West Publishing history featured in the Green Bag

The latest edition of  The Green Bag has an entertaining look at a 1901promotional pamphlet published by West publishing called "Law Books by the Millions: An account of the largest law-book house in the world, the home establishment of the National Reporter System and the American Digest System".  An introductory essay by Ross E. Davies discusses this historic artifact and how it illustrates that the more things change, the more things remain the same. For example, the pamphlet describes the lawyers working on theditorial staff : "as a body there is not another to match it. The tests given applicants make it certain that only lawyers of West Publishing Co.
more than average ability, and with special mental aptitude for this class of work, are engaged in this very important position. A lawyer of scholarly tastes and abilities finds a more attractive field in legal literary work than in the competitive struggle which awaits him if he enters the practice, and the rewards, if less dazzling, are more assured."

Monroeville restaurant makes the news by banning young children

Many news outlets are carrying the story of a Monroeville restaurant that has announced it will no longer allow children under age 6 to dine at the establishment. McDains Restaurant, located at 4440 Broadway Boulevard in Monroeville, started as the "19th hole" for the McDain's Golf Club and proved so popular that it developed into an "upscale, quiet and casual" restaurant with outdoor dining. Owner Mike Vuick announced the ban on children under 6 after he'd received noise complaints from customers about crying kids at neighboring tables. In an email to customers, Vuick explained: "We feel that McDain's is not a place for young children. Their volume can't be controlled and many, many times, they have disturbed other customers." The Reuters story asks if this is legal, and answers Yes; while restaurants can't discriminate against race, color, religion or national origin, "Nowhere in that list is there a category for "kids."

World Statistics visualization project

The World of 100 is an interesting visualization project that looks at world statistics.  Artist Toby Ng looks at various statistics asking the question:  "If the world were a village of 100 people, how would the composition be?" He has built a set of 20 posters visualizing various world statistics.  For example, the "Languages" poster shows that  if the world were a village of  100 people, 17 would speak Chinese, 9 would speak English, 8 would speak Hindi, 6 would speak Russian, 6 would speak Spanish, 4 would speak Arabic, and 50 would speak "other languages".

Law Technology News: web tools

A recent article in Law Technology News by Louis Abramovitz, a Washington D.C.-based law librarian, provides a list of free and low-cost online resources now available to lawyers, including websites for Pubic Records searches.

Database: Gender Law Library

The Gender Law Library is a collection of national legal provisions impacting women's economic status in 183 economies (it is hosted by the World Bank, and supported by the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan and the Norwegian Trust Fund). The database can be used for comparative analysis of legislation affecting women. It serves as a resource for research, and contributes to reforms that can enhance women’s full economic participation. The materials are generally organized into categories including geographic region, income level grouping, legal topic, and type of law. The collection is updated regularly.

hat tip: InSITE

TRAC vs. SSA

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse recently published a report titled Social Security Awards Depend More on Judge than Facts: Disparities Within SSA Disability Hearing Offices Grow. Embedded in the report is a special interactive table giving the public access to extensive counts and rates that further document the degree of the disparities among individual judges in a Social Security hearing office as well as disparity measures for each office as a whole.
In response, the Social Security Administration published a statement sharply criticizing TRAC's study on several different grounds. TRAC has now issued a point-by-point refutation of the SSA's sweeping statement regarding TRAC's original report.
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University.  Using Freedom of Information Act requests, the organization gathers highly detailed but easy-to-access information on selected federal enforcement agencies, special topical reports, and "bulletins" about federal enforcement, staffing and expenditures.  .

2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism released by White House

The White House recently released its new counterterrorism strategy, the National Strategy for Counterterrorism (19 page pdf). They also released a Fact Sheet that summarize the strategy, saying that "this strategy builds upon the progress we have made in the decade since 9/11, in partnership with Congress, to build our counterterrorism and homeland security capacity as a nation. It neither represents a wholesale overhaul-nor a wholesale retention-of previous policies and strategies... This Strategy stands to testify to our friends, our partners, and to our terrorist enemies: Here is our plan of action to achieve the defeat of al-Qa‘ida and its affiliates and adherents . It is this outcome we seek, and indeed it is the only one we will accept ."
Contents include:

• The Threat We Face
• Principles That Guide our Counterterrorism Efforts
• Overarching Goals
• Area of Focus
• Other Terrorist Concerns Requiring Focus and Attention
• Conclusion

Wikipedia Higher Education Summit

Inside Higher Education reports that Wikipedia, in its efforts to improve and expand its relationship with academia, held the first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit last week. Attendees were professors who have actively incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as faculty who are interested in doing so. According to the report, over two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework, and many of these campuses have “Wikipedia ambassadors” tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, was the speaker who gave the opening address, saying that his office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a “Wikipedian in residence” in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
At the Summit, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Rosta Farzan demoed a set of new course software tools aimed at making it easier for professors to assign and evaluate Wikipedia-related assignments. The free software includes a dashboard for instructors to track student work and provide private feedback on edits, as well as a new course page builder to help instructors create useful and well-structured course pages.

Chief Justice John Roberts on relevance (or irrelevance) of legal academia

A recent post on the Legal Skills Prof Blog points to an interview with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals' 77th annual judicial conference. A video of the 47 minute interview is available on C-Span.
The blogpost specifically talks about Justice Roberts' comments on the relevance of legal scholarship to the practice of  law,  as evidenced by law review publications. You can watch this part of the interview by forwarding the video to minute 28:50. Dean Raymond C. Pierce of the North Carolina Central University School of Law in Durham, N.C., poses this question to Chief Justice Roberts:

“Your comments earlier about the use of your law clerks caused me to think about a comment by Judge Harry Edwards of the D.C. Court of Appeals where Judge Edwards strongly suggests that our judiciary on all levels, and the practicing bar, are unfortunately too disconnected from our academies, from our law schools. I want to know your thoughts on that as to whether or not you agree with that or whether you think the relationship between the practicing bar and the bench, and our legal academy, our lawschools is fine, or whether or not there is some impact on instruction as it relates to the good future of our profession.”

Chief Justice Roberts replies:

"Judge Edwards and I are on the same page on that point. There IS a great disconnect between the academy and the profession. Pick up a copy of any law review… and the first article is likely to be (on an abstract topic) that I’m sure is of great interest to the academic who wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar. Now I hasten to add, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If the Academy wants to deal with the legal issues at a particularly abstract and philosophical level that’s great, that’s their business, but they shouldn’t expect that it would be of any particular help or even interest to members of the practicing bar or judges. At the same time we’re not looking for vocational guidance like “this is how you fill out the form for an entry of appearance”. At the same time, I do think that if the academy is interested in having an influence on the practice of law, on the development of law, they would be wise to stop and think, “Is this area of research going to be of help to anyone other than other academics?”. It’s their business, but people ask me what the last law review article I read was, and I have to think very hard before coming up with one."

CALI News

News from the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, aka CALI:. Starting this school year, CALI lessons will have a very new look. The educational content remains the same, but the new-look versions include a number of new features  including  iPad and iPhone compatibility, auto scoresave, and easy copy & paste.
You can  register for an upcoming live webcast about the new CALI lesson on July 12, 3PM Eastern, 2PM Central. The webcast will cover what's changing in CALI Lessons, the expected time line for implementation, and provide time for answering questions. Faculty can preview of the new viewer on each lesson description page. Click the lesson title - not the play button - from the listings, and then click on the link that says "Try the new lesson viewer (alpha)".

LexisAdvance & WestlawNext, two views

Two interesting discussions of the two big new legal research products have been published online and provide a lot of food for thought for law librarians and legal researchers.  Ron Wheeler, from Univ. of San Francisco School of  Law & Director of the law library has a paper on SSRN titled "Does Westlaw Next Really Change Everything: the Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research".  And Dan Baker of the University of Houston O'Quinn Law Library has published Part 1 and Part 2 of his First Thoughts on Lexis Advance for Law Schools on the library's blog.  

EBSCO, H.W. Wilson merge

Publishers and database vendors EBSCO and H.W. Wilson have announced that the two companies have merged as Ipswich, MA-based EBSCO acquiring the staff and product lines of H.W. Wilson Co. According to the announcement,   the “vast majority of Wilson databases will continue to be maintained, and there are many planned enhancements. Some Wilson databases will be merged together with closely related EBSCO databases to create more robust versions.”

Chart of forthcoming changes and enhancements due to merger provided by EBSCO.

ABA moves to improve law school employment data accuracy

The National Law Journal reports that the ABA's section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved changes to the annual law school questionnaire that require more detailed information on the employment status and salaries of law school graduates. Law schools will be required to report in much greater detail on the types of jobs in which their graduates have found employment.  They will also have to provide information on graduates who are unemployed or whose employment status is unknown. 

