Library Information

Exam Prep Help!

The Library wants to help!! Here are three important tips as you prepare for upcoming exams:

· Visit the Library’s Exam Preparation Resources page for lots of sources containing practical advice and strategies.

· Visit our archive of previous years’ exams, organized by course name and professor, found under Student Resources on the NYLS Portal.

· Try some CALI lessons, interactive tutorials covering almost all law school subjects. CALI also offers a variety of lessons and podcasts with exam tips and advice from faculty, including Top 10 Tips for Successfully Writing a Law School Essay and Tips for Multiple Choice Exams in Law School. If you haven’t registered for CALI, contact the Reference Desk (reference@nyls.edu) for the access code or pick up a CALI card at the Reference Desk.

CALI also wants to help you “tune out the noise,” with their complimentary earplugs. Grab a pair (a pair) at the Reference Desk.

 

 

Celebrate Law Day 2019

Each year on May 1st, the United States celebrates Law Day. First designated in 1958 by President Eisenhower, Law Day celebrates the rule of law and its contributions to Americans’ many freedoms. This year’s theme is Free Speech, Free Press, Free Society, which “focuses on these cornerstones of representative government and calls on us to understand and protect these rights to ensure, as the U.S. Constitution proposes, ‘the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.’”

The Law Library of Congress has a Law Day Research Guide, with links to legislative and executive documents as well as books, journal articles and speech transcripts. Additional information on Law Day and materials relating to this year’s theme are on the ABA’s Law Day web page.

Celebrate Earth Day!

Monday April 22, 2019 is Earth Day.

This year’s Earth Day Network campaign is Protect Our Species, which aims to educate and raise awareness about the accelerating rate of extinction of millions of species. It also seeks to build a global movement that embraces nature and its values and to achieve major policy victories that protect broad groups of species as well as individual species and their habitats.

Visit Earth Day Network’s website to learn more about this and other Earth Day campaigns and efforts.

The Mendik librarians will again honor Earth Day by contributing $2.00 to the Earth Day Network for every spill-proof mug purchased at the Circulation Desk through the end of the semester. Mugs are available for just $5.00.

Selecting Your Courses for Next Year: Why You Should Consider Legal Research

Selecting Your Courses for Next Year: Why You Should Consider Legal Research

Among the most important skills all lawyers rely upon is the ability to do legal research—to find what’s needed to interpret and analyze legal issues. Legal research is an integral part of the “competencies” that NYLS and the ABA require of law students. Effective research skills are vital to students engaged in any type of legal writing, to those who are clerking or participating in externships, and to those entering legal practice.

To help you prepare for the realities of law practice, we offer a number of courses that build upon skills learned in the first year and will make you a more efficient, confident and successful researcher.

Legal Research: Practical Skills (1 credit)
Builds on fundamental research skills through refining students’ techniques, introducing shortcuts and new approaches, and developing effective strategies. The course focuses on finding legislation, administrative materials, and related cases; using the secondary sources relied on by practitioners; attaining greater proficiency and comfort with Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, and other online research tools, including reliable free and low-cost sources. We also offer this class with a focus on a particular substantive practice area, including Corporate & Business Law; Criminal Law; Family Law; Foreign and International Law; Intellectual Property Law; Labor and Employment Law; and Real Estate Law.

Legal Research: Skills for the Digital World (3 credits)
Continues to build on the fundamentals described in Legal Research: Practical Skills. Students concentrate on more advanced techniques and strategies and learn to evaluate online and print materials in order to choose the best and most cost effective source for particular projects. Some assignments are geared to students’ individual subject interests. Take-home assignments test and enhance students’ ability to perform various research tasks and strengthen their understanding of important research process and strategy considerations.

Want more information? Contact Prof. Michael Roffer

Find Love in the Library!

Find Love in the Library!!

The Valentine’s Day Info Hunt is back! Can you find love in the Library?

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, here’s a sweet treat for you: an opportunity to WIN study aids, Lexis points, NYLS swag, and other swell stuff. Just answer the easy (and fun) Valentine’s Day Info Hunt questions. Your answers don’t need to be perfect—just close!

Click here to access the questions. Each slide includes just one question, along with step-by-step instructions to get you to the answer. Print the PDF answer sheet (or pick up a copy at the Reference Desk) and drop it in our Reference Desk Raffle Drum by 3:00 pm on Thursday February 14, and then join us outside the library at 5:30 for some sweets and the prize drawing at 5:45pm.

 

xoxo

Black History Month: Moses Leonard Frazier, NYLS First African American Graduate

Moses Leonard Frazier, Class of 1899, is believed to have been NYLS First African American Graduate.  In the early days of NYLS, students enrolled by signing a student registration ledger and writing certain basic information about themselves, e.g., their age (in years, months and days!), the college or graduate school they had attended (although a college degree was not a requirement for admission to NYLS until the 1960s), their address and the names and addresses of their parents or guardians.  Moses Leonard Frazier’s signature appears on the Student Ledger Book 7, page 13, line 9.

 

A collection of all student ledgers can be found on the NYLS Digital Commons Page.

Spring 2019 RSW Registration is Open

Registration is open for this semester’s Research Skills Workshops (RSW):

  • EELR II (1/15 – 2/7)
  • Introduction to Administrative & Regulatory Research (2/11 – 2/24)
  • Citators:  Is All your Research Up to Date? (2/25 – 3/7)


Please Note:

  • Legal Practice Students must attend all three RSW.
  • Other members of the community are welcome to attend the Introduction to Administrative & Regulatory Research and the Citators:  Is All your Research Up to Date? RSW.
  • Advance Registration is required for all three RSW.
  • To register please go to the library homepage or click on link:  https://libguides.nyls.edu/rsw

 

IMPORTANT CHANGES TO NYLS LIBRARY LABS

Important changes have been made to the Library lab PCs. Most students use these labs, and so should pay careful attention to the following:

Network Login: All lab PCs have been reconfigured to login automatically to a generic account named “Lab User”. You will no longer login with your personal username and password. Rather, the PC you’re using will have a desktop that gives you access to internet browsers and applications – Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat – logged in as Lab User.

Password? Your lab PC shouldn’t be asking you for a password, but if it does, just restart the PC.

My Network Account? You won’t be able to login to your own network account when you’re working at a lab PC. If you want to save a file you have several choices: 1) Save it to your OneDrive; 2) Email it to yourself; 3) Save it to a thumb drive.

Name Your Documents before Printing!!! When you send a document to print, it will appear in the queue as coming from “Lab User”, a generic name. To make sure you can identify your own document in the queue, you must give it a name you can recognize! If your document is named “Document1” you won’t be able to distinguish it from other users’ documents. Save it with a unique name before you send it to the printer!

The Library staff stands ready to help you adjust to these changes. Just visit the Reference Desk, or call us at ext. 2332.

All U.S. Case Law Now Freely Available Online

All published U.S. court decisions from 1658 to June 2018 are now freely accessible online, thanks to the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a partnership between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and Ravel Law, acquired by LexisNexis.  CAP’s goal is to “make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent digitized format.”  To create this massive collection, law librarians at Harvard digitized roughly 40 million pages of decisions contained in roughly 40,000 bound reporter volumes .

Users can access the data via an open-source API (application programming interface). CAP provides a Beginner’s introduction to API along with usage examples that explain how to retrieve cases by ID or through simple full-text searches.

For more information, see Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog post and the CAP website.