Ranking law schools

There is an interesting article titled Sense and non-sense of a European ranking of law schools and law journals in the latest edition of Legal Studies, the Journal of the Society of Legal Scholars. The article focuses on whether it is possible to rank European law schools, but it also offers a clear-eyed look at law school rankings in the U.S., the good, the bad and the ugly.   The Abstract:

Rankings of law schools and law journals are part of a trend towards more emphasis in academia on transparency and accountability with regard to the quality of research and education. Globalisation increases the need to compare law schools and law journals across borders, but this raises complicated questions due to differences in language, education systems, publishing style and so on. In this contribution, it is argued that ranking of law schools and law reviews runs the risk of driving us away from quality based on substance towards proceduralisation and quality assessment based on proxies favoured by managers of law schools, funding bodies and government agencies, instead of by the forum of legal scholars.

GPO unveils plan for the future of the FDLP

The Government Printing Office just unveiled a new National Plan for the Future of the FDLP at the 2014 Depository Library Council Meeting & Federal Depository Library Conference. This is the result of much work by GPO and the depository library community, based on the FDLP Forecast Study. The National Plan aims for a sustainable FDLP, which is proposed to be renamed the Federal Information Access Library Program and expanded to include more types and sizes of libraries and a new category of Federal Information Access assurance Partners. Although this is a proposal, and much work still needs to be done, it’s a very positive milestone. Law librarians should be pleased with the emphasis on information access, preservation, and program sustainability. Superintendent of Documents Mary Alice Baish will be discussing the plan at the AALL Annual Meeting.

Federal legislation visualization

An interesting new visualization tool called Leg/Ex (short for Legislative Explorer) comes from the University of Washington Center for American Politics and Public Policy. It's an interactive visualization that allows anyone to explore actual patterns of lawmaking in Congress. To use it, go to the website and click the "Launch" button.. Choose any year/Congress  back to 1973. Then hit Play and and watch the tiny points of light (bills introduced) fly to their various committees until the committees start to look like little nuclei (bills are coded blue for Dems, red for Reps, yellow for Inds). You can also choose from 19 major topics and many minor topics and watch the numbers increase like a sports ticker on the bottom of your screen. You can search by individual member, see members ranked on an ideology scale, explore by State, and lots more possibilities.

Visualizing legal research

An article in the ABA Journal discusses a new website called Ravel (still in beta) that is called a legal research alternative. Ravel was developed by 2 law students at Stanford who were interested in data visualization. Ravel does not look like traditional legal research platforms because it gives a visual presentation of search results. Rather than display a list of text results,  Ravel draws a visual map of the results, showing the relationships among cases and their relative importance to each other. Results are displayed in a cluster map, with a timeline shown below. Each dot in the cluster is another case.
Ravel is currently free during beta-testing.  

Crowdsourcing the Statutes at Large

This recent email came from James Jacobs, one of the Government Information librarians at Stanford University library and a founder of the Free Government Information blog :
Hi All, Do you love the Statutes at Large? (note: who doesn't???) then please help... the Congressional Data Coalition (http://congressionaldata.org) with a project to proofread digital SaL for permanent free public access! You can find directions for this project at https://hackpad.com/Statutes-at-Large-TOC-Signup-List-WEXNPB8aSp2. 

WestlawNext webinars for faculty

To help ease the transition for faculty from Westlaw Classic to WestlawNext, which is being phased out over the next couple of months, Westlaw is holding a series of free webinars to help introduce (or refresh) faculty to using WestlawNext.
There are 2 webinars available on a number of dates in May and June:
1.  From Classic to Next Basic
 In this basic webinar, you will learn where to find and how to use your favorite aspects of Westlaw Classic on WestlawNext. Learn about conducting finds and searches, including Boolean searches, and KeyCite and Key Numbers. We will also review how to save your Research Trails so you can have them available in WestlawNext.
2.  From Classic to Next Advanced
 In this advanced webinar, you will learn about Alerts on WestlawNext, how to use Custom Pages (similar to tabs on Westlaw Classic), Folders, and Practical Law. We will also review how to save your Research Trails so you can have them available in WestlawNext.
If interested, go to Westlaw's Faculty Webinar Page, select the date and time you prefer, and register for the webinar. 

