CMLawLibraryBlog

The California Supreme Court has just affirmed the right to gay marriage, making it the second state, after Massachusetts, to extend the right. Read the decision here and news coverage here, here and here.

The U.S. Department of the Interior [press release], following the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has announced the listing of polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The decision came after a three-year legal battle and law suit brought by Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Natural Resources Defense Council [links for individual press releases] against the two government agencies. If you’re interested in reading the case against Interior and Fish and Wildlife, the citation is 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34753.

On an ironic personal note, I happened to be watching the Golden Compass the same time the polar bear protection announcement was made. Iorek Byrnison, the armored ice bear, would be happy.

You know we want to you come visit us at the Library, even once you’ve graduated. And with your Alumni Borrower’s Card [online application], you can still check out the Law Library materials that you’ve come to know so well over your time in law school. On our services for alumni page, you’ll find more useful stuff like guides for career resources, legal publishers, professionalism, and CLE materials. The Library also offers a computer room for alumni use. Hope to see you back soon!

Westlaw reclassified over 500,000 headnotes, particularly in the Criminal Law topic. Some of the changes are apparent if you log on to Westlaw,
click on "Key Numbers" at the top, and open up the Criminal Law topic. You will see that the "Sentencing Guidelines" section has been moved to the "Sentencing and Punishment" topic, etc. Minor changes have been made to the following topics: Automobiles, Innkeepers, Insurance and Negligence.

If you are searching online, you can still search using the old key number. The old key numbers are listed next to the new key numbers in the case headnotes. The print Digests will eventually incorporate the new changes, either by pocket part or by a replacement volume.

There is also a correlation table in the print version of the West's Digest (for example, West's Ohio Digest), that will tell you which new digest number corresponds to the old number, and vice-versa. The correlation table is usually located at the beginning of the topic, after the topic outline. Of course, the correlation tables in the current print volumes reflect only changes made to key numbers last year, not the most current crop of changes.

Looking for a job? Our newly posted resource guides may help:

• Law Career Resources links to online job boards such as ABA Job listings and Vault.com. This resource guide lists books on job search strategies and legal career options.
• Intellectual Property Law Career Resources and International Law Career Resources link to job postings and career websites, have information on researching employers and list books for these specialty careers.

Also take a look at Cleveland Marshall's Office of Career Planning web page.

Recent graduates who have added sheets to their network printing account and who have sheets remaining as of 8/01/08 are entitled to a refund of that amount if it is more than $1.00.* To obtain your refund, you’ll need to make an appointment, come to the Law Library and fill out a form to take to the Bursar’s Office for actual payment. The deadline for requesting a refund is 12/31/08. Contact David Genzen, Director of Technology Operations, phone 216-523-7372, or email david.genzen@law.csuohio.edu

*This refund applies only to your lab network printing account and only to value that you have added to that account. Refunds are not given for the pages that the school adds to your account at the beginning of the academic year. Also, we do not give refunds for value added to copy cards.

If this isn’t law student creativity, I don’t know what is.

José Arcadio Klein, 3L at Harvard, has designed a line of “Learned Handmade Plates.” Klein describes the Legal Plate Project as “represent[ing] an album of the American Law School Experience. The plates are snapshots from the core of law as it is taught. Most law students have been expected to memorize most of the cases depicted here. They have been evaluated on the basis of how well they can reproduce the information these cases contain.”

And indeed, in the collection you can find plates for such classic cases as Ex Parte Quirin, Phillip Morris USA v. Williams, Brandenburg v. Ohio, or A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. and others. There are also commemorative plates for all current Supreme Court Justices [I like the Scalia plate the best].

The plates are on sale through Etsy, the Ebay of handmade goods, minus the bidding. And yes, there’s a graduation sale on the Supremes.

Tip: Et Seq.: The Harvard Law School Library Blog

Starting today and continuing for three days straight, the Web magazine Slate will run a special report on procrastination. In it, you can find out stuff like how to bank on investments in procrastination culture and pick up some summer reads on procrastination.

If you’ve been putting off some legal career-related tasks, a couple books to nudge you along –

• How To Study for the Bar Exam in Three Days
  (NOT that I’m encouraging you to try this – in fact, better to look at our Bar Exam Resource guide now)

• Résumés for Law Careers

• Building Career Connections: Networking Tools for Law Students and New Lawyers

fyi…there are only 78 days until the July Bar!

Two of the champions and leaders of the movement to bring case law into the public domain so that attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public can freely access federal and state court decisions, participated in a recent podcast on Lawyer2Lawyer. Tom Bruce, co-founder of the Legal Information Network, and Carl Malamud, founder of PublicResource.org spoke of the importance of removing barriers so that, in our nation of laws, the law itself should be available without “passing a cash register.” Answering charges the Westlaw and LexisNexis duopoly prevents new entrepreneurs from developing more cost effective legal research systems was Andy Martens of Thomson West.

Not quite the flip side of the public access issue, is Tom Bruce’s thoughtful blog discussion of the issue of privacy facing legal information providers: in our clamoring for free and open access to the workings of the legal system, how do we balance the public right to know with the individual’s right to privacy and security? He argues that it is the responsibility of the courts to determine, with “vigorous public involvement” the standards and policies that best preserve both interests.

Professor John F. Duffy, of George Washington University School of Law, has discovered a defect in the appointment process of Patent Judges. These Judges have been appointed by a government official, who does not have the Constitutional power of appointment. Currently, 46 of the 74 Judges on the Patent Court have been appointed by this flawed process. This flaw could invalidate thousands of patent law decision by these courts. To read the NY Times article click here. To download Prof. Duffy's article click here.

This post is courtesy of Tim Woods, 2005 CM Alumni.

Many law schools impose a mandatory lap top requirement; at Cleveland Marshall, over 90% of the students have their own laptop computers as it is. But there is also a backlash from faculty in some places claiming that laptop use in the classroom interferes with teaching and learning. We reported earlier about the University of Chicago Law School banning internet access in the classroom. Now Kevin Yamamoto has published “Banning Laptops in the Classroom: Is it Worth the Hassles?” (Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 57, 2008 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1078740 ), recounting his experience banning laptops in his classroom and citing studies on the effect of classroom web browsing on student grades, as well as the effectiveness of typing over handwriting for note-taking. Yamamoto concludes that professors should ban or restrict laptops absent a showing that their use increases learning.

Two discrimination-related titles that have just landed on the new book cart are Anna Kirkland’s Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood and John Parry’s Disability Discrimination Law, Evidence and Testimony.

Fat Rights addresses how weight might fit into the traditional civil rights structure, while Disability Discrimination serves as a reference manual on the law of mental and physical disabilities. Both titles are available on the Atrium.

As posted earlier, 2008 has been designated by the U.N. as the International Year of Languages. The UNESCO portal provides some interesting tidbits on languages.

Did you know that --

• More than 50% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide are likely to die out within the next few generations?

• 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by a mere 4% of the world’s population?

• Fewer than 100 languages are used in digital environments?

Minority languages are afforded some measure of protection through human rights mechanisms such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 27), and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

One of the most linguistically rich areas of the world is Africa, with an estimated 2,000 languages spoken on the continent [see Major Languages of Africa from PanAfriL10n from more details.] The topic of international legal protection for African languages is taken up in this new GlobaLex guide, “Towards the Human Rights Protection of Minority Languages in Africa” by Innocent Maja of Zimbabwe. It’s one of a large collection of research guides on international and foreign law topics available through GlobaLex.

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