An embarrassment of riches comes your way next Friday, March 26, 2010.  You are invited to two different programs (details below) focusing on your legal career and preparation for it.  Although you can’t attend both you also can’t make a mistake choosing either one of them.  Take a look!

Bridge the Gap

Want to develop practical skills and approaches to master your summer employment?  Attend the Bridge the Gap program at the New York City Bar, sponsored by the Law Library Association of Greater New York.  Click here for a PDF version of the program announcement and registration form.

This full-day program will enhance your research skills in a number of specific practice areas (including Securities & Corporate Law, Bankruptcy, Business/Company Research, Criminal Law, Employment/Labor Law, International Arbitration, International Law, New York Internet Legal Research, and Patents).  The program concludes with a panel discussion about life as a summer associate.  Panel members will include a law firm partner, a practitioner for a non-profit, a judge, an Assistant District Attorney, and a New York Law School student.

Bloomberg Law Second Annual Legal Career Symposium

Bloomberg Law invites NYLS students to its Second Annual Legal Career Symposium. You will have the opportunity to hear top legal professionals discuss traditional and non-traditional career paths and share their personal and professional insight to the legal profession.

The symposium is on Friday March 26, 2010, from 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.  Lunch will be provided.  Click here for complete details, including information about the speakers. If you have any questions, contact Pamela Haahr at 212.617.2285.  You must RSVP via email to blawls@bloomberg.net (name, law school, year and phone number) and you must bring your NYLS ID.

If you entered NYLS before the Fall semester of 2008, you were assigned an email address ending in @nyls.edu.  In August 2008 NYLS changed email systems; all student email addresses now end in @law.nyls.edu.  For one year, all messages sent to a student’s old address were automatically forwarded to the new one.  But this automatic forwarding ended in April 2009.

Chances are that you used your original first-year email address to set up your Lexis and Westlaw accounts.  If you have not updated your Lexis and Westlaw account profiles, then email notices sent by these vendors to your old address are no longer reaching you.  This includes important communications, such as acknowledgements that are sent when you change your Lexis or Westlaw password, and notices from your Lexis and TWEN Webcourses.

Pease take a moment now to update your email address in your Lexis and Westlaw profiles.  Simple instructions for doing this can be found at http://www.nyls.edu/library/how_do_i/update_password_profiles.

Student access to LexisNexis and Westlaw are based on academic subscription plans maintained by New York Law School.  Beginning June 1st, passwords will either be deactivated or limited in use. LexisNexis and Westlaw have special summer access provisions. Register now to ensure that these research databases are there when you need them. For more information, please visit: http://www.nyls.edu/library/for_students/extend_passwords

The 2008 results of the annual Law School Survey of Student Engagement are now available.  You can download a copy of this year’s 16-page report, Student Engagement in Law Schools: Preparing 21st Century Lawyers, here.

From the LSSSE website:

What is the Law School Survey of Student Engagement?

The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) is designed to provide reliable, credible information about the quality of the law student experience. This spring, more than 27,000 students at 85 law schools participated in the second national administration of the survey. The survey asks students about their law school experience – how they spend their time, what they feel they’ve gained from their classes, their assessment of the quality of interactions with faculty and friends, and about important activities. Extensive research indicates that good educational practices in the classroom and interactions with others, such as faculty and peers, are directly related to high-quality student outcomes. The LSSSE focuses on these practices by assessing student engagement in key areas.

Margaret A. Schilt, faculty services librarian at the D’Angelo Law Library for the University of Chicago, asks Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?:

If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere.

…Blogging contributes to the shortened life cycle of a theory or idea, reflected in what is called the open access movement. Law review articles no longer meet their readers first in published and printed form. Good articles start their lives as idea papers, posted on the Social Science Research Network’s Legal Scholarship Network or another electronic repository. Repositories such as the SSRN provide a place for scholars to post their work, either in abstract or in full. These papers are available to the public generally for reading and comment. Bloggers post links to them with short descriptions ("Highly recommended!" "Download this while it’s hot!") and respond in blog posts. By the time the prestigious law review accepts the submission and publishes the article, the scholarly community has built upon the insights in the article and moved on.

The American Constitution Society has set up ACS ResearchLink, a project which will collect legal research topics submitted by practitioners for law students to explore in faculty-supervised writing projects for academic credit. The resulting paper is provided to the practitioner and also added to a searchable online directory.

About the ACS Research Link project.

Read the FAQ.

[via Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites]

Review the GAO’s report on the debate over whether the ABA should continue to be the accreditor of the nation’s law schools. The report, “Higher Education: Issues Related to Law School Accreditation,” provides an overview of the controversy but it makes no recommendations.

A few of you have reported that the notification feature of the Lexis Blackboard web course system is not working properly. Notification messages of new postings to the Lexis web course pages are not being generated and sent by the system. Lexis is working with Blackboard to isolate and fix the problem. Our IT department is also aware of the issue.

The failure of this feature has occurred at a most unfortunate time of the semester. Until Lexis is able to make the correction, it will be necessary for all users of the Lexis web course system to pro-actively check the web course sections and discussion boards for new postings. We will post any new information we receive on the Library Blog.

Visit the Lawsagna blog, which describes itself as "[a]lternating layers of thoughts, tools, tricks, tips and other ingredients for a successful learning experience in law school and beyond."