Law Commons^™

Is Open Access Equal Access? Pacer User Fees And Public Access To Court Information, John L. Moreland

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Our country has a long history of striving for openness and transparency in government processes. In 1978, the United States Supreme Court held, “It is clear that the courts of this country recognize a general right to insect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.” Long before America’s high court recognized this common law principle, court records were historically accessible for inspection by lawyers, journalists, land title companies, credit agencies, academics, and members of the general public. These individuals were also permitted to take notes as a part of their right to inspect court documents. Having …

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Scholarly Articles

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

Attorney Advertising In 'The Litigators' And Modern-Day America: The Continued Importance Of The Public's Need For Legal Information, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Essay addresses the phenomenon of attorney advertising from several vantage points. Part II of the Essay addresses how best-selling author John Grisham depicts attorney advertising in his great book The Litigators. Part III discusses the legal framework of how the U.S. Supreme Court protected attorney advertising as a form of protected commercial speech. Part IV addresses how the states and bar regulators have treated attorney advertising. Finally, Part V addresses the recent Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers Report and the American Bar Association’s proposed changes to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct regarding attorney advertising. Part V briefly …

The Life Of The Law Cannot Be Coded, Rebecca Roiphe

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Redefining Open Access For The Legal Information Market, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

The open access movement in legal scholarship, inasmuch as it is driven within the law library community over concerns about the rising cost of legal information, fails to address - and in fact diverts resources from - the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. The current system of legal scholarly publishing - in student-edited journals and without meaningful peer review - does not face the pressures to increase prices common in the science and health disciplines. One solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their …

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Content And Quality Of Legal Information And Data On The Internet With A Special Focus On The United States, Claire M. Germain

Claire Germain

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as "authoritative," or "the official" word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital …

Legal Information Management In A Global And Digital Age: Revolution And Tradition, Claire M. Germain

Claire Germain

This article presents an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries, and describes some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. It discusses the impact of globalization and the Internet on international and foreign law information, the free access to law movement and open access scholarship, and mass digitization projects, then turns to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long term access to born digital legal information and authentication of official digital legal information. It finally discusses new roles for librarians, called upon to evaluate the quality of information teach legal research methodology and be advocates …

Worldwide Access To Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication, Claire M. Germain

Claire Germain

This paper was originally presented at the World Library & Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012, as part of a panel on Promoting Global Access to Law: Developing an Open Access Index for Official Authenticated Legal Information, Part II. Europe. http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-day/2012-08-14. It focuses on worldwide access to the official word of the law, specifically to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements in different foreign countries. The importance of improving global access to foreign law was highlighted at a 2012 joint European Commission/Hague Conference on Private International Law, with …

From The Editor, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

The 95 Theses: Legal Research In The Internet Age, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Public Access To Primary Legal Information In China: Challenges And Opportunities, Xiaomeng Zhang

Law Librarian Scholarship

Despite a lack of a national legislation that mandates open government information in the People's Republic of China, each major government branch has taken proactive efforts to make primary legal information issued within their power available to the public. A close examination of Chinese official legal information portals on the national level reveal issues such as a lack of uniformity and a lack of access to authenticated primary legal information. This article proposes a solution that would not only offer more consistent guidelines for the government but would empower the public to assert their right to primary legal information more …

Worldwide Access To Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication, Claire M. Germain

Working Papers

This paper was originally presented at the World Library & Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012, as part of a panel on Promoting Global Access to Law: Developing an Open Access Index for Official Authenticated Legal Information, Part II. Europe. http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-day/2012-08-14. It focuses on worldwide access to the official word of the law, specifically to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements in different foreign countries. The importance of improving global access to foreign law was highlighted at a 2012 joint European Commission/Hague Conference on Private International …

Digitizing The World's Laws, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Where does one find the foreign investment laws of Botswana? What about the copyright law of the Netherlands, the corporation laws of Japan, or the English translation of the Egyptian Civil Code? Already back in 1991, just before the internet, Wallace Baker remarked that “foreign law has become the daily bread of lawyers everywhere who formally had totally domestic practices.” Since then, the need to access the content of foreign law has increased exponentially. The importance of global access to foreign laws on the internet and how to improve it was recently highlighted at an international Meeting of Experts on …

Digitizing The World's Laws, Claire M. Germain

Working Papers

Where does one find the foreign investment laws of Botswana? What about the copyright law of the Netherlands, the corporation laws of Japan, or the English translation of the Egyptian Civil Code? Already back in 1991, just before the internet, Wallace Baker remarked that “foreign law has become the daily bread of lawyers everywhere who formally had totally domestic practices.” Since then, the need to access the content of foreign law has increased exponentially. The importance of global access to foreign laws on the internet and how to improve it was recently highlighted at an international Meeting of Experts on …

Legal Storytelling: The Theory And The Practice - Reflective Writing Across The Curriculum, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

This article concentrates on the theory of narrative or storytelling and addresses the reasons it is vital to encourage in law schools in non-clinical or primarily doctrinal courses. Section I traces the advent of storytelling in legal theory and practice: while lawyers have long recognized that part of their job is to tell their clients' stories, the legal academy was, for many years, resistant to narrative methodologies. Section II examines the current applications of Writing Across the Curriculum in law schools. Most exploratory writing tasks in law school come in clinical courses, although a few adventurous professors are adding reflective …

Law Library 2.0: New Roles For Law Librarians In The Information Overload Era, Sasha Skenderija

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

WWW has rapidly evolved from a technological into a social medium. Web 2.0 has become a metaphor for the distributed and decentralized collaboration networks on a global scale. With the recent trends of new media development, the sources available have reached a critical mass resulting in an unprecedented information overload. The urgent challenge to all information professionals, in this case law librarians, is no longer availability and direct provision of resources, but rather the filtering and highlighting the ubiquitous Infosphere. The recent transformation of legal information has had more drastic consequences than in many other cases. The Cornell Law Library …

Where Web 2.0 And Legal Information Intersect: Adjusting Course Without Getting Lost, Matthew M. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

For more than a century, the process of legal research remained unchanged. This process was rooted in an established legal information structure. The law was published in standard texts, such as the West reporters, annotated codes, treatises, and the West Key Number Digest. While the advent of computer-assisted legal research was a departure from the print-based model, it did not fundamentally change the structure of legal information or the nature of authority. In fact, in its conservative beginnings, computer-assisted legal research provided a mere format shift as case texts were transcribed to simple online databases. More recently, Web 2.0 technologies …

Legal Information Management In A Global And Digital Age: Revolution And Tradition, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article presents an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries, and describes some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. It discusses the impact of globalization and the Internet on international and foreign law information, the free access to law movement and open access scholarship, and mass digitization projects, then turns to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long term access to born digital legal information and authentication of official digital legal information. It finally discusses new roles for librarians, called upon to evaluate the quality of information teach legal research methodology and be advocates …

Redefining Open Access For The Legal Information Market, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The open access movement in legal scholarship, inasmuch as it is driven within the law library community over concerns about the rising cost of legal information, fails to address - and in fact diverts resources from - the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. The current system of legal scholarly publishing - in student-edited journals and without meaningful peer review - does not face the pressures to increase prices common in the science and health disciplines. One solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their …

Pioneering Change In The Centennial Year, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Negotiating And Analyzing Electronic License Agreements, Duncan E. Alford

Faculty Publications

Mr Alford analyzes license agreements for electronic resources and suggests certain negotiation points to consider when entering into such an agreement. He begins by describing the results of a survey of law librarians about their preparation for and techniques used when negotiating electronic license agreements and the legal strategies used by publishers to support the licensing of electronic information. After reviewing selected principles of licensing issued by library associations and several standardized electronic license agreements, he identifies provisions in a typical agreement that should concern libraries and suggests certain arguments to use in negotiating terms more favorable to the library.

Content And Quality Of Legal Information And Data On The Internet With A Special Focus On The United States, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as "authoritative," or "the official" word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital …

The Top Fives: An Internet Pathfinder For Law Librarians, Yolanda Patrice Jones

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Many law librarians are currently beginning to explore the Internet as a source of legal information. One of the most frequently asked questions after one gets an Internet connection is "Where do I go from here?" The following pathfinder is a list of what I consider to be the most important resources which will lead the legal researcher to the widest possible amount of legal information on the Internet.

This list is purely subjective, and certainly not complete. I tried to stick to the 'top five' format as much as possible, but every so often I couldn't help myself from …

The Future Of Law Librarians In Changing Institutions, Or The Hazards And Opportunities Of New Information Technology, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It is uncontroverted that a major technological shift in the delivery of legal information is well underway. What will be the effects of these changes on law librarians and, more importantly, what opportunities will the changes create? Professor Martin suggests several opportunities stemming from the distinctive competencies of law librarians.

Book Review. Legal Information Management Index, Linda K. Fariss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Better Organization Of Legal Knowledge, Layman E. Allen, Tomoyuki Ohta

Articles

The increasing need of legislatures to draft complicated statutes, e.g., the Internal Revenue Code, requires the development of new techniques for defining and communicating complicated policies both accurately and understandably. At present, these complicated statutes are expressed in long, convoluted sentences with frequent uses of exceptions and limitations. Current drafting technique, with its inadequacies, often hinders a comprehensive understanding of the policy being communicated and often fails to communicate the policy accurately. Moreover, with the voluminous increase of legal literature in recent times, legal researchers experience increasing difficulty in attempting to retrieve relevant judicial and administrative interpretations. The authors propose …