7:00 pm 0

About those GAO legislative histories…

Despite all the controversy about Westlaw getting exclusive rights to the digitized legislative histories compiled by the GAO (see e.g. http://dukelawref.blogspot.com/2008/07/who-owns-legislative-history.html), I really didn’t take a close look until I needed some examples for class. There really is a lot of information in that database, and good quality PDF images. On the other hand, there are some questions about coverage, and some really annoying features in the database organization and search facility.

Coverage starts nominally in 1915, but more fully in 1921 (when the GAO was created). Since the GAO was mostly a green-eyeshade operation up until 1970, the legislative histories must have been to help decide if expenditures were proper. In any case, not all statutes have GAO histories. (Class example: ch. 359 of 1948 – nothing in GAO; use USCCAN instead). When a GAO history is available, especially in more recent years, it is extremely detailed, including texts of amendments. The table of contents for the PDFs, however, is broken up into several pages, sometimes with only one or two entries per page. Presumably, this preserves some information about the contents of bound volumes provided by the GAO, but it makes the set unnecessarily hard to use, and may cause some users to go away disappointed, unaware that more is available for the clicking. The default search template can also be frustrating since it doesn’t have a blank to fill in for chapter number. This is a handicap for earlier session laws that are cited only by chapter number.

Take-away: a big step forward in online access to federal legislative history material, but not one-stop shopping, and with room for improvement. -WT

Filed under: U.S. Law, legal research, library 2.0, research guides

September 2, 2009 • 2:20 pm 0

Now a Word from CALI

There is often confusion surrounding the CALI authorization code among new students. Here are a few tips and a 2 minute video that to help you and your students avoid confusion.

Please pass this on to your students:

Before creating a new account at cali.org, find your school’s authorization code and have it handy. Contact your school’s rep at www.cali.org/contacts or just ask a librarian.
Use your school’s authorization code just one time. During your first cali.org registration/account creation process, enter it into the box entitled “Authorization Code.” You’ll never, ever type or even have to think about your school’s CALI authorization code again after your new cali.org account is created.
Your school’s authorization code IS NOT your cali.org username or password: You create your own username during registration. You create a unique password by following a link CALI will send you in an email immediately following the first registration step.
This may sound confusing, but take two minutes to watch the video and you should understand.

4. Once you’ve registered, use the username/password you created during registration to login at cali.org. Once registration is complete and your account is created, you use your own username and password — not your school’s authorization code, which you can officially scrub from your memory.

Filed under: Law School, Technology, legal research, software

June 15, 2009 • 3:33 pm 0

Cool Firefox add-ons

Add-ons are Firefox extensions that one can add to the basic browser to add new features. Bonnie Sucha, a super librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law Library, has put together a list of add-ons useful for legal/library researchers. Go check ‘em out.

Filed under: Cool links, Technology, Web 2.0, legal research, library 2.0, software

May 5, 2009 • 6:56 pm 0