Due Process: Georgetown Law Library Blog

Patrons who use our Free and Low-Cost Legal Research Guide will be interested in some recent developments in the availability of free legal material online. First, Lexis recently shut down lexisOne, their site for free case law. Now, the only way to access case law through Lexis is to subscribe to their premium services (Lexis Advance and Lexis.com).

On a more positive note, however, the Public Library of Law (PLoL) is once again being kept up-to-date. The PLoL, provided by low-cost alternative Fastcase, was not being updated with current material for a brief time, but that problem seems to have been corrected.

Fastcase and PLoL are only two of the free and low-cost alternatives to the dominant legal research services. For more information, consult our research guide for the particular type of material you are interested in (cases, statutes, etc.). For each type of legal material, the guide has links to the relevant websites, dates of coverage, and available search options. 

This entry was posted on April 18, 2012 at 6:38 PM and has received 1258 views. Print this entry.

Georgetown's Lauinger Library has recently expanded its access to ProQuest's Digital National Security Archive, adding several new document collections to its subscription.  The archive contains more than 35,000 declassified primary documents that led to U.S. national security policy decisions, and is available to all members of the Georgetown community. The newly added collections include materials related to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community after September 11, 2011.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2011 at 10:54 AM and has received 15306 views. Print this entry.

With exams and the summer approaching, we would like to let you know about some of our services and resources that can be particularly useful during this time of year. A Georgetown Law Librarian will discuss materials that can be used for exam preparation, reference assistance we can provide during the summer, and many more library resources you may not be aware of. We are offering two sessions, and space will be limited, so please register online.

There will be coffee and snacks, so please take a break from studying and join us!

Sessions will be held on:

Tuesday April 26th at 5:00 PM in McDonough 110
Sunday, May 1st at 5:00 PM in McDonough 110

This entry was posted on April 21, 2011 at 3:41 PM and has received 23444 views. Print this entry.

The Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology has developed a new iPhone app designed to, "appeal to all Supreme Court junkies." The OyezToday app allows iPhone users to access the content of the Oyez Project, an extensive collection of material from the Supreme Court of the United States. New opinions, as well as audio and transcripts from oral arguments, are available on OyezToday the same day they are released by the Court.

OyezToday is free and available in the iTunes App Store. Apps for the iPad and Android phones are forthcoming. For more information, see the press release from Chicago-Kent or the preview of OyezToday from Apple.

This entry was posted on March 31, 2011 at 1:44 PM and has received 23869 views. Print this entry.

Looking for a way to stand out among your peers and impress your employer this summer? Can’t remember the difference between the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations? Then you should attend the 2011 Bridging the Gap program, an intensive, day-long legal research review course designed to help law students prepare for summer employment. The program will include a review of basic legal research and research strategies as well as cost-effective research methods. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to attend a subject-specific administrative law session on either securities, tax, patent, or government contracts law research. The day will conclude with a panel of attorneys from the area who will provide invaluable advice on how to have a successful summer experience.

Bridging the Gap is coordinated and co-sponsored by the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC and the Young Lawyers Section of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, and will take place on April 8, 2011 at the Georgetown University Law Center. All interested law students are eligible and encouraged to attend. The deadline for registration and payment is April 1, 2011.

Register online here: http://www.llsdc.org/en/cev/293

This entry was posted on March 28, 2011 at 5:36 PM and has received 23414 views. Print this entry.

The Law Center has launched a new database devoted to materials related to the state secrets privilege. This evidentiary privilege, which has been widely discussed in legal scholarship and news media in the past few years, allows for the exclusion of evidence from litigation if its disclosure will have an adverse effect on national security. Georgetown Law Professor Laura Donohue, who has written extensively on the privilege and on national security law generally, and Georgetown's Center on National Security and the Law, have been collecting case law, litigation documents, executive branch materials, news articles, and scholarly works related to the privilege.

This material is now publicly available through the Georgetown Law State Secrets Archives. The documents are fully searchable, and organized by subject, jurisdiction, government position, and disposition of the state secrets claim. The database is intended for use by scholars and students, as well as journalists and other researchers, and is the largest online collection of state secrets material 

This entry was posted on March 15, 2011 at 1:51 PM and has received 23865 views. Print this entry.

This entry was posted on January 31, 2011 at 12:27 PM and has received 23894 views. Print this entry.

Judge Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has issued his ruling and findings of fact in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the litigation over California's Proposition 8. The opinion can be accessed here.

This entry was posted on August 4, 2010 at 5:08 PM and has received 24032 views. Print this entry.

The Law Library has added Congressional Quarterly's Political Contact Suite to its collection of databases. This resource contains contact and biographical information for over 170,000 elected officials and staff members from all branches of the federal government. The information is updated daily, so it is always timely and reliable, and the database is linked to Congressional Quarterly's other titles, like CQ Weekly and CQ Almanac, so researchers can look for related entries from one central search engine.

While there are a number of contexts in which this information could be useful, it might be particularly helpful to our students and alumni who are seeking federal jobs, and need to find accurate and current contact information.

As always, feel free to contact our reference department for help with using this resource.

This entry was posted on June 28, 2010 at 11:57 AM and has received 24497 views. Print this entry.

With today's announcement that President Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to become the next Associate Justice of The Supreme Court, we have updated our Supreme Court Nominations Research Guide. We have listed some links to basic information about Solicitor General Kagan, such as biographies and her scholarly publications. We will continue to post more information as the confirmation process continues, so check our guide often for updates.

This entry was posted on May 10, 2010 at 4:26 PM and has received 24424 views. Print this entry.