CMLawLibraryBlog

Professor Janice Aitken told me about using mind maps or flowcharts as a research log. Flowcharts can contain more words, so maybe they are better for a research log. Mind maps have plenty of fans, however. Attorney Maxwell Kennerly said of mind maps:

"Personally, I find that if I'm dealing with a lot of issues at once -- as is frequently the case in business litigation, multi-defendant personal injury cases, or cases involving a lot of documents -- there are few better ways to get everything in your brain down onto paper in a coherent form." (see his post on the Litigation & Trial Blog - Free Mind Mapping Programs ).

I tried a number of different free mind mapping and flowchart programs. My favorites were Bubbl.us for flowcharts and Mindomo or Mindmeister for mindmaps. I like these three because they are free, easy to use and allow for collaborative editing. Only people you specify can see the diagrams, and only people you specify can edit them. You can export the diagrams you make and save as them as an image, which can be posted to a Wiki or other website.

Here is an example of a mind map I made of a research problem concerning a petting zoo's liability for a child being bitten by a rabbit. I made a similar flowchart, which can be accessed by establishing a free Gliffy account.

Brian Leiter's Law School Reports has posted a new study by Roger Williams University School of Law on faculty productivity of law schools outside the U.S. News and World Report's top 50 law schools. The study reviewed scholarly productivity over a 15 year period.

Each year Beloit College compiles a Mindset List to give faculty a sense of the “rapidly changing frame of reference” of incoming freshmen. Check out the new List or link from it to a few earlier ones. Check out the list for the class of 2008, our incoming law school class, assuming they came to law school directly from college.

Empirical legal studies wouldn’t exist as a discipline, of course, without its foundation in statistical research. Over 100 federal government agencies compile staggering amounts of statistical data, all of which is neatly organized and readily accessible through FedStats. While far from glitzy, FedStats is nonetheless an excellent portal to federal agency statistics on hundreds of topics, organized by subjects and agencies. There’s even a section for kids.

So if statistics make you queasy, as they do me, FedStats might just ease you gently into numbers research.

Rebecca Flanagan, Director of the Academic Success Program at Vermont Law School proposes using a visual arrangement to brief cases, called the "star strategy". The star strategy was developed by Lynn Melzer, PhD, of the The Research Institute for Learning and Development.

Source: Law School Academic Support Blog,(Rebecca Flanagan).

The star diagram was created by Melzer as a tool for students to organize their thoughts before writing. Melzer put the main topic in the middle, surrounded by who, what, when, where, why and how at the points of the star.

I came up with this "diamond strategy" diagram, based on the more traditional IRAC approach (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion):

 (More)

Check out the Top 35 Law Professor Blogs rankings, released yesterday. The rankings are taken from the Law Professor Blogger Census. The blogs must be edited by law professors, and have traffic over the past 12 months with publicly available sitemeters. Some popular law prof blogs, such as Feminist Law Professors, are not included because their sitemeters are not publicly available.

The Law Professor Blogger Census contains lots links to professor blogs. You may also want to look at Law Professor Blogs.com and Law X.0 to find more blogs of interest.

Tip from TaxProf Blog

A recent post on the Legal Scholarship Blog features a call for papers for the Fall 2009 Best Practices in Persuasion issue of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (J. ALWD). Deadline for submissions for the Fall 2009 issue is September 15, 2008. For more information, see the JALWD website.

The AALS International Human Rights Law Section is repeating its “New Voices” program at the 2009 Annual Meeting on January 7, 2009. Interested individuals should submit an abstract of no more than two pages describing their research or scholarship by August 15, 2008. For detailed information, see the call for papers in the Section newsletter.

A while ago, I did a post on Prof. Douglas Berman's course blog Legislation Course (at) Moritz College of Law. As you might recall, Professor Berman used the blog to discuss legal issues and course mechanics with students.

Here are some more examples of course blogs:

• What is Fair Use? (Peter Friedman)- Incorporates copyright web sites, music files and videos. (Thanks to the Barclay Blog).
• Entertainment Law, Randazza Tabs at the top of the blog create separate pages for course documents, class policies, etc. The students were required to post blog comments on legal issues and cases - example . There are also posts where the students can ask questions - example.
• Internet Law, Grimmelman Posts are categorized by assignments. The students were required to do blog posts.

If anyone has a course blog they'd like to share, or experiences regarding course blogs, please comment!

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a faculty member discovering and using Facebook . She speaks of the delights in discovering more about her students and how that in turn helps her be a better mentor. On the flip side, when grades come out and some do not do as well as others, the students' Facebook walls may not be very complimentary. And all of this in real time...no waiting until the next semester.

Would you invite your student/professor as a friend?

Introducing Faculty Mini Sessions, a one-on-one educational service available to faculty members at C-M Law. When you schedule a faculty mini session, a librarian will be happy to meet with you one-on-one in your office to discuss anything from using Lexis and Westlaw to podcasting and social networking. In each session, you’ll have a chance for individual attention and training in a host of research and technology areas. What’s more, you can set up a mini-session to discuss a particular issue or just as a personal information session to find out more about a new technology or service. It’s up to you. Sessions can be scheduled anytime to fit your schedule. For a full list of ideas for mini session topics, check out the faculty services page.

