Due Process: Georgetown Law Library Blog

The proposed Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union was finalized on Monday, January 30, 2012. All member states signed on except the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic. After the informal summit the European Council set out the plan for its becoming law as follows:

"The treaty will be signed in March and will enter into force once it has been ratified by at least 12 euro area member states. It will be legally binding as an international agreement and will be open to the EU countries which do not sign it at the outset.
The aim is to incorporate it into EU law within five years of its entry into force."

Controversy surrounding the agreement and various related proposals has the Greek debt crisis as its focus. The EUtopia Blog is one free source (major UK papers and the Financial Times of course provide extensive analysis) with good discussion of the issues.

This entry was posted on January 31, 2012 at 2:19 PM and has received 335 views. Print this entry.

The inaugural 2012 issue of the Georgetown Law Center, Business, Economics & Regulatory Law Research Paper Series (Vol. 14, Issue No. 1) has just been just been released by SSRN.

This issue includes the following new works of scholarship from Georgetown Law faculty:

• The WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel: The Evolution of Global Health Diplomacy by Allyn L. Taylor and Ibadat S. Dhillon (Realizing Rights)
• Looking at the Lanham Act: Images in Trademark and Advertising Law by Rebecca Tushnet
• The Dodd-Frank Act and Housing Finance: Can It Restore Private Risk Capital to the Securitization Market? by Adam J. Levitin, Andrey D. Pavlov (Simon Fraser University) and Susan M. Wachter (University of Pennsylvania)

Registered SSRN users can subscribe to this series for free.

Recent faculty publications and working papers are also available via the Georgetown Law Scholarly Commons.  The Georgetown Law Center’s SSRN series and the Scholarly Commons are administered by the Georgetown Law Library.

This entry was posted on January 30, 2012 at 3:53 PM and has received 323 views. Print this entry.

The inaugural 2012 issue of the Georgetown Public Law & Legal Theory Paper Series (Vol. 14, Issue No. 1) has just been just been released by SSRN.

This issue includes the following new works of scholarship from Georgetown Law faculty:

• Turning the Corner on Mass Incarceration? by David Cole
• Scary Monsters: Hybrids, Mashups, and Other Illegitimate Children by Rebecca Tushnet
• Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama by Robin West
• On Constitutional Disobedience by Louis Michael Seidman

Registered SSRN users can subscribe to this series for free.

Recent faculty publications and working papers are also available via the Georgetown Law Scholarly Commons. The Georgetown Law Center’s SSRN series and the Scholarly Commons are administered by the Georgetown Law Library.

This entry was posted on January 25, 2012 at 10:02 AM and has received 525 views. Print this entry.

In September, 2011, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, Pub. L. 112-29, was signed into law. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has prepared an indepth resource guide on the implementation of this act which is available on their website. The guide includes a complete legislative history of the act, including bills, Senate & House debates and hearings. Over the next couple of months, the USPTO will be traveling throughout the country to discuss proposed rules for implementation of the act and their scheduled presentations are highlighted here as well.

For secondary sources on conducting patent law research, take a look at the library's Patent Law Research Guide,

This entry was posted on January 24, 2012 at 9:19 AM and has received 441 views. Print this entry.

The Georgetown Law Library has launched a new data archiving service, the Georgetown Law Dataverse, to support the empirical research of Law Center faculty members, academic centers and institutes, and legal journals.

"Georgetown Law faculty are increasingly publishing scholarship with empirical data components," said Law Library Director and Professor of Law Michelle Wu. "This trend is reflected in the broader legal academy as well. As a result, free, open and reliable access to source data has become critical to the development of legal scholarship. With an eye towards facilitating such scholarship, the Georgetown Law Library is offering this innovative service to support the preservation and sharing of digital datasets."

The Georgetown Law Dataverse is a repository of digital datasets, collections of statistical information or other related data used in empirical scholarship. This service will allow authors to permanently preserve and publically release data that they have collected. Authors who continue to update their work after publication can upload revised data as it becomes available.

More information about the Dataverse is available here: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/collections/dataverse.cfm.

This entry was posted on January 12, 2012 at 1:41 PM and has received 760 views. Print this entry.

In collaboration with Georgetown's undergraduate library, the law library provides access to Credo Reference, featuring electronic access to hundreds of encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographical sources and other reference resources from 80 publishers. Some of the ebooks featured include:

• Dictionary of Spanish Law
• Business German Dictionary
• Financial Times World Desk Reference
• Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
• Marquis Who's Who in America
• National Gallery Image Collection

Credo Reference is searchable by keyword, subject, phrase and date. If you need any assistance making use of this resource, please contact a reference librarian.

This entry was posted on January 12, 2012 at 9:23 AM and has received 675 views. Print this entry.

The 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 is now available.  The Blawg 100 is a list of the top legal blogs, according to popular vote.

To find more legal blogs, see the ABA Blawg Directory, where you can browse blogs by topic, author, geography, or law school affiliation.

For more information on current awareness resources for a particular subject, see the Georgetown Law Library research guide on the subject of interest.

This entry was posted on January 10, 2012 at 12:27 PM and has received 724 views. Print this entry.

In 21st century America, we all know that New Year's Day is January 1st. But, did you know that this wasn't alway so?

From 1582 until 1751, England refused to adopt the 'new' Gregorian Calendar on the grounds that it was steeped in Roman Catholic 'superstitions' and not at all proper for a Protestant country. This resulted in almost two centuries of dual and/or contradictory dating of legal documents, governmental proclamations, newspapers, and other printed materials. Sometimes the document would follow the practice of every other European nation, including Protestant Scotland, and use January 1st as the start of each new year. Sometimes the document would follow the English practice of starting each official new year on March 25th. Sometimes the document would list both years for any date between January 1st and March 25th, as in 'January 1, 1700/01'. You can easily imagine the potential for confusion and complications this ongoing situation led to in England and its dominions and colonies.

The latest exhibit in the Williams Library Atrium illustrates this cultural anomaly of Early Modern English governance with facsimiles from books held by Georgetown Law Library's Special Collections.

This entry was posted on January 6, 2012 at 5:42 PM and has received 970 views. Print this entry.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank maintains an extensive library of economic reports, statistics and special collections, known as FRASER. This website has recently undergone a facelift and the material is much easier to access now. Researchers can search the collection, or browse by topic, author or date. Some of the material contained in FRASER includes:

• Federal Reserve Act documents, including bills, hearings & laws from 1913 through the 1970s
• Economic Reports of the President
• Original documents from the formation of the First & Second Banks of the United States
• Banking & Monetary Statistics from 1914 - 1941

If you have any questions about this resource, feel free to contact a  reference librarian for assistance.

This entry was posted on January 6, 2012 at 12:36 PM and has received 970 views. Print this entry.

The Library has added an electronic subscription to Tax Notes Today. Tax Notes Today has daily coverage of Federal tax law changes and policy shifts, special reports, analytical articles, and news concerning Congressional, Treasury, and IRS actions. 

Current faculty and students may subscribe to receive a daily email of Tax Notes Today. Archives of Tax Notes Today are also available --- coverage goes back to 1987.

Tax Notes Today is accessible from the Tax Analysts database.

To set up an email subscription to Tax Notes Today, select "Edit my email profile", then click on "E-Mail Profile" on the following screen. Once you enter your email address, you will have the option of subscribing (or unsubscribing) to Tax Notes Today.

You can also set up daily or weekly email alerts to Tax Notes Today that will notify you of articles discussing particular Code sections or subject areas. 

This entry was posted on January 5, 2012 at 12:21 PM and has received 970 views. Print this entry.