News for Canadian lawyers...

Lexbox is a free Google Chrome extension for use in Canada that helps users organize and monitor online legal research. It enables users to assemble in one central location relevant legal information from various online sources, and to create personalized alerts. Legal research is not a task completed on one single website. You may start with Google, then identify a few relevant cases on CanLII, note a regulation on a Queen’s Printer website, as well as a few web pages specifying the administrative policies of a regulatory body. The idea behind Lexbox is to provide a workspace to keep track of all this information in one centralized location. You can setup folders by client/file name or topics of interest, whatever makes most sense in your context. And because the documents saved in your Lexbox account remain on the publisher’s website, they keep being updated as the law changes..

TWEN to drop the term "dropbox"

An announcement from Westlaw Academic about TWEN:

* Important TWEN Announcement:

We are not changing functionality, but we will saying goodbye to the term, drop box.

Why? The term drop box has been confusing administrators and students alike since the advent of

Dropbox.com©.

What’s the plan?

Spring semester professors will see the term sections wherever they previously saw drop box. If, for

example, professors use their TWEN course(s) for more than one set of students, they will add an

additional section.

Spring semester, students will go to Assignments & Quizzes (currently they go to Assignment & Quiz

Drop Box). Neither the term drop box nor sections will be seen by students.

I have always found the term “assignment and quiz dropbox” to be awkward and confusing for both faculty and students, so the change is probably a good thing.

Practicing Law Institute online library now available

The Barco Law Library has purchased a subscription to the PLI collection of treatises, forms, course handbooks, and answer books for the University of Pittsburgh. The PLI collection is available both on- and off-campus, and the content has been catalogued so it is available through PittCat. You can browse the full collection or limit your search by such fields as author and date of publication. Users are encouraged to set up their own personalized accounts so they can save the books they want to use in one place. All the usual database functionality is available, such as creating permalinks, bookmarks, pdfs, emailing content, printing, etc.

Infographic guide to the war in Syria

The dizzyingly complex war taking place in Syria involves many countries, rebel forces, and other groups/actors. The online magazine Slate has published a helpful infographic chart showing who is fighting whom. The author also points out that "Many of the powers involved in the conflict have found themselves on the same side as countries they’re normally at odds with, and vice versa."

Law Library eBooks

Digital materials continue to pose problems for libraries. On the RIPS-SIS law librarian blog, librarian Jamie Baker (Texas Tech law school) has an interesting post titled "Issues Surrounding eBook Collections in Law Libraries." She uses Suffolk University Law School library as a case study, noting that Suffolk drastically cut its library budget by 50% and will be using the Lexis Nexis Digital Law Library as a partial replacement. Her analysis offers much food for thought.

Fastcase buys Loislaw

Recent big news in legal research land: Fastcase has purchased Loislaw from Wolters Kluwer. Dewey B. Strategic has a good blogpost examining the news, and talking about what this might mean for law libraries.

Barco Lost Book Processing Fee increase

Barco Law Library patrons FYI: the processing fee for lost books at the Barco Law Library has been increased to $35. This increase brings Barco's policy in line with the University Library System. If we can find a replacement copy the charge will be the replacement cost plus the $35 processing fee. IF a replacement copy is unable to be located then the fee will be a flat rate of $75 + the $35 processing fee.

Slaw on looseleafs

Slaw, Canada's online legal magazine, has taken on the thorny question of looseleafs in a series of articles. According to columnist Gary Rodrigues, "At the most recent meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Moncton, it was clear that the present, past and future of looseleaf services continue to be a source of angst and concern in the legal research community." In another column entitled "The Curse of the Loose Leaf Law Books" the author says " there is no future for loose-leaf publications, a publishing format on life support that should have died a natural death years ago."

U.S. Web Design Standards

The federal government recently posted U.S. Web Design Standards online. These are the outcome of a project to develop a U.S. government set of "common UI (user interface) components and visual styles for websites. It's a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences."
They are soliciting feedback for improvements via GitHub, and there are already over 2000 comments on the standards, including comments proposing that they incorporate recommendations for archivability within the standards.

Legal information for laypeople

An interesting article in SSRN titled "Lay Deployment of Professional Legal Knowledge" by three law professors looks at legal self-help materials that have been developed by the access to justice movement. From the abstract:

This Article makes two contributions. First, we develop a theory of the obstacles LMI individuals face when attempting to deploy professional legal knowledge. Second, we apply learning from fields as varied as psychology, public health, education, artificial intelligence, and marketing to develop a framework for how courts, legal aid organizations, law school clinics, and others might re-conceptualize the design and delivery of civil legal materials for unrepresented individuals. We illustrate our framework with examples of re-imagined civil legal materials.