William & Mary Law Library launches historic digital project

In honor of Law Day, the College of William & Mary's Wolf Law Library has launched a new digital project, "Wythepedia," an online encyclopedia named for William & Mary's -and the nation's - first law professor: George Wythe. Wythepedia features pages describing the library's George Wythe Collection, aspects of Wythe's life and death by poisoning, his letters and papers, and even some poetry. "Wythe has always been a somewhat forgotten Founding Father," said Linda K. Tesar, Head of Technical Services and Special Collections, and the project's Managing Editor. "Wythepedia was designed to bring some much deserved recognition to a statesmen who was a revolutionary, jurist, and mentor to the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay."

Fargo

Not the movie, not the TV show. Elmer Masters of CALI fame has written a blogpost on Slaw about Fargo the Outliner. Elmer's recommendations are always useful, and Fargo looks like super useful web-based software that helps you easily create outlines on the fly. Not only that but it has some excellent additional features that let you, for example, easily turn your outline into a presentation, or set up a note/link blog to track interesting things on the internet.  Thanks Elmer!
p.s. You need to have a Dropbox account (they're free) to use Fargo. 

Speaking of photocopying...

The ABA Journal  reports on a new feature created by the New York Times called "Verbatim". Verbatim is a performance series that will transform "verbatim legal transcripts into dramatic and often comedic performances". In this dramatization of transcripts from a legal deposition, a lawyer becomes embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier. It is from a real case in Cuyahoga County, Ohio that involved a challenge to a Cuyahoga County Recorder's Office policy.

Photocopying and copyright

Librarians are uncomfortably aware of the potential copyright issues posed by photocopiers. A fascinating article in a recent Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. titled "Modern Technology, Leaky Copyrights, And Claims Of Harm: Insights From The Curious History Of Photocopying " (58 page pdf) by NYU Law Professor Diane Leenheer Zimmerman looks at the law of copyright by way of the history of the xerox machine. She says, "The approach taken by this paper in trying to shed light on this topic is somewhat unusual in that it looks not so much to theory as to experience."

From the abstract: "The core problem this article attempts to address is what should count as “economic harm” in determining whether particular kinds of copying are appropriately treated as copyright infringement....What the paper concludes is that adequate copyright protection does not mean virtually airtight control over works by their owners. Considerable room for compromise between the public’s desire for free access, and the owners’ interest in retaining incentives to produce exists."

Government Relations Office to Host Open House During Federal Depository Library Conference

AALL's Government Relations Office (GRO) will host a special open house during the Government Printing Office's Depository Library Council Meeting and Federal Depository Library (FDL) Conference on May 1 from 5:30-6:30 p.m., followed by the annual law librarian and friends dinner just one block away at Kelly's Irish Times.AALL's GRO is located next door to the Government Printing Office, offering the perfect opportunity to see AALL's D.C. office and network with colleagues attending the FDL Conference. 

Congressional Quarterly database news

CQ.com has announced that "valuable new content and features are being added" to our CQ subscription this week:
 CQ.com will be refreshed with a new look.
 CQ Now, the new, real-time chronicle of the Capitol’s most important developments, will come directly from the intelligence-gathering team embedded in the halls of Congress. You can rely on CQ Now to flag every major floor action and committee markup as the legislative day unfolds.
 The  popular Today at a Glance feature will now be continually updated to reflect changes in the congressional schedule and latest action, with links to news coverage, documents and transcripts of note as they are published.
 Five new blogs will be added featuring expert analysis on key topics: Agriculture & Food, Banking & Finance, Defense, Energy & Climate and Transportation. Morning Take e-newsletters on each topic can be sent to your inbox at dawn at your one-click request. 

