The law library is organizing a focus group of law students to help us better understand your research experiences in your summer positions. Our interest is in both your research successes and your research failures, as your feedback will help us better tailor our offerings in legal research instruction to reflect your real-world research experiences in the workplace.
The session will be held on Monday, Oct. 5, at 12:00 noon, in Rm. 320 of Williams Library.
Lunch will be provided.
To participate, sign up at: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/students/signupfg.cfm.

The law library has created a new guide to researching Congressional investigations.  The guide provides guidance on how to find relevant primary source documents, such as Congressional hearing transcripts, as well as case law dealing with the authority of Congress to conduct investigations. We have also listed some valuable secondary sources to help you get started on your research.

This week the Sacramento Bee reported that a California judge ruled that a litigant may learn the identity of a person who posts an anonymous comment on a blog.

In the case Calvin Chang, a police officer for the University of California in Davis filed suit against UC, claiming discrimination and breach of a settlement agreement in a prior lawsuit. David Greenwald, who operates a blog called The People's Vanguard of Davis, wrote about the suit and people commented. Chang believes that one anonymous comment was written by a 'managing agents' of the university and contained information that would violate the agreement of the prior settlement agreement.

The California judge ruled that Chang can hire a third-party to investigate whether the author of the comment was a manging agent. If it was the court would allow Chang to request that Google, the Vanguard's former host, provide him with the anonymous poster's e-mail addresses and log-in information.

The Sacramento Bee also reported that the judge ruled that the First Amendment generally protects anonymous speech, but online anonymity may be breached. "When vigorous criticism descends into defamation, constitutional protection is no longer available."

Read more about the case in the Chronicle of Higher Education, provide through the library's subscription.

   Georgetown University Law Library now has access to a new database from Hein Online that contains a number of already compiled legislative histories on historic tax and economic reform legislation.  The  Taxation & Economic Reform in America: A Historical Archive 1781-2009 database includes the historic Carlton Fox Collection, which compiles 48 years of legislative history research for major tax legislation. Additionally, the database contains many other already compiled legislative histories.

   Don't forget that Hein Online links you to many other already compiled legislative histories via the Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories Database.  When completing legislative history research, it is always helpful to be aware that someone may have already done the hard work of compiling a legislative history for you. 

   For more information on legislative history research, please see our Legislative History Research Guide.

In the August 24, 2009 issue of the National Journal, Aaron S. Bayer reports on the history of unpublished federal appellate cases. The article notes that there has been general criticism of the practice since at least 1985, when Supreme Court Justice Steven's dissent in County of Los Angeles v. Kling, 474 U.S. 936, 938 (1985), and compares the practice "like the decision to promulgate a rule spawning a body of secret law - plainly wrong."

The article states that according to the Judicial Business of the United States Courts:  Annual Report of the Director, tbl. S-3, between 2000 and 2008 the federal courts have not published more than 81% of all appellate opinions issued.  The number is not getting smaller.  In 2008 the same courts failed to publish more than 81.8% of all appellate opinions issued. See Annual Report of the Director, tbl. S-3 (2008).

Bayer's article is available through subscriptions to the National Law Journal purchased by the Georgetown Law Library.  Read it either in print or online versions.

Websites disappearing and links becoming broken as time goes by, known as link rot, is a familiar theme of doing research in the internet age.  As increasingly many published court decisions cite to internet only publications, the problem of link rot has affected the reliability of citations in court opinions.  Now, the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management, with the endorsement of circuit court librarians, has recommended an means of preserving internet authorities, as reported by The Third Branch, the Newsletter of the Federal Courts.  Their proposal calls for chambers staff preserving a copy of websites cited in opinions by downloading a copy of the webpage and filing it as an attachment to the opinion in the Electronic Case Files System.  The copy would be available with the rest of the court's opinion via PACER.  The Committee also recommends that citations to links from commercially published online materials (that charge a fee or give the appearance of a preference to a particular system) be avoided.

Do you think that this is a viable proposal to deal with the issue of link rot in citations to internet authorities in court opinions?

The blog VoxPopuLII  recently published an article about a new type of legal research product called OregonLaws.org.

The service was created by Robb Shecter, a third year law student at Lewis and Clark Law School in Oregon. OregonLaws.org provides a system to "gather, create, visualize, and mine data." Shecter explains that his database provides new ways to research Oregon statutes because it:

• uses the hierarchy created by the Oregon Legislature when it designed the Oregon Revised Statutes;
• uses the subjects of each statute to create a tag cloud leading the researcher to related statutes;
• provides digital authentication for each document;
• creates a statutory dictionary based upon all o f the defined terms in the Oregon Revised Statutes (see principal office) - https://www.oregonlaws.org/blog/2009/04/began-a-new-sub-project-oregon-legal-glossary/ new annotations.

According to a press release from the company Recap, it has created a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.  PACER contains the docket sheets and many documents filed with the federal courts.

The press release states: "RECAP is an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that gives PACER users a hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from the public archive."

You may learn more about how the extention work directly from the Recap website.

The newly published 9th Edition of Black's Law Dictionary has arrived in both the Williams and Wolff Libraries. It has been updated to include newer legal terms and contains approoximately 2,000 more entries than the 8th Edition.

While most law students are aware that Black's is the most respected and comprehensive source of legal definitions, many do not know about the other valuable information it contains. For example: there is a table of legal abbreviations, which can help you decipher difficult citations; a list of Latin legal maxims with their English translations; and many entries include references to Corpus Juris Secondum and the West Topic and Key Number System. Often, these tools are the quickest way to get started on your research, so it is worthwhile to become familiar with Black's.

The library recently acquired a microfilm collection of the Earl Warren Papers which reproduces documents archived in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. This 70 reel microfilm collection includes Warren's opinions as Chief Justice from 1953 until 1969, as well as his conference memoranda and 13 reels of his correspondence from 1953 through 1974.

Earl Warren, nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served as the 14th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Warren Court oversaw such landmark decisions as Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona.

The collection is available for use in our Media Department on the first floor of the Williams Library.