CMLawLibraryBlog

Did you borrow any OhioLINK books this semester? Maybe for seminar papers or cite checking? Now's the time to check your patron record, and see if those books are due! You can renew OhioLINK books up to four times, but eventually you'll have to return them.

Why remind you? Because OhioLINK fines are steep - $0.50 per day for overdue materials and then if you are billed for a book you still don't return, you're facing a $125.00 replacement fine. Not pretty, I know.

So bring us back our [OhioLINK] books, or we'll call you up and sing you this until you do!

Hein Online now has an online chat feature for you to get help with your searches. (Thanks to the Ross-Blakely Law Library Blog for the tip) From the main page, click on the link that looks like this:

If you are not familiar with Hein Online, it is a great place to find older law journal articles that are not on Lexis or Westlaw. There are also more recent law journal articles, federal regulation materials, federal legislative history materials and more.

Don't forget that Lexis and Westlaw also have online chat features, as well as hotlines to help you with your research. On Lexis, click on the "live support" link. On Westlaw, click on the Help link in the top right hand corner. For help with BNA databases, click on "contact us" at the top of the screen for phone and email contact information. See the Electronic Resources page for a list of BNA databases.

Of course, the law library research librarians will be happy to help you with any of these databases.

BOOK 'EM EARLY. Study rooms may be reserved 72 hrs in advance in person and 24 hrs in advance via phone. You must have 2 or more people in order to reserve a study room and we will hold the room up to 30 mins before it will be canceled and opened up for another study group. Study rooms may be reserved up to 3 continuous hours.

We do ask if you aren't able to make your reservation to give us a call so we can free it up for another study group.

Don't let the stress of upcoming exams take a toll on your body. Get enough sleep, drink plenty of water and don't forget to get out and exercise!

The CSU Recreation Center can help you out with that last one. From December 10 - 17, the Rec Center is offering Cram Jam -- free classes in group x, spinning, H2O-water aerobics, mind & body, and dance classes. Cram Jam should be just in time for you to de-stress from your first exams while you gear up for your last couple.

Thanks to Professor Steven Steinglass for pointing out this inaccuracy:

Check out the Wikipedia entry on the Ohio Constitution. Here is a quote:

"With the tremendous growth of the state's population, and the strains and exigencies of the Great Depression and both World War I and World War II, it became clear that the 1912 Constitution was inadequate to the needs of a modern state government. A fifth constitutional convention drafted a new constitution, which was duly adopted by state voters, taking effect on September 1, 1951."

This is total fiction. In reality, there was no fifth constitutional convention in 1951, nor was a new constitution drafted at that time. See Steven H. Steinglass, The Ohio State Constitution, A Reference Guide, Introduction , (2004) KFO401 1851 .A6 S74 2004 . There were only four constitutional conventions, the first produced the first Ohio Constitution in 1802, the second produced the Ohio Constitution of 1851, the 1873-74 convention produced a constitution which the voters rejected and the last convention in 1912 created amendments which were adopted by voters. The 1851 Constitution, as amended is the Constitution currently in effect.

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, so inaccuracies do occur. To see who wrote an article in Wikipedia, click on the History tab at the top of the article. The Ohio Constitution entry was originally written by a group known as Wikiproject Ohio, but the entry may have been edited by others. To find out who has edited a page, click on the "Edit this Page" tab at the top of the Wikipedia article, then click on "this page's edit history".

Either I or Professor Steinglass will edit the error in the near future.

Thanks to David Monniaux for some corrections to my original post.

Preparation for exams, closed or open book, should be approached in the same manner. While the information is in front of you, you will not have time to flip through your notes to search for the information you need. Most open book exams are not just testing the law but the application of the law to a certain set of facts, and the questions are more complex. You need all the time you can get. Having a well written outline will assist you in finding the information and organizing your answer. See The Eight Secrets of Top Exam Performance in Law School by Charles Whitebread and “When you come to a Fork in the Road, Take It, and Other Sage Advice for First-Time Law School Exam Takers” (Spring 2006) 22 Ga.St.U.L.Rev 653

For additional tips on exam prep, check out Preparing for Exams.

Looking for journal articles for your research paper, hoping to find electronic copy, but can't find electronic versions of your needed journals in LexisNexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, SCHOLAR, JSTOR, or the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center? Check out the Directory of Open Access Journals. The DOAJ "aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content." It provides access to nearly 163,000 articles in over 2900 journals. In addition to Law and Political Science, journal subject areas include Agriculture and Food Sciences, Arts and Architecture, Biology and Life Sciences, Business and Economics, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, General Works, Health Sciences, History and Archaeology, Languages and Literatures, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Religion, Physics and Astronomy, Science, Social Sciences, and Technology and Engineering. You can expand the subject directory of journals to zero in on a journal topic or search for a specific journal title. You can also search for articles within a subset of its journal collection; currently 965 journals can be "article-searched." The DOAJ is hosted and maintained by the Lund University Libraries Head Office.

