Law Commons^™

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Addressing The Issue Of Websites Which Are "Lost In Space", Patricia A. Broussard

Patricia A Broussard

This article takes a "light-hearted" approach to dealing with vanishing websites that have been used as footnotes in legal scholarship. It pokes a bit of fun at scholarship, but ultimately offers some solutions to the problem of vanishing websites.

Modern Disparities In Legal Education: Emancipation From Racial Neutrality, David Mears

David Mears

Abstract

Wealth, leadership and political power within any democratic society requires the highest caliber of a quality legal education. The Black experience is not necessarily a unique one within legal education but rather an excellent example of either poor to substandard quality disseminated unequally among racial and socioeconomic stereotypes based upon expected outcomes of probable success or failure. It is often said, “Speak and so it will happen” – many within the halls of academia work hard to openly predict failure yet seemingly do very little to foster success internally within the academic procedures and processes based on the customer …

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 …

Miroslav Petricek And The Quest For A New Ontology Of Information, Sasha Skenderija

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Research and academic libraries, as well as academic publishers, belong to the sub-category of the infosphere known as “Institutions of Knowledge.” Libraries, however, have made few contributions to the development and utilization of the Internet, and now face a situation in which Google is replacing libraries as the primary research destination of scholars and students. The theories of leading Czech contemporary philosopher, Miroslav Petricek, may provide a construct for better understanding such developments and providing pathways for situating and developing library products and services within these new infosphere realities.

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 …

The Internationalization Of The American Journal Of International Law: Reality Or Chimera? - A Survey, Christos A. Ravanides

Christos A. Ravanides

In 2006, the American Society of International Law ("ASIL") celebrated its centennial anniversary. In 2007, it is the turn of the Society’s flagship publication, the American Journal of International Law ("AJIL"), to celebrate the centennial year since its inception in 1907. This first-of-its-kind detailed survey dissects the Journal’s “international” attribute: how truly “international” and how “American” has this prestigious publication proved in the course of a century? How accommodating a host has it been to international lawyers with no U.S. affiliation or with “deviating” views on international law? The research has been multi-fold; we examine the content, the structure and …

Current Awareness Alerts Make The Internet Revolve Around You, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Shares ways for busy lawyers to utilize tech-savvy methods to receive desired news and information.

Legal Research And Legal Education In Africa: The Challenge For Information Literacy, Vicki Lawal

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This paper analyses legal research within the context of legal education in Africa, it examines some of the challenges of electronic legal research in view of the influences of online legal electronic resources and Computer Assisted legal Research (CALR) and the importance of information literacy in addressing some of the issues raised especially with regards to undergraduate legal education.

How To Present Web-Based Legal Information: Towards Library Web 2.0, Sasha Skenderija

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

The World Wide Web 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. As an example of the utilization of Web 2.0 values, the Cornell Law Library (CLL) recently re-launched its website. The …

Keynote Address: Remarks At The Workshop On Tapping Into The World Of Electronic Legal Knowledge , Muna Ndulo

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

Professor Muna Ndulo of Cornell Law School presented the keynote address at the 2007 Starr Workshop, “Tapping into the World of Electronic Legal Knowledge.” The workshop took place at Cornell Law School October 7-10, 2007 and was co-sponsored by the Starr Foundation, New York University Law Library, and Cornell Law Library.

Professor Ndulo addresses the topic of new information technologies and their importance to legal research and teaching.

U.S. Law And Legal Research, Pat Court

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This presentation on the basics of U.S. law offers a general outline of the fundamental sources of U.S. law. With a foundation in the three branches of government and the laws, court decisions, and regulations that flow from them, the speaker demonstrated free and fee-based electronic resources frequently used for legal research. The focus is on Westlaw, LexisNexis, PACER the Public Access to Court Electronic Records), GPOAccess, and the official U.S. Supreme Court web site. While the web has made it possible for universities, governments, courts, and others to put user-friendly law on the web for free, the most extensive …

Demand For Electronic Legal Information At The University Of Botswana , Kgomotso F. Radijeng

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

The advent of technology has changed the way legal research is conducted. The study looks at the availability of electronic legal information at the University of Botswana, perceptions of the university legal community about such information, challenges affecting access to electronic legal information and recommended solutions to those challenges. The paper also looks at the contribution that the library can make in alleviating the challenges and addressing the different perceptions by the legal community.

Race, Diversity,And Opportunity: Opening Up The Pipeline, Angela M. Laughlin

Angela M Laughlin

Take a moment and think back to how you first got the idea to become a lawyer. Chances are, your inspiration was someone you knew personally. Now, imagine that your path had never crossed with that of the person who inspired you. This situation is real life for some young people of economic disadvantaged backgrounds: they never have considered a career in law because they rarely encounter such professionals in positive situations. Law schools need to be creative when it comes to increasing diversity among their student population. Diversity is a compelling state interest and is important to the legitimacy …

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

Cornell 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 …

Unlocking The Secrets Of Highly Successful Legal Writing Students, Anne Enquist

Anne M Enquist

Abstract Unlocking the Secrets of Highly Successful Legal Writing Students Anne M. Enquist Seattle University School of Law Why are some law students successful in their legal writing classes and others are not? To identify the secrets to success, I did a case study of six second-year law students as they wrote a motion brief and an appellate brief for their 2L legal writing course. Based on their 1L legal writing course, two of these students were predicted to be highly successful, two were predicted to be moderately successfully, and two were predicted to be only marginally successful. Through daily …

Navigating “Social Networking” Tools: Blogs, Wikis, Rss Feeds And Beyond, Elizabeth Geesey Holmes

Presentations

What are “social networking” tools, and why should lawyers care about them? Wikipedia, itself built on social networking software, notes that social networking refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications, known as online social networks are becoming increasingly popular. This phenomenon is also known as Web 2.0. Jack Maness, a librarian at University of Colorado at Boulder, defines it as, “not a web of textual publication, but a web of multi-sensory communication … a matrix of dialogues, not a collection of monologues. It …

Delegating Discrimination: Why Discretionary Licensing Statutes Controlling Concealed Carry Weapons Permits Contravene The Rule Of Law, Robert J. Endorf

Robert J. Endorf Jr.

