More About Amazