CMLawLibraryBlog

Thanks to yesterday’s post on Out of the Jungle, I was tipped off to HeinOnline’s Facebook debut. Doesn’t surprise me in the least that this family-run legal information purveyor is reaching out to customers through social-networking media. You can also check out how-to videos on various HeinOnline collections on their YouTube channel. Some of the most popular collections in the database are law journals, session laws, CFR, English Reports, legal classics, U.S. Supreme Court library, U.S. Congressional documents, and world trials.

Our Amy Burchfield was much too modest in her previous post There’s More on Sports Law Than You Think. When she referred to the recently updated International Sports Law resource guide published by GlobaLex , she neglected to name herself as the author. Now, Amy’s just celebrated her first anniversary here as our Access & Faculty Services Librarian, and quickly established credentials as our international and foreign law expert. Who knew she was also such a fan? Kudos, Amy!

With the Beijing 2008 Summer Games just 21 days away, I thought a quick assessment of research sources for sports law would be in line. Closest to home you’ll find C-M Law Library’s Sports Law Research Guide, which is a fairly comprehensive bibliography of Ohio and federal materials. For international sources, try the recently updated International Sports Law from GlobaLex. And it’s always worth a quick read through a standard like the third edition of Sports Law in a Nutshell.

Finally, one of my personal favorites is the very Web 2.0 tag-enabled Bibliography on Sports Law from the Peace Palace Library, which brings your basic bib into the 21st century.

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.

Some advice for Law Review and Journal of Law and Health write-on candidates:

1. Read the Out of the Jungle blog post, Law Review Writing Time.

2. Try Suffolk's handy online Bluebooking Guide

3. Take a look at the books Law Review put on reserve: Academic Legal Writing : Law Review Articles, Student Notes, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review , Eugene Volokh, KF250 .V6 2007 and Scholarly Writing for Law Students: Seminar Papers, Law Review Notes, and Law Review Competition Papers, Elizabeth Fajans, Mary R. Falk, KF250 .F35 2005.

Thanks to Jeanie Fallon at the Suffolk Law Library Blog.

C-M Law Library's Scholarly Writing Resource Guide and Avoiding Plagiarism Guide may help, too. Also, see our prior posts:

• Good Advice for Writing Your Note or Seminar Paper;
• CiteULike: It's Del.icio.us for Academia;
• New Circuit Splits: Potential Paper Topics;
• Five Tips for Writing Better Papers and
• Finding Topics for Papers and Law Review Notes Using ACS Research Link.

Westlaw's intranet database of reference attorney tips is now easily available to Westlaw users. Just click on Help (upper right hand corner), click on Help Topics, then click on West Research Assistance. You can find research tips by browsing the folders. The folders are categorized by: (1) researching codes, (2) researching text,periodicals and forms, and (3) legal topics listed alphabetically. There is also a search box, although I had better luck finding items by browsing.

For example, to find Department of Labor Interpretive Bulletins, select Topics F-L, then Labor & Employment. Among the listed articles, is one on DOL Interpretive Bulletins. It says that Interpretive Bulletins can be found in the Federal Register, and gives suggestions for search terms.

Three law professors from the University of Missouri at Kansas City have put together a checklist for students to utilize when editing their papers. The paper, Training Independent Learners published on SSRN, follows the independent learning theory. The theory contends that students learn best when they learn self-assessment. The checklist is broken into categories such as: organization, writing and plagiarism. Within each of these categories is a list of questions that students check off (sign and date) as they are completed. This step by step process makes the proofreading process more manageable. Professors' reviews of drafts may be cursory and spell check doesn't catch it all, so students must engage in thorough self-editing.

The University of Georgia has recently launched the Civil Rights Digital Library, an online research collection documenting the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The interface allows you to browse by events, people, topics and other criteria. The Civil Rights Digital Library is a partnership among libraries, technologists, archivists, educators and others working together to create this comprehensive resource. This multimedia collection includes sound recordings, letters, diaries, photographs, moving images, web sites and more. It’s well worth a look.

Ross Guberman penned an article in Legal Times, highlighting some helpful hints for drafting memos for summer associates.

courtesy of Moritz Legal Information Blog

Ohio Capitol Connection is now available remotely for Cleveland Marshall students, faculty and staff, for educational use only. Just use the link in this post, or a link from the library webpage, and you can get in from home using your CSU Id and PIN. Ohio Capitol Connection provides one-stop shopping for legislative history documents corresponding to bills and acts from 1989 forward.

What does Ohio Capitol Connection have that is not on the Ohio General Assembly's webpage or elsewhere on the Internet? Among other things ...

• Coverage back to 1989. The Ohio General Assembly's page goes back to 1997.
• Summaries of hearing testimony (When you pull up a bill, click on "Bill History").
• Hannah Report news articles corresponding to each bill.
• Executive Orders back to 1999.
• A fifty state search to find legislation pertaining to a particular topics in all or some of the fifty states.
• A search for bills and acts that actually changed a particular Ohio Revised Code section, not that merely mentioned the section in passing.

CSU faculty and students also have access to Gongwer News Service Ohio,which contains (More)

While I stood there reviewing the stack of newly-arrived law reviews waiting to be shelved in the library, I didn’t expect to find an article that led me to question the veracity of my breakfast. But the law is a wide and wonderful thing, and there it was—and article on untrustworthy yogurt in the latest issue of Food and Drug Law Journal [online resource]. Ms. Leah A. Satine has written a fascinating article entitled “Is My Yogurt Lying? Developing and Applying a Framework for Determining Whether Wellness Claims on Probiotic Yogurts Mislead” [63 Food & Drug L.J. 537] that takes a critical look at the health claims of everyone’s favorite fermented dairy product.

Food and drug law (and the overlap between the two) is a major practice and scholarship area. For further research ideas, try the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s searchable database of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations (dealing with all aspects of food and drugs) or browse through the Food Law Prof Blog.

So my yogurt couldn’t pass a polygraph. Does this implicate the fruit?

A recent survey of federal judges shows that judges want shorter, more hard-hitting briefs. While attorneys cited adequate case authority, judges found their legal analysis lacking. Only 56% of judges said that attorneys always or usually made their side's best argument. Judges "prefer traditional methods of organization, such as the use of a summary or roadmap of the arguments to follow and the placement of an advocate's strongest arguments first." Finally, concise writing is essential. As one judge stated, "If briefs are too long, the judge's attention will often stray and the good arguments will be lost in the sea of irrelevance." Robbins, Kristen, K., The Inside Scoop: What Federal Judges Really Think About the Way Lawyers Write, Georgetown Law Faculty Working Papers 2008.

Thanks to TVC Alert.

The Suffolk Law Library Blog informs us of a series of podcasts entitled Transitioning from One-L to Summer Legal Work.Legal writing professors from all corners of the U.S. collaborated on these programs. Anyone can download them for free via Itunes.

Don't forget that the research librarians are available during the summer to answer questions about your clerkship research assignments. (Of course, if the law firm you are working for has their own librarian it is best to ask them first). You can contact us via (216) 687-6877 during Research Librarian hours or send an email to research.services@law.csuohio.edu.

Interested in video or audio of law-related public affairs lectures? Then check out UChannel brought to you by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In the tag cloud, click on "Law", or use the search box for more precise results. There are lectures on everything from Sarbanes-Oxley to the drinking age, however, the emphasis appears to be on foreign and international law, terrorism and civil rights. ( Thanks to The Resource Shelf)

While CSU does not participate in UChannel, you can view lectures by CSU professors in the Cleveland State University Mediasite Catalog. If you are a faculty member and you want to record a mediasite presentation for students to view later, contact a research librarian, or Jim Bandes of Instructional Media Services, 687-9707.

To find other legal podcasts, try Legal Talk Network, Top Ten Law Podcasts or Blawgs.fm. Of course, many Universities post lectures on Itunes.

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.

Thanks to LexLibris.

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.

Last night on 60 Minutes (April 27, 2008), Justice Scalia was interviewed by Lesley Stahl. If you missed it, you may want to see the video of the interview for a number of unexpectedly candid statements on both his personal life and his work.

Justice Scalia also discussed his new book, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (St. Paul: West Group, 2008, ISBN 0314184716 ). Scalia's co-author is Bryan A. Garner, the Editor-in-Chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, as well as other titles on language and law. The Law Library has Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges on order.

Would you like summer access to LexisNexis and Westlaw, even if you’re graduating and studying for the bar? No worries, if you meet the eligibility requirements, it can be done!

For LexisNexis, all eligible students (including graduating students) should register before June 1st. To do so, after logging on to LexisNexis, click on the box in the middle column of information when it displays “Summer Access...” At the next page, click on “Summer Access Registration.” At the next page, complete the required information and indicate your legitimate reason for summer access. Legitimate reasons are: Summer School, School-Related Research Assignment, Moot Court Research, Law Review or Journal Research, Working as a Professor’s Research Assistant, Non-Profit Externship, Unpaid Internship/Externship, and Bar Review.

For Westlaw, non-graduating eligible students should register before June 1st. To do so, after logging on to Westlaw, click on “Learn More” in the “Does your summer forecast call for Westlaw?” box in the middle column of information. At the next page, indicate your legitimate reason for summer access. Legitimate reasons are: Summer law school classes, Law Review and Journal work, Project for a professor, Moot Court, and Unpaid non-profit public interest internship/externship or pro bono work required for graduation. Graduating students should have already received an email from Westlaw notifying them of their eligibility for five hours of access in both June and July (ie, a total of ten hours). Within this email you are asked to complete a survey to register for access. Please note! If you have received such an email from Westlaw and are not graduating, click on the link provided in the email to notify Westlaw of its error.

What do you hate about The Bluebook? ("everything" is not an option). Now you have a chance to offer input into revisions for the upcoming 19th Edition: the editors invite you to complete a Web-based Bluebook 19th Edition Questionnaire to express your opinions about the changes you would like to see. Surveys must be received by June 30th, and respondents are eligible for a prize drawing. For a paper or electronic copy of the survey, email editor@legalbluebook.com. You can also email comments to suggestions@legalbluebook.com.

Working on an appellate brief ? Be sure to consider the standard of review, and how it can work in your side's favor. Read why the standard of review is so important, and how it can help your client in "A Thought on Standard of Review" by the Drug and Device Law Blog.

This post sites to a handy Standards of Review Outline, written by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Even if you are working on a case for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, or a state court of appeals, the outline is still useful. Just look up the Ninth Circuit cases cited in the outline on Lexis or Westlaw, and find the corresponding Westlaw Key Number or Lexis Headnote. If you are not sure how to do this, just ask a research librarian for help.

The library staff can also point you to other helpful resources, such as the handy tables in LexisNexis® 19-206 Moore's Federal Practice - Civil § 206.08 , (also available in print) or LexisNexis® 1-6 Appellate Practice and Procedure in Ohio § 6.02, Section 8 (also available in print). or OH. App. Prac. Appendix G (2007-2008 ed.) (also available in print).

Thanks to the Legal Writing Professor Blog for pointing out the Drug and Device Law Blog post.

Darby Dickerson, Dean of Stetson University College of Law and author of the ALWD Citation Manual, offers her take on the relative importance of correct citation form in a new article, Reducing Citation Anxiety. Claiming that solid research, writing and analysis trump citation in significance, she offers ten tips or guidelines to help the legal writer keep the fears of citing incorrectly in perspective. She argues for a reasonableness standard, and a balancing of the utility of spending too much time on form over substance. Tip #7 should resonate: "Accept that you will never find the answer to every citation question in a citation manual. Legal citation is an art, not a science." (p.91).

Dickerson, Darby, "Reducing Citation Anxiety" . Scribes Journal, Vol. 11, No. 85, 2007 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1117085

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a list of five useful resources for researching environmental law available at C-M Law Library:

• BNA Environment Reporter (password or IP access)
  Great for current awareness – super up-to-date.

• Environmental Law Handbook KF3775 .E473
  In-depth resource.

• Treatise on Environmental Law KF3775 .G7
  In-depth resource.

• Environmental Law in a Nutshell KF3775.Z9 F56 2008
  An easy overview.

• Environmental Law Resource Guide
  Leads you to many more sources.

Just for fun, try taking the Ecological Footprint Quiz. You might be surprised at your results!

Lexis Hub was created for new attorneys and law students. You don't need a Lexis account to use the Hub. The site includes:

• Career Guidance: webinars and articles
• Legal Research tutorials and webinars
• Subject Matter Tutorials
• Discussion Boards
• Legal News Feeds

Looking for something legal-like to add to your Facebook profile? For fun, try Legal IQuiz, a user-generated trivia quiz on the categories Supreme Court, criminal law, torts, minutia & miscellaneous, and the law in TV & movies. It’s kinda hard.

For research, you can add PreCYdent, a new open-source legal search engine / database that Sue blogged about here. PreCYdent gives you a nice, simple search box, and tabs up top to limit your search to a specific category of results. But instead of the typical tabs for searching web, images, video, shopping, etc., you get search tabs for opinions, statutes, GPO, uploaded documents, legal questions and others. It’s kinda cool.

HeinOnline will soon be made available on Google Scholar. HeinOnline is the largest distributor of legal periodicals and has quite an extensive collection, including many out of print legal materials. In addition to law review articles, Hein offers other collections such as, session laws and information from the Supreme Court Library. Hein has created a YouTube channel, posting training videos..Check 'em out

As a librarian, I love to find that one source that brings together practically all of the research help I need on a particular subject. Unfortunately, I don’t find sources like this too often, but there are some. One example is a compiled legislative history, such as Bassiouni’s three-volume set on the International Criminal Court.

Another example is a comprehensive collection of research guides on a particular subject. This is what’s offered in the latest issue of Legal Reference Services Quarterly for the topic ballot initiatives and referendums.

In volume 26 of LRSQ, you’ll find 23 scholarly research guides on initiatives and referendums, all discussing research in individual states, including Ohio. The guides discuss both what guest editor Beth Williams calls first order I&R (the state constitutional and statutory basis for I&R) and second order I&R (the initiatives and referendum themselves).

For information on Ohio initiatives and referendums, you may also want to look at the Ohio Constitutional Law and History website, particularly the sections on Constitutional Revision and the Bibliography. The Table of Proposed Amendments and Votes links to the text of ballot language or text of the amendment, where available.

So now I know where I’ll be turning for help researching this popular area of state law.

B.N.A.'s U.S. Law Week has released its quarterly chart showing splits of opinion among the federal appeals courts. The latest chart includes splits noted in U.S.L.W. news stories appearing during the first quarter of 2008. There are lots of issues - everything from banning the sale of sexual devices to accommodation of employees' religious beliefs.

Circuit splits can be a great source for paper topics. Keep this in mind for next year's papers and law review notes, or possibly for the Law Review 's and Journal of Law and Health's summer writing competition.

To find prior circuit split charts, click on "Search all Issues" and do a search for "circuit splits" and select "in headings only".

WhiteSmoke Legal Writing Software can help when preparing legal documents, contracts, memos or proposals. It has a thesaurus of legal terms, which can suggest synonyms. There are document templates and writing tips. According to their website, "By adding legal-based terminology, WhiteSmoke Legal writing version makes your writing more precise, persuasive and credible. You will improve your legal writing skills rapidly." The product works with word processing and email applications. Source: The Legal Writing Professor Blog, who heard about this product from Cleveland-Marshall Professor Karin Mika.

(Update: Be sure to read the comments to this post by Christine Stouffer, Library Director at Thompson Hine)

If you will be clerking this summer, you will want to look at the library's new guide: Getting Ready to Clerk: Resources and Tips for A Successful Summer Associate Research Experience.

You may also want to look at the following tips I gathered by speaking with local law firm librarians. Here is what the firm librarians want you to know:

1. "We have a lot of online services in addition to Lexis & Westlaw. Sometimes they can be a lot more cost-effective, especially when starting a project."

What you can do --- Take a look at Heinonline, BNA databases or RIA Checkpoint(tax) via the electronic resources page. Get a free student membership in the Ohio State Bar Association and get the Casemaker database for free. Look at the library's Internet Legal Research Guide or Legal Research Workstation to discover free Internet sources. Ask the firm librarian about available databases before starting a project.

2. "There is a lot of electronic information that can not be reached by Googling."

What you can do ..... Again, find out what databases the firm purchases. As far as information on the web, use search engines geared specifically to legal information such as Justia, FindLaw or Westlaw WebPlus (free for Westlaw subscribers). Find and bookmark sites that have relevant legal information, or are portals to legal information. Read The Invisible or Deep Web by U.C. Berkeley.

3. "Treatises and practice books can be a good starting place. Often students will want to hop on a case law database right away. These books collect the relevant cases and familiarize the researcher with the appropriate terms of art. While many of these books exist both online and in print, use the print versions if the firm has them."

What you can do ..... Take a look at law library research guides to discover the titles in particular areas. Ask the firm librarian what treatise/practice book they would recommend.

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How trustworthy are legal resources on the web? Are they trustworthy just because they are hosted by the government? Last March, the Access to Electronic Legal Information Committee part of AALL, released a report on the authentication of online state-hosted legal resources. According to the report, the "official version" of a statute or court opinion means it is government prepared or government authorized.

Content that is "authentic" must be verified by the government as complete and unaltered from its original context. An authentic text has a mark or certification, meaning that the document in question has been validated. Marks of authenticity may be digital watermarks or signatures. Official print versions are automatically authentic, but official on-line versions are not, because they can be tampered with or subject to data corrosion.

The report concluded that only 10 states and the District of Columbia have one or more of their primary online sources deemed "official". Eight more states have online sources with "official traits". None of the state online resources are "authentic" or capable of easy authentication.

Does this mean we should stop using government-hosted primary law websites? Not necessarily. But be aware that if a discrepancy arises, the official, authenticated version of the legal document will prevail over the unofficial and/or unauthenticated.

GPO took a step in remedying the problem on the federal level. Recently, they announced that beginning with the 110th Congress, Public and Private Law on GPO Access will be digitally signed and certified, making the documents official and authentic.

Thanks to Sue Altmeyer for her input.

Those interested in medical research may want to sign up for a thirty day free trial of Casemaker Medical . Unlike regular Casemaker, the product is not free with an Ohio bar membership. (Regular Casemaker is available at the two public access terminals in the law library. See our prior post.)

Casemaker Medical offers an advanced way to look for medical articles from MEDLINE and Cochrane. You can search by using all or part of a document as a search criteria, such as an expert's report; patient's medical summary; or deposition transcript. The user can choose which concepts in the document will receive greater weight in the search results. Additionally, Casemaker Medical suggests search terms and conceptual categories. Expert profiles are generated for each retrieved author.

Casemaker Medical only provides full text articles if they are offered for free on Medline. If you have a Lonesome Doc account, you can order articles right from Casemaker Medical.

Thanks to Laura Ray for her input.

When writing your papers, don't forget about WestCheck and Shepard's Brief Suite. Both of these Shepardize or Keycite all of the cites in a document you upload.

Shepard's Brief Suite also ensures the citations are in correct Bluebook format and constructs a Tables of Authorities. It checks quotations to make sure they conform to the actual opinion. You will need to download the Brief Suite software on your computer. More information on this product is available via the Lexis Law School page, click on download tools, then click on cite checking.

You do not need to download Lexis BriefCheck. BriefCheck will verify citations and quotes and runs Shepards, but does not check for Bluebook form or generate a Table of Authorities. Access it from the Lexis Law School page, click on download tools, then click on cite checking.

You do not need to download WestCheck, which will pull keycites and Westlaw tables of authorities for all the citations in your paper. There is a link to WestCheck on the Westlaw Law School page.

For more information, please see our Citation Checking Guide.

Google Scholar has now started indexing articles from Hein On Line. Hein On Line has one of the largest on-line collections of law review articles. From Google Scholar, you can search various topics using numerous academic databases that may not normally appear using 'regular' Google. Google Scholar results are ranked by the number of hits on the search terms, the author, publication, and how often it has been cited in other scholarly works. Of course, using the advanced search option will get you more precise results. Please keep in mind, Google Scholar does not link to Hein On Line full text. Test this feature by searching for some of our faculty and finding their recent publications. Thanks to Wisblawg.

The Scotus Wiki has pages for each Supreme Court case, starting in 2007. See case index 07 , case index 08. Multiple authors quickly post documents, analysis, video and podcasts pertaining to the cases. There is also information on Petitions to Watch.You can set up an email alert for pending cases using the Watchlist.

The Wiki is brought to you by the authors of the Scotus Blog. Currently, only authorized individuals can edit pages. In the future, everyone may be able to participate, presumably with some moderation by the Scotus folks. For more information, read About the Scotus Wiki. The Scotus Wiki was brought to my attention by attorney Jack Sargent, author of EEO/iNews. Thanks, Jack!

Don't forget about BNA's U.S. Law Week/Supreme Court Today,
another excellent source for information on new Supreme Court cases.

Bluebooks dating from 1926 to 1991 are available for free on the Bluebook website. They appear to take a while to download. A more up-to-date free source for citation information, although not as comprehensive, is Basic Legal Citation by the Legal Information Institute. LII's information is keyed to the most recent edition of the Bluebook, published in 2005. Thanks to TVC Alert.

LexisNexis has recently launched an Expert Commentaries feature. You may see one or more Expert Commentary $ links when browsing search results, particularly when searching within Banking, Bankruptcy, Class Actions, Copyright, Patent, Personal Injury, Securities, Trademark, and Transportation source files. For our College of Law faculty and students, despite the $, don't despair. These Expert Commentaries are included in our academic subscription. Simply click on the link to connect to a PDF document, which can be printed or downloaded. Each commentary includes links to U.S. or state case law, statutes, regulations, treatises, and other analysis. You can also search all of the Expert Commentaries -- this is source file under the Secondary Legal category.

Or at least, according to The Frugal Law Student, law students ought to take advantage of the marketing opportunities and writing practice afforded by blogging. In Why Every Law Student Should Blog, Brett McKay points out that potential employers can learn a great deal from a candidate’s blog about his/her personality, communication strengths, judgment, passions, tech-saviness and self marketing ability. And the student who blogs seriously gets lots of practice in writing and editing that hone essential legal drafting skills. So, Blog On!

All that free law on the Internet – who is using it and for what purpose? Tom Bruce, cofounder and Director of the Legal Information Institute, recently offered his thoughts on how the kinds of primary authority and secondary analysis that the LII posts on the web are being accessed and used. Is it possible that the lofty goals of providing open access to the law are justified by concrete, measurable outcomes? Looking at patterns of use and comments on LII products, Bruce notes the following about the observations about the audience for legal information:

· It is not a “bipolar” audience – the language of the law is increasingly accessible to non-law (lay readers), and their needs for legal information run a spectrum from the personal to professional

· The Internet audience is more interested in regulations than case law

· Lay users are not trying to replace lawyers nor are they in danger of harming themselves – becoming better educated about the law, they are more likely recognize a need for legal services

· They are not doing, nor do they need, the exhaustive research that lawyers tend to do

· And, they are using the law they find to make “assertions about legal relationships” as applied to other endeavors they may be involved in, and interacting with legal text in new web applications

Need some help preparing an oral argument? Try:

• ABA Podcast on Effective Oral Argument. Thanks to the Legal Writing Prof Blog.
• Check out these videos at the library: (1) MAKING THE ORAL ARGUMENT : THE VIEW FROM THE INSIDE OUT. 83 min & Study Guide, KF8915 .M34 1996; (2)EFFECTIVE ARGUMENTS TO THE COURT. KF8915 .E43 1989 The second videotape in this series is an oral argument to the US Court of Appeals, with attorneys commenting afterward. The video is 2 hours long.
• 30 page article: Stepping Up to the Podium with Confidence: A Primer for Law Students on Preparing and Delivering Oral Arguments by James D. Dimitri. Thanks to the Legal Writing Prof Blog.

The Ohio Constitutional Law and History Website provides online full-text resources and citations useful to scholars, lawyers, judges and the general public. The site brings together the following resources in one convenient place:

• Links to the full text of primary source material, such as current and historical versions of the Ohio Constitution, and Constitutional Convention proceedings.
• Current Ohio Supreme Court decisions and pending cases on Ohio Constitutional issues.
• A table of all the proposed amendments to the Ohio Constitution, vote tallies, and the ballot language or text of the amendment, where available.
• A bibliography containing citations to secondary sources on the Ohio Constitution, Ohio history and state constitutional law. Some of the secondary sources are linked to the full text of the article or book.
• The text of recent ballot initiatives filed with the Ohio Attorney General

The site is a work in progress. Please send any comments, corrections or additions to Professor Steven H. Steinglass or Sue Altmeyer, Electronic Services Librarian

Attorneys are posting court filings and transactional documents they drafted on numerous free websites such as JDSupra, Scribd and DocStoc. These sites can help when the form books or Internet form sites just aren't specific enough, or lack examples relating to current trends.

JDSupra ties the documents to author profiles. JDSupra can be used to showcase an attorney's filings and legal documents, as well as articles they authored. Thanks to Wisblawg.

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.

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.