Just in time for paper writing season comes Professor William Mock’s short, incisive, instructive, and heavily footnoted guide to the types of footnotes used in legal writing. “When a Rose Isn't 'Arose' Isn't Arroz: A Student Guide to Footnoting for Informational Clarity and Scholarly Discourse” describes and illustrates referential, factual, and idea footnotes with many examples and tips for effectively advancing scholarship objectives. It’s an entertaining read, as well!

Mock, William B.T., "When a Rose Isn't 'Arose' Isn't Arroz: A Student Guide to Footnoting for Informational Clarity and Scholarly Discourse" . International Journal of Legal Information, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 87, 2006 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1019891

Back when, you decided you wanted to go to law school. Then you picked a school. Now that you’re here at C-M Law, you decide each semester which classes to take. You’ll face choosing a law firm. But it doesn’t stop there!

In her article “How New Lawyers Can Choose Assignments Wisely,” Petra Pasternak explains how the choice of work assignments in law firms can have a huge effect on associate satisfaction and can even influence future career paths. She outlines three general systems of work assignment and gives tips on how to play the game of seeking out personally interesting assignments while keeping partners happy.

Now if you could just decide between the pumpkin pie, the pecan pie and the sweet potato pie!

The Ohio Supreme Court issued proposed Superintendence Rules which, if adopted, will govern all Ohio courts concerning the sealing of records and redacting of information. The proposed rules:

• Define "court record", and state that court records shall be made available for public access.
• Provide for partial redaction or omission of social security numbers and other identifying information.
• Provide that a party to a case, or person whom the information is about, may request that the court limit access to case information. The court can limit public access, if it finds that the presumption of allowing public access is outweighed by a higher interest" after considering a list of four factors. The court must use the least restrictive means of limiting access.
• Create a procedure where any person can request access to documents or information that has been granted "limited public access".
• Create rules for bulk distribution of court information and custom compilation of the information.

The Law Library will be CLOSED Thursday and Friday in observance of Thanksgiving. We will be open Saturday 9am-6pm and Sunday Noon-9pm. Regular semester hours will resume on Monday. Have a Safe and Happy Thanksgiving.

Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings has just released Most Cited Faculty by Specialty, 2000-2007, listing the ten (in some cases 20) most cited faculty in eighteen legal specialty areas. A “citation” for purposes of the study was an article that referenced the scholar, rather than the number of citations within the article. Within each specialty, Leiter identifies the scholar, current academic affiliation, number of citations and scholar’s age, and follows with a list of runners-up. He also includes a list of citations for scholars who don’t usually publish in each of the areas, but who nonetheless were highly cited. Age matters: the majority of the highly sighted scholars were in their 50’s and 60’s.

See also Joe Hodnicki’s comments on the study on the Law Librarian Blog

Every Federal Rule of Civil Procedure will be changed, effective Dec. 1, 2007, unless Congress acts otherwise. The changes include substantive changes, organizational changes (moving sections around) and stylistic changes. The stylistic changes are being made because the Civil Rules have been amended piece-meal over the years, and the language sometimes does not track from one rule to another. The rules contain arcane language. Although the stylistic changes are not supposed to change the meaning of the rules, some attorneys may base arguments upon subtle differences in the language. See West's five-minute video: Major Federal Civil Procedural Rules Changes Effective Dec. 1st, 2007.

Some legal scholars question whether changes in the language of the rules can be made without changing the meaning of the rules. These scholars believe the amended rules will create chaos in the courts, with little benefits. The Law Librarian Blog cites two articles which advocate the postponement of the effective date of the new rules, so the new rules can be studied further:

• Jeremy Counseller and Rory Ryan's The Restyling of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: A Solution in Search of a Problem on Washington University's Slip Opinions, and
• Jeffrey Parker's Postponing the 2007 'Restyling' Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on SSRN.

Thanks go to the Law Librarian Blog, which posted the following: Restyling the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Thompson West Video on Revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

At last! You can now easily get to the digest topic outline on Westlaw via a link on the top of the Westlaw page that says "Key Numbers". Before, you had to click on "Site Map" to get to the topic outline, which was not obvious.

Additionally, when you click on the "Key Numbers" link, you can do a term search to find relevant key numbers. This search will find key numbers in the entire West's Digest set for the jurisdiction or jurisdictions you select. An electronic search of the entire digest for relevant key numbers previously did not exist.

Kudos to the Out of the Jungle blog for bringing this to our attention.

For more on the West Key Number system in general, see West's Key Number System - The Key to Finding Good Law.

The Illinois Trial Practice Weblog, written by attorney Evan Schaeffer, has lots of advice concerning appellate arguments. Check out his posts in the appeals category, the most recent of which is entitled Appellate Court - Never Read Your Argument. This post contains Schaeffer's personal oral argument preparation techniques. Schaeffer also has practical legal writing advice - see the Legal Writing category.

Source: Stark County Law Library Blog.

Cameron Stracher, Commentary: Guerrilla Tactics Can Help You Survive the Recruiting Jungle, The American Lawyer, Nov. 9, 2007 (on Lawjobs.com), tells you how you can get a big firm job even if you did not get an on-campus interview. The article highlights tactics such as calling the recruiting coordinator directly, using your contacts and even crashing law firm parties. Law firm partners want someone with the enthusiasm and chutzpah to employ these guerrilla tactics, says Stracher.

In Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research , Syracuse University College of Law Professor Ian Gallacher focuses on how the increasingly digital legal publishing environment limits the ability of all users to access the law. Saying good-bye to print research techniques doesn’t burden the legal researcher with full and unfettered access to Westlaw and Lexis: both systems offer the self-indexing approaches of Boolean and natural language searching, as well as numerous pre-indexing editorial enhancements common to print tools. Gallacher, however, is concerned that open access alternatives to the major legal information vendors do not provide sufficient indexing retrieval mechanisms.

Gallacher uses social networking theory to describe how the pre-indexing inherent in judicial opinion writing can be used to map the relationships between authorities and the evolution of legal issues. The idea is to map case "A" by showing cases that relied upon case "A"(which cases would appear in a Shepards or Keycite) and cases which case "A" relied upon (which cases that would appear in a Lexis Table of Authorities). A database could employ a graphical representation to "allow the researcher to see the cases the court believed were most important to its decision on a particular issue and would permit the researcher to understand the relationships that exist between cases as they contribute to the development of a piece of legal doctrine."

Gallacher, Ian, "Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research" (October 24, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1024176

As exam period approaches, the last thing you want as an extra stressor in your life is a dysfunctional study group. After all, study groups are supposed to facilitate learning, right? Not become immense wasters of your ever-more-elusive time.

A brief article by Amy L. Jarmon in the November issue of Student Lawyer offers some good "rules of the road" for successful study groups. Some of the tips are just plain etiquette - like having a rotating or permanent group moderator who is responsible for conveying information to others. Other tips are about optimal size of groups (3 - 4 members) or how to benefit from different individual learning styles.

If you want to read the article, you can ask for the current of issue of Student Lawyer at the Information Services desk. Student Lawyer also regularly runs short articles on interviewing, legal writing, professionalism, hot practice areas and other topics. It's the kind of publication you can easily flip through on a quick study break.

And of course, the Library offers study rooms for group study -- but they tend to fill up quickly the closer we get to exams, so reserve one in advance for your group at the Information Services desk.

Law schools are changing their curriculum to better train law students for the real world. See Jonathon D. Glater, Training Law Students for Real Life Careers New York Times, Oct. 31, 2007. The curriculum changes mentioned in the article include:

• Teaching students to interpret statutes and regulations, not just cases.
• Encouraging students to take graduate classes in non-law subjects.
• Increasing the emphasis on foreign laws and legal systems.
• Creating or expanding clinical programs.
• Providing class credit for an externship with a practicing attorney.

Source: Out of the Jungle blog

Findlaw.com provides various outlines and exams broken down by area of law. Some of the material is slightly dated, but could still be useful when studying or preparing for exams. Findlaw does not maintain the links, so some of the links they provide may be dead.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a trial court judge may decide whether Ohio's legal injection execution method is cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections filed a writ of prohibition with the Ohio Supreme Court, attempting to stop Lorain County Judge Burge from making a decision on the 8th Amendment issue. The Department of Corrections argued that the trial judge was overstepping his authority and only federal judges can decide the issue. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled otherwise. The Ohio Department of Corrections must now disclose its execution procedures to Judge Burge. The judge will decide the issue before the defendant's capital murder trial starts. See docket for State of Ohio ex rel. Terry Collins v. Burge, Case No. 2007-1576. Source: Reginald Fields, Lorain County Judge to Decide Legality of Lethal Injection Process,The Plain Dealer, Nov. 1, 2007.

The issue of whether certain lethal injection methods are cruel and unusual punishment will soon be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court is examining Kentucky's legal injection method, but the case will probably resolve the issue in other states as well. See docket for Baze v. Rees, Case No. 07-5439. More information is on BNA, Supreme Court Today.

In Ohio, not only is the lethal injection method under scrutiny, but the entire death penalty system. A team of Ohio legal experts, including Cleveland-Marshall Associate Dean Phyllis Crocker, found that Ohio’s death penalty system has inadequate procedures to protect defendants. The experts, working under the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, urged Governor Strickland to temporarily suspend executions in Ohio. See ABA News Release.

Continuing coverage of Ohio death penalty news can be obtained from the ACLU of Ohio News Center.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Stanford Law School are leading an effort to study law school curriculum and how to provide more real-world training for law students. Ten law schools are participating in the study. The project is in its initial phases, and details have not been worked out. Source: Vesna Jaksic, A Fresh Look at Legal Education ,The National Law Journal, Oct. 29, 2007.

The Carnegie Foundation recently released the results of a two-year study on legal education. The law library owns a copy of this study: Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, San Francisco : Jossey-Bass/Wiley, KF272 .E38 2007.

Source: CALI's Pre-Law Blog

You may notice a new addition to your law school Westlaw page. The page contains a search box for Westlaw WebPlus, which sorts Internet search results by legal relevance. You can search for legal news, information on a legal issue or information on a company, person, government entity or organization. Results can be broken down into smaller categories, by selecting "filter results by subject". There are also filters for domain name and file format.

Source: Wisblawg

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