Our Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide has been undated to provide links to background material on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated to the Supreme Court today by President Obama.We link to previous key decisions of Sotomayor on SCOTUSBlog, as well as many biographical resources and her previous confirmation hearings when nominated to the Circuit Court and District Court.

Additionally, we link to the Supreme Court records and briefs for her recent opinion, Ricci v. DeStefano, which is currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. As her confirmation process proceeds, we will continue to update this guide on a regular basis.

The California Supreme Court today ruled to uphold Proposition 8, while allowing 18,000 gay marriages entered into before the Proposition passed to stand. Due to overwhelming demand on the Court's web site, a copy of the ruling has also been made available from http://www.scribd.com/doc/15824759/Prop-8-Ruling-Cal-Sup-Ct.

Legal records from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp are being collected by New York University's Tamiment Library and Seton Hall University's Center for Policy and Research with the expectation that public access will be available in the fall of this year. The institutions are making plans to provide remote access to oral histories and other digitized materials they acquire.

Read the full release from NYU and the American Libraries Online article.

As posted by Emily Feldman to the AALL Washington Blawg, THOMAS, a product of the Law Library of Congress, has launched its first RSS feeds. Information on how to subscribe to these feeds, including the Daily Digest, is available at: http://www.loc.gov/law/news/rss.php.

On May 14, at 2:00 P.M. E.T., Judge Richard Posner will speak for 20 minutes about his new book, A Failure of Capitalism. After his presentation, he will spend 10 minutes answering questions posed by webinar participants in real time. For more information and to register for the webinar, go to http://tinyurl.com/curyh8.

On Friday, Justice Souter announced his intention to retire from the Court at the end of its current term. 

For a crash course in how the nomination process works, read the Congressional Research Service's report Supreme Court Appointment Process: Roles of the President, Judiciary Committee, and Senate (last updated 3/20/08).

The Library recently updated the Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide.  It includes links to materials about the nomination process and the text of previous nomination and confirmation proceedings. 

In response to the current influenza outbreak, the library has updated the Pandemic Flu Research Guide to provide access to the sources of both International and U.S. legal authority, Federal and State emergency preparedness and response plans, as well as Secondary Sources and web sites of interest.

We've referenced the most current government reports available on the topic and provide a link to the World Health Organization's H1N1's update page with RSS feed. You can also check out the Top 10 Epidemiology and Flu Blogs from our guide.

The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania recently released an article entitled, Legal Strategy 101:It's Time for Law Firms to Re-Think Their Business Model which looks at the impact of the the global financial crisis on the legal industry. It outlines the challenges being faced and the accommodations necessary to sustain the top-notch firms.

The library also has some books on this issue, such as:

Think Again!: Innovative Approaches to the Business of Law, by Jeffrey L. Nischwitz

The Lawyer's Guide to Governing Your Firm, by Arthur G. Greene

Practical Law Office Management, by Brent Roper

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a symposium sponsored by the Yale Information Society Project. There have been a few similar programs at various law schools recently. This symposium raised issues of copyright and privacy, along with the use of the now-familiar 2.0 applications to bring users into a customized world of content, context, and ubiquitous availability of scholarly and popular information via what we have been calling "the library."

Speakers ranged from Jonathan Zittrain to Lolly Gasaway, Kenneth Crews and others whose bios and affiliations are listed at the links above. Coming soon are the presentations themselves, to be posted in full; some are already up at the YaleISp Blog, http://yaleispblog.net/
There was lots of real time Twittering and photos posted but linked from above to flikr.

My takeaway for law libraries: the Faustian bargain as described by  Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. Patrons will be tracked through many of the social networking applications libraries might choose to use, and so there is a trade-off between the sharing and aggregation of information with some of the traditional privacy and anonymity that libraries have afforded their patrons, indeed, even guarded on their behalf.

Much to think about and much with which to experiment.

This morning the Vermont legislature voted (House: 100-49, Senate: 23-5) to override Governor Jim Douglas's veto of Senate Bill 115, which legalizes same-sex marriage. http://www.leg.state.vt.us/database/status/summary.cfm?Bill=S%2E0115&Session=2010