Still Time to Register for Legal Research: Labor and Employment Law

The class provides a great opportunity for anyone with an interest in labor and employment law to develop and hone the practical research skills necessary to hit the ground running as a practitioner. The seven-week class (from September 8, through October 20, 2008) will emphasize statutory and administrative/agency materials as well as specialized secondary sources, including forms, pleadings, court/agency rules and procedures, and some of the most important current awareness tools.

A few slots remain open for Legal Research: Labor and Employment Law, a one-credit, fall semester class that will meet on Mondays from 11:00-12:40.

Statistical Analysis of the Supreme Court Term

An annual summary of relevant statistics for the Supreme Court’s recently ended term are available at the SCOTUSBlog (see "End of Term ‘Super StatPack’" post).  The categories of compiled statistics include:

1. Summary Memo (New)
2. Justice Agreement
3. Non-unanimous Agreement (New)
4. Decisions by Final Vote
5. Frequency in the Majority
6. Opinion Tally (New)
7. Circuit Scorecard
8. Opinion Authors by Sitting
9. The Court’s Workload
10. Visual Representation of Supreme Court Voting Lineups (New)
11. OT07 Complete Case List (New)
12. Grant Rates by Conference

Independence Holiday Long Weekend

Thursday through Sunday, July 3 – 6 is the Independence Day Holiday.  Library book collections, circulation, reference and other services will be closed during this entire period.  All borrowing and circulation transactions must be complete by Wednesday evening, July 2.

FRIDAY, JULY 4:  All Library areas at 40 Worth Street are closed.

THURSDAY, SATURDAY and SUNDAY, July 3, 5 & 6: Library areas on the 14th floor of 40 Worth Street are open 10 am to 9 pm for Study Hall.  All other Library areas are closed.

The Stiefel Room and Student Center remain open 24 hours during the entire holiday period.

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse Revisited

The Law Librarian Blog (Joe Hodnicki) recently posted about the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse:

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a web repository of information and documents relating to civil rights cases, particularly injunctive and class-action cases.  Sponsored by The Center for Empirical Research in the Law at the Washington University School of Law, St Louis, the database has grown substantially since LLB’s 2006 post.

Currently, the categories include: Child Welfare, Criminal Justice (Other), Disability Rights-Pub. Accom., Education, Election/Voting Rights, Equal Employment, Fair Housing/Lending/Insurance, Immigration, Jail Conditions, Juvenile Institution, Mental Health Facility, Mental Retardation Facility, Nursing Home Conditions, Policing, Prison Conditions, Public Accommodations, Public Benefits, Public Defenders, Public Housing, School Desegregation, Speech and Religious Freedom.

For each included case, litigation documents include the docket sheet, the complaint, any decrees issued by courts or agreed to by parties, and any published opinions. Cases are indexed by court and issue, and are summarized. Check out the Clearinghouse search engine. Well done!

Tax Policy Center Preliminary Analysis of Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans

The Tax Policy Center is a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. The Center is made up of nationally recognized experts in tax, budget, and social policy who have served at the highest levels of government.  The following abstract provides a summary of the Center’s recent report analyzing the presidential candidates’ tax plans.

Tax and fiscal policy will loom large in the next president’s domestic policy agenda. Nearly all of the tax cuts enacted since 2001 expire at the end of 2010 and the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) threatens to ensnare tens of millions of Americans. While a permanent fix palatable to both political parties has proven elusive, both candidates have proposed major tax changes. This report describes how we performed our modeling and analysis, outlines the major tax proposals, and discusses the implications of their policies for the revenue raised, taxpayer economic activity, and the distribution of the tax burden.

Technical Problems with Electronic Resources

Please be advised that we are currently experiencing technical problems with access to many of the Web subscription services that the Library offers. You may notice the problem when you are trying to navigate to the Web pages for resources such as Hein Online, JSTOR, Making of Modern Law, and the BNA services. You will get an error message saying that there is a problem with the Website’s Security Certificate. Many Web browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, will let you click past this message and get to the service you’re trying to access. But Microsoft Internet Explorer may completely prevent you from moving past the error message page. Please be assured that there is NO security risk to your computer in using the services; this is merely a technical problem. If you are using Internet Explorer, you can work around the problem by switching to a different browser. We apologize for your inconvenience. Our OIT Department is troubleshooting the problem, and we hope to have it resolved very soon.

Categories: Web

Civil Rights Digital Library

The Civil Rights Digital Library from the University of Georgia:

The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation’s history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement trough its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources – such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities–to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. The CRDL advances cross-disciplinary approaches, promoting a seamless infrastructure for learning, emphasizing context and structure for digital information, and recruiting and educating new leaders for a learning society. The Civil Rights Digital Library initiative achieves its desired outcomes through a partnership among digital library and information technology professionals, archivists, humanities scholars, educators, university graduate and undergraduate researchers, academic publishers, and public broadcasters.

American Presidency Exhibit Displayed at NYC Bar

During this presidential election year, a new exhibit on the American Presidency, Hail To The Chiefs, is on display in the lobby of the New York City Bar at 42 West 44th Street. The exhibit features many rare items from the archives of the City Bar’s library, including important books that document the defining influence of the early presidents on the Constitution and the Republic.

Summer Extension of Westlaw Passwords

Students have the option of extending full access to Westlaw over the summer if they meet one or more of the following criteria (see Westlaw’s web site for specific restrictions):

– Enrolled in summer law school
– On law journal or moot court
– Working as a research assistant for a faculty member
– Working at an unpaid, non-profit, public interest internship/externship or doing pro bono work required for graduation

In order to take advantage of this extension, you must complete the summer extension request form at: http://lawschool.westlaw.com/registration/summerextension.asp

For those continuing students not entitled to a summer extension, full access passwords will deactivate on May 31, 2008, and will automatically reactivate on August 1, 2008.

If you do not extend your password, you will have full access to Westlaw for only two hours in June and two hours in July. New law school graduates are entitled to ten hours of access total for June and July 2008 to assist them in their bar review studies; any non-academic use of this time is prohibited.

Summer Extension of Lexis Passwords

Follow these directions to request summer access to LexisNexis:

Log on at www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool (Law School Home page) and click the Register for Summer Access logo in the left side navigation bar. On the Summer Access Program page, click the red “Summer Access Registration” link in the middle of the page. On the final page, check the box on the upper right to certify your particular use, select a reason for use in the drop-down menu, and click SUBMIT. You must click SUBMIT or your password will not be registered.

If you do not register, your LexisNexis law school ID will be limited only to career materials as of June 1, 2008

Important: Graduating students must register for summer access as well. Access will run through August 1, 2008. Students who have changed their expected graduation date since first issued a LexisNexis ID their first year must contact customer service (800-45 LEXIS) to change their graduation date on the LexisNexis system.

Please contact your LexisNexis representative, Nejat Bumin, Esq., at nejat.bumin@lexisnexis.com with any questions or concerns.