Project will digitize older Technical Reports

The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) is an initiative led by the University of Arizona in collaboration with the Center for Research Libraries  to identify, digitize, archive, and provide access to federal technical reports issued before 1975. These technical reports communicate research progress in technology and science and deliver information for technical development to industry and research institutions contributing to the continued growth of science and technology. While availability to more recent (1994–current) technical report literature has greatly improved with Internet access, legacy technical report documents remain elusive, and this initiative aims to close that gap. Some of the report series digitized include divisions of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; U.S. National Bureau of Standards, the U.S. Bureau of Mines and more.

NTIS Technical Reports

The June 2011 NTIS Technical Reports Newsletter (from the US Dept. of Commerce National Technical Information Service) is now available online. This  issue has been designated as a Special SLA Edition to correspond with NTIS’ participation at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference, and the issue highlights the topic The Virtual World. It features enhanced graphics and design, and includes selected information from the NTIS Subject Categories:

• Communication (45)
• Computers, Control & Information Theory (62)
• Library & Information Sciences (88)

If you are attending this year’s SLA Conference, the NTIS will be previewing the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) Repository Beta Version 2.0.

Libguides for (ProQuest) Congressional databases

The editorial team at ProQuest, the company that recently bought the Congressional databases from Lexis, has created a collection of useful bibliographies that provide links to documents in the Congressional databases on current topics. The bibliographies are on the following topics; when you click on the link, click on the blue tabs at the top of the page that say "Committee Prints and CRS Reports", "Hearings", and/or "Congressional Record" for live links into the Barco databases. You need to be on campus or accessing via the Pitt remote server to use these.

Al Qaeda http://proquest.libguides.com/al_qaeda
Egyptian Revolution http://proquest.libguides.com/egyptian_revolution
Gas Prices http://proquest.libguides.com/gas_prices
Haitian Earthquake (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/haitian_earthquake
Health Care Reform http://proquest.libguides.com/health_care_reform
Immigration and Naturalization http://proquest.libguides.com/immigration_and_naturalization
Libyan Unrest http://proquest.libguides.com/libyan_unrest
Natural Disasters http://proquest.libguides.com/natural_disasters
North Korea (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/north_korea
Nuclear Crisis in Japan http://proquest.libguides.com/nuclear_crisis_in_japan
Osama bin Laden http://proquest.libguides.com/osama_bin_laden
Same Sex Marriage (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/same_sex_marriage
U.S. Natural Disasters http://proquest.libguides.com/natural_disasters

Newspaper Map

The Newspaper Map website is a visual map where you can identify newspapers from all over the world, translatable to and from many languages with one click. In many cases you will also find links to the newspapers sites on social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. You can search for specific cities or newspapers, filter by language, or look for historical newspapers that are available online.

A Mullet view of law school?

The Chronicle of Higher Education this afternoon has a brief article titled "Overcoming a "Mullet" View of Faculty". The author defines a "mullet" view : a university president told him that when new faculty attended their first faculty meeting, the "serious" ones sat in front, with the malcontents and disengaged at the back.  Hence the mullet: professional in front, party behind. The author said professors tend to view the way students choose classroom seats in the same way: A’s in the front, C’s in the back.  Is this true in law schools too? 

Electronic course packs

The Wired Campus blog reports on a couple of University of Chicago graduate students who have launched an online version of coursepacks called Sibylus "the syllabus, reimagined". The students realized that the photocopied materials they were buying from the bookstore in coursepacks are available online to students via the databases licensed by the university; or even on free websites.The students—who are both studying business and law—started a pilot program this spring in several classes at Chicago’s business school . The online coursepacks aren't free, but they are cheaper than the photocopied versions sold  by the bookstore. 

Public Libraries

The New York Review of Books blog has a post titled "A Country Without Libraries".  It is a pretty wonderful essay on the value of public libraries, and the disheartening news of how many public libraries are being closed or having their hours curtailed.
Here's some of the essay:
Over the years I thoroughly explored many libraries, big and small, discovering numerous writers and individual books I never knew existed, a number of them completely unknown, forgotten, and still very much worth reading. No class I attended at the university could ever match that. Even libraries in overseas army bases and in small, impoverished factory towns in New England had their treasures, like long-out of print works of avant-garde literature and hard-boiled detective stories of near-genius. Wherever I found a library, I immediately felt at home."

The main branch of the Scranton public library, where this blogger spent many happy hours.