The most significant change in this nation's firearm regulation in almost fifty years is the majority of states adopting liberalized rules for the carrying of concealed firearms. The political debate surrounding theses new "shall issue" licensing laws has almost unanimously confused two distinct issues. The debate has centered on whether states should issue many licenses, or virtually no licenses; however, because many licensing statutes date back to the turn of the twentieth century and were originally passed for highly suspect motives, such as outright racism or xenophobia, the issue of how best to issue licenses has been buried under the …

Law And Heidegger’S Question Concerning Technology: A Prolegomenon To Future Law Librarianship, Paul D. Callister

ExpressO

Following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger offered one of the most potent criticisms of technology and modern life. His nightmare is a world whose essence has been reduced to the functional equivalent of “a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world [is] in principle a technical one . . . . [It is] altogether alien to former ages and histories.” For Heidegger, the problem is not technology itself, but the technical mode of thinking that has accompanied it. Such a viewpoint of the world is a …

A Study Of Islamic Family Law In Malaysia: A Select Bibliography, Raihana Abdullah

International Journal of Legal Information

Islamic Family Law is one of the most studied fields in Malaysian law. This is because it affects the personal life of Muslims, and because many issues have arisen as a result of the implementation of the Islamic Family Law Enactment which governs Muslims in Malaysia. Scholarship in this area has expanded with the development of the Enactment itself. Several approaches have been used to analyze the implementation of the law inter alia, legal, socio-legal, comparative, and anthropological and sociological perspecitves. It cannot be denied that research and scholarly publications in the field of Islamic Family Law have contributed to …

Sexual Orientation And The Law: A Research Bibliography Selectively Annotating Legal Literature Through 2005, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND THE LAW: A RESEARCH BIBLIOGRAPHY is a project of the Standing Committee on Lesbian and Gay Issues of the American Association of Law Libraries. This almost-500 page volume includes several features that the Standing Committee hopes will be useful to librarians and their patrons. These include: a description of the bibliography project from its origins in 1987; an introduction by Brad Sears, Executive Director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy that places this literature into intellectual, historical and legal perspective; a reprint of the original 1994 bibligraphy as it appeared in Law …

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Quality Online Legal Researching -- On The Cheap!, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Summarizes issues to consider when exploring the internet for free but reliable legal resources, and offers a table of links to federal and Georgia state materials.

Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation And America's Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion To Bibliographical Orthodoxy And The Constriction Of Open And Equal Access To The Law, Ian Gallacher

ExpressO

This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system’s devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals – The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual – has on open access to the law.

In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

Economic Analysis Of Law And Economics, Oren Gazal-Ayal

ExpressO

The academic world is wonderful. Like few other professionals, we can choose what we want to do and what questions we think are important, which in our line of work means choosing what topics we want to research. But what influences our choices? This paper examines what drives scholars to select Law and Economics (L&E) as a topic for research. It does so by implementing the methodology of many L&E papers – by assuming that regulation and incentives matter.

Legal scholars face very different academic incentives in different parts of the world. In some countries, the academic standards for appointment, …

L Is For Lawyer: An Alphabet Of Handy Web Pages, Wendy E. Moore

Presentations

This paper contains an alphabetical list of 26 websites that you may find helpful when conducting legal research. These websites are just a sample of what is available on the Internet to assist your legal research every day. The list below includes government, educational, and commercial websites, most of which focus on the law and legal related topics. In addition to those, there are also a few non-legal websites included because of their usefulness to legal professionals. This list of websites does not pretend to be the definitive list of legal websites available, but rather a good jumping off point …

Google And Beyond: Finding Information Using Search Engines, And Evaluating Your Results, Elizabeth Geesey Holmes

Presentations

Searching the World Wide Web can be a daunting task. The Web has expanded at such a rapid pace that nobody knows exactly how large it is, but it is safe to say that there are many billions of Web pages residing on servers all over the world. Add to this scenario the task of evaluating information found on the web and choosing between the hundreds of different search tools available – including directories, search engines, meta-searchers, and specialized search engines – and the situation begins to feel overwhelming. Fortunately, learning a few essential concepts of Web searching and site …

The Prophecies Of The Prophetic Jurist – A Review Of Selected Works Of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Kissi Agyebeng

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

This is a review of the methodology and style of legal research of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., focusing on the ideological and philosophical leanings that informed his scholarship. The review spans selected works of his undergraduate days through his mid-career writings and his representative opinions on the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Forty-Two: The Hitchhiker's Guide To Teaching Legal Research To The Google Generation, Ian Gallacher

ExpressO

Students are coming to law school increasingly dependent on computers to serve their research needs. And they expect that computerized legal research will be both more efficient and more effective than book-based research. These expectations place students in conflict with traditionalists who point to the inherent limitations of computer-assisted legal research and the dangers in relying on legal research conducted entirely in electronic databases. These traditionalists favor a “books first,” if not a “books only,” approach. This paper explores the cultural conflict between the traditionalists and the “Google generation,” evaluates the dangers associated with computer-assisted legal research, and proposes a …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.