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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.

Legalese as a Second Language: Definition of the Day

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | February 28, 2008 - 08:59

Yes, the law has its own vocabulary, and it takes a while for students to comfortably throw around terms that have one meaning in everyday English and a completely different one when expressing a legal concept. Facility comes with complete understanding and incorporation of the underlying issue, so that when you say “ripeness” you aren’t even thinking about fruit. Check out Definition of the Day, a new occasional feature of the Legal Information Institute’s Blog LII Announce, to enhance your vocabulary comprehension: see ripeness and assumption of the risk for example. References to primary authority and links to extended discussion in LII’s online encyclopedia Wex, provide additional opportunity to firm up your legal language skills.


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CiteULike - It's del.icio.us for academia

Amy Burchfield, Access & Faculty Services Librarian amy.burchfield@law.csuohio.edu | February 28, 2008 - 08:08

Many of you are probably busily using tags on del.icio.us for sharing and discovering general information on the Web. CiteULike offers the same ability to share your resources with others and find out what others are interested in – but with an academic twist. Whereas del.icio.us is an all-purpose social bookmarking tool for the wide wide Web, CiteULike is designed with students and academics in mind. You’re much less likely to find shopping sites and YouTube videos tagged on CiteULike, and much more likely to find the latest research on computers, science, and even law.

Using social booking applications like CiteULike allows you to keep your online research all in one place while you’re researching and writing, and the “social” aspect allows you to discover what other people find useful on your topic by exploiting the tagging feature.

What makes CiteULike even more attractive for academic users is the site’s ability to automatically draw in the citation information from certain databases [see faq for which ones] directly into your personal CiteULike library. Full disclosure: no, this automatic citation feature unfortunately doesn’t work yet for Lexis and Westlaw, so you’d still have to type the citation information into your personal library. Does this ruin the appeal of CiteULike for law researchers? No, since think of all the legal research that’s done outside of these two traditional legal databases.


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