Save the Inner Temple law library petition

A fellow law librarian in the UK has started an online petition to save the Inner Temple Library, located at the Inner Temple (one of the 4 Inns of Court in London). According to the petition, "the Inner Temple library, which has existed since 1440, is one of the finest law libraries in the world. It lies at the heart of the Inner Temple providing a free invaluable service to practitioners and students alike and serves a core charitable function of the Inn. Aesthetically, it is a masterpiece of library design with its double-height galleried rooms mentioned in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England. All of this is under threat" because of a proposal to "re-develop" the space. And there is an alternative possibility that is less expensive and wouldn't ruin the library.

U.S. Code Online - Quick Links to the Statutes at Large

Since 1926, the United States Code has been the official codification of Federal statutory law. The United States Code contains the general and permanent laws of the United States, organized into titles based on subject matter. The printed and online versions of the United States Code are prepared by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, an independent, nonpolitical office in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Law Library of Congress blog, In Custodia Legis, recently had a post about enhancements that the Office of Law Revision Counsel has made to their  online US Code. For example, users can now easily jump from the US Code to pinpoint page citations in the Statutes at Large. Easy navigation tools allow users to jump to other volumes/pages. The newly expanded coverage now includes every page of the Statutes at Large, from volume 1, page 1 (Declaration of Independence) to the most recent slip laws published by GPO.

U.S. elections guide

A gov docs librarian in Mobile, Alabama has created a useful, thorough guide to U.S. elections with links to relevant informational websites. The guide includes information about the 2016 Presidential election candidates, the electoral college, election history, campaign finance, voter registration, and other relevant topics.  

Do you like Google's new logo?

Many do not; the reasons are explained by Sarah Larson in an excellent essay in the New Yorker. 

Legal Writing Tips from Justice Kagan

Time magazine has a story describing an interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in which she offers helpful hints on legal writing - and writing in general.

"The key, Kagan explains, is understanding that legal writing and writing for a general audience aren’t so different. If you work in a technical field — like law — don’t write like you’re addressing a technical audience. Kagan implored law schools to teach better writing skills to their students. 'There’s not some special magic to good legal writing. To be a good legal writer, honestly, is to know the law, and to be a good writer.'”

hat tip: Karen Shephard 

Readex online training

Readex is offering free fall training sessions for its various database collections, including a September 29 training in America's Historical Government Publications (including U.S. Congressional Serial Set and American State Papers).  You can find out more about the trainings and register on the Readex website. 

Voting booth privacy and selfies

The ABA Journal has an article about... well, another article, in the New York Times... about whether people who take selfies in the voting booth (to show their cast ballots) are violating laws that protect privacy in the voting booth.  The NYT is quoted as saying "concerned that the practice could threaten voting rights, some lawmakers have expressly banned doing so. In other states, existing laws concerning voting and photography at least arguably prohibit selfies".

New journal focuses on technology and privacy

beSpacific reports the launch of an important new academic journal, The Journal of Technology Science.  The new journal focuses on the intersection of technology and its various impacts on society. The journal is examining this topic in breadth and depth, explaining on its web site: “The scientific study of technology-society clashes is a cross-disciplinary pursuit, so papers in Technology Science may come from any of many possible disciplinary traditions, including but not limited to social science, computer science, political science, law, economics, policy, or statistics.”  Institutional one-year subscriptions are listed as costing $25,000, "which (according to the license agreement) is currently discounted at 50 percent from the $50,000 regular license fee. " (!)
The first articles in the new journal include:
Did you really agree to that? The Evolution of Facebook’s Privacy Policy, and
Who’s Paying More to Tour These United States? International Travel & Price Discrimination.

Amusing musings on The Bluebook

With school starting and a new batch of 1Ls arriving and the publication of the 20th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, the ABA Journal has published some amusing commentary by Bryan Garner on the Bluebook.
A few quotes:

"What I’ve come to realize is that when it comes to The Bluebook, small changes are made for the sake of making small changes."

"From an author’s standpoint, the most irksome thing about a new Bluebook is the nettlesome changes that take place."

"There are rules, you see, exceptions to rules and exceptions to exceptions. These are all elaborated in the 560 pages of the 20th edition. By contrast, the earliest edition of The Bluebook in my possession is the 10th edition of 1958. It weighs in at 124 pages."

Orientation!

1L orientation for the Class of 2018 begins Tuesday August 18 and runs through Friday. The schedule is available here on the Pitt Law website.
 Welcome everyone!