Legislative Research webinar series

ProQuest is hosting a series of webinars on "Using Legislative History to Find Legislative Intent" using the Congressional database meant especially for law students. This 90-minute session is designed for the summer associate, judicial, law firm or government agency law clerk, intern, extern or research assistant. You will learn how to use ProQuest Congressional to:
1. Develop an understanding of the legislative process both procedurally  (how did the language read as first proposed, what committees considered the proposal, when were amendments made and where was the proposal when it was amended)  and as an adversarial process (who was lobbying in support of the proposal and what were they trying to accomplish, who was active in opposition what were their objections, who was responsible for amendments to the proposal).
 2. Become familiar with the documents available pertinent to your issue.
3. Identify where in the process the changes you care about occurred – this provides a mechanism to narrow the scope of your search for explanations for why the language was changed;
4. Learn how to identify both direct and circumstantial evidence of intent.
The live webinar will be held on 6 different dates; click the link to register:
Fri. April 25  10 am
Thurs. May 1 1 pm
Fri. May 16 1 pm
Thurs. May 29 1:30 pm
Thurs. June 12 1 pm
Fri. June 20  9 am

New from the GPO: Baseball!

We just got the latest monthly list of New Titles from the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.  One of this month's new eBooks published by the GPO is Baseball: the national pastime in the National Archives.  It's got a lot of interesting factoids for baseball fans (did you know fan is short for aficionado?).  It also has images of the patents for  the first baseball bats, gloves and balls, filed by John Hillerich of Louisville Ky (his bat company is the maker of the Louisville Slugger); George Rawlings (baseball glove patent from 1885) and Benjamin Shibe, known as the Edison of Baseball (a baseball with a cork center in 1909).  There are also lots of historic photos.  

Heartbleed hints: do you need to change your passwords?

"Heartbleed" is a recently discovered internet security threat that has affected many websites.  Mashable has published a list of popular sites and information about whether you need to change your password for these sites. For example, Facebook: yes. LinkedIn: no.  

End of year hours

Remember that the law school's calendar is longer than the University's calendar. The University's final exam period is April 21-26; the law school's is April 24-May 7. For the university, the week of Sunday April 27 through Sunday May 4 is called "Interim" and the campus computer labs are all closed except the one in Hillman which has limited hours. So student printing can be an issue if you're not careful. The Barco printer will be working throughout our exam period.
On Sunday May 4 at midnight all the student print quotas reset so our students should have plenty of print quota for last-minute papers etc.  And Barco Law Library begins our summer hours on Thursday May 8; closing at 6 pm M-Th, 5 pm on Friday, open Saturday 9-5 and CLOSED on Sunday.  

Digital Preservation at the LOC

The Digital Preservation Blog on the Library of Congress website posted yesterday about a presentation on the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship and on using the Levels of Digital Preservation (1 page pdf) that have been developed by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. The National Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions to provide funders and executive decision‐makers insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for funding, research and development. The Levels of Digital Preservation is a tiered set of recommendations for how organizations should begin to build or enhance their digital preservation activities. It is intended to be a relatively easy-to-use set of guidelines useful not only for those just beginning to think about preserving their digital assets, but also for institutions planning the next steps in enhancing their existing digital preservation systems and workflows.
The LOC also has a helpful webpage on "Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories" with basic information about best practices for saving your digital photos, audio, video, email, and records.

Replacing Windows XP

For anyone who has a computer that still uses the Windows XP operating system: an interesting article in PC World, titled "Don't Waste Your Money trying to upgrade your Windows XP PC". The author says that basically even IF your computer meets the minimum system requirements for Windows 7 or Windows 8, you are still better off just buying a new computer.
And while you're thinking about XP, here's an interesting little newslet about XP's default wallpaper, called "Bliss"...which is an actual, unretouched, unphotoshopped photograph taken by photographer Charles O'Rear in Pittsburgh  Napa Valley.

The Flipped Classroom

Last week there was an interesting post on the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog about flipped learning and the flipped classroom, ideas that are slowly making their way into law school education.  This week Robert Talbert, the educator who wrote the post, has another post  on the topic - because the original post elicited a great deal of commentary.  Most of which made him angry.
It's interesting and points to a divide in faculty attitude towards students.  

April Fool's: funny federal publications

The GPO's Government Book Talk blog had an April Fool's Day post listing the "top ten" funny titles of federal documents. OK, they're only moderately funny.  But still. They're trying.