An article in Monday’s New York Times looks at the phenomena of ranking download statistics on the Social Science Research Network: Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings, Too quotes Glenn Reynolds, Constitutional Law Professor at the University of Tennessee, upon finding that he came in fifth in total downloads over the last year, “If I could pick a certain 20 people to read my article, that would mean more to me than 20,000 others who read it.” And yet, he states, open access to academic literature should work to challenge authors to write in ways that are more “accessible” rather than “impenetrable.”

Cleveland-Marshall scholars post their papers in the SSRN Legal Scholarship Network Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series

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.

What is the C-M Law faculty writing about these days? A lot.

Try labor law, international law, capital punishment, bioethics, or antitrust immunity. Or predatory lending, cybermedicine and data protection, citizenship and immigration, or genetics and sexual orientation. Or race and freedom of expression, Black rights in Canada, or integration in the schools.

The Faculty Publications database provides full-text links to Lexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, SSRN, and free online sources for faculty scholarship. Search features allow you to pull up forthcoming works or works in progress, or to search by author, subject or publication type. New articles, books and other works are always being added to the database, so it’s an up-to-date resource for C-M Law faculty writing.

The Washington and Lee School of Law has announced plans to revamp its 3L curriculum. As reported by the National Law Journal, W & Lee plan on replacing all 3L academic classes with "experiential" learning. In other words, students would receive practical real world experience.

Change has been in the air. Stanford and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching along with 10 other law schools have joined in tackling the issues raised in the two-year study by the Carnegie Foundation. 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.

What if your professor commented upon your outline, so you would know where you are going wrong before the exam? Professor Steven Friedland of Nova Southeastern University invites his students to post their outlines to the course webpage, where he will comment upon them. (See his post on Best Practices for Legal Education Blog) Students can post outlines anonymously. Prof. Friedland uses Blackboard (Web CT) for his course page, but the same can be accomplished with TWEN or Lexis Course Pages. TWEN, Lexis and WebCT allow access only to students enrolled in the class. Google Docs is another option where access can be restricted to class members.

Engaged Learning is What Makes CSU Special, according to the University’s new marketing campaign. The buzzword itself isn’t unique to CSU, however: The Center for Engaged Learning in the Law (CELL) blog, hosted by Elon University School of Law aims to “contribute to the discourse on teaching and learning in law, from the inspirational to the whimsical, to the mechanical.” Contributors include professors from several universities.

Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog for discovering this resource.

Last night, Harvard University’s Arts and Sciences faculty voted to adopt a policy that requires faculty to submit their research to an open-access repository maintained by the university library. The text of the Harvard policy is posted at the Open Access News blog. News coverage of the move is available here [Chronicle of Higher Education] and here [New York Times].

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has already launched a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature called PubMed Central. The European Research Council has likewise released its Guidelines for Open Access.

For an example of the use of a blog for a law school class, see Prof. Douglas Berman's Legislation Course (at) Moritz College of Law. Professor Berman uses the blog to discuss legal issues as well class requirements. Source: Using Blogs Instead of Propriety eCourse Management Services, Law Librarian Blog.

While Prof. Berman's blog can be viewed by the public, blogs can be set up to be exclusive to class members. Students can comment and ask questions anonymously, which may encourage student questions. Discussion lists on TWEN, Lexis Course Pages and Web CT are another option. TWEN, Blackboard and Web CT also offer anonymity features.

There has been some controversy of late over a professor giving students course credit for writing posts on the professor's blog. See Should Law Profs Require Student Blog Participation?, Law Librarian Blog.

Washington & Lee University’s John Doyle has updated his Law Journal Ranking page for the period 2000-2007, with a couple of changes in methodology, most notably affecting the calculation of the impact factor. Doyle’s rankings attempt to assess the scholarly impact of a journal as measured by citations in current U.S. legal periodicals and federal and state case law. The database allows users to select journals by subject, type (student, peer edited, refereed), country, category as general or specialized, and ranking factors as an aid in the submission process.

The recently issued 2007 Law School Survey of Student Engagement report aims to provide law schools with insight into the actions and feelings of their students. More than 27,000 law students at 79 U.S. and Canadian law schools completed the online survey on which the report was based. The study looks at law student participation in class, involvement in law school organizations, interaction with professors and more. Comparisons are made by age and race of the student, as well as law school characteristics such as public vs. private, size and selectivity.

See the Jan. 3, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education article by Sara Lipka "Younger Law Students Report More Collaboration and Older Students More Diligence in Survey of Engagement" for highlights of the report.

I'm happy to announce the publication of the January - February 2008 issue of the Faculty Current Awareness Bulletin. In it, you'll find information on ten upcoming conferences and symposia, nine publishing opportunities, and more.

The Bulletin is published every other month and past issues can be viewed here.

Today's installment of Tech Therapy, The Chronicle of Higher Education's podcast series, presents "Setting Professors Right on Rights." It's a brief episode on the copyright and fair use implications of posting course materials on course webpages and other electronic media.

If you would like to delve deeper into the topic, have a look at Technology and Copyright Law: A Guidebook for Library, Research and Teaching Professions.

UCLA and Cornell Law Schools have joined to create a database of law journal articles that contain either original empirical research or significant analysis of data from other sources, such as census data. The ELS Bibliography contains articles dated July 2005 and later. The creators hope to add articles going back to 2005. See Database Description.

Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog for the tip.

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

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

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,