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CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

Search Updates Can be Emailed from Current Law Journal Contents

Sue Altmeyer, Electronic Services Librarian, sue.altmeyer@law.csuohio.edu | August 30, 2007 - 17:35

Washington and Lee's Current Law Journal Contents can now store your searches and run them weekly against tables of contents that were added during that week. The new search results will be emailed to you.

To use this free service, go to the Current Law Journal Contents site, and click on "Create profile". Searches use AND, OR, NOT, * as a wildcard and "" for phrases. "And" is implied as a connector. Field searching is available for au=author,ti=title, jo=journal, ab=abstract. The default is to search author/title/abstracts. Not many articles in the database have abstracts. For more search syntax hints, click on explanation at the top of the page. CLJC covers 1336 law journals.

A similar free service is Findlaw Abstracts Subscriptions. The Findlaw service does not save searches, but you can select topics of interest and receive notification of new articles on those topics.

Thanks to John Doyle of Washington & Lee Law School for the tip.

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Using Dictionaries for Statutory Interpretation

Sue Altmeyer, Electronic Services Librarian, sue.altmeyer@law.csuohio.edu | August 30, 2007 - 12:27

Black's Law DictionaryA recent article offers tips for using dictionaries for statutory interpretation. The article points out that in some circumstances, judges will employ dictionaries in order to determine the plain meaning of a statute. This use of dictionaries can be instead of, or in addition to, examining legislative history. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia often uses dictionaries for statutory interpretation.

Metzmeier suggests several rules for using dictionaries to interpret statutes. First, several respected unabridged dictionaries should be consulted. Second, the dictionary should be one published near the same point in time that the statutory language was enacted. Third, specialized dictionaries should be consulted to obtain definitions of terms used by a particular profession.

The article is: Metzmeier, Kurt X., "You Can Look it Up: The Use of Dictionaries in Interpreting Statutes" . Louisville Bar Briefs, pp. 14-15, July 2007 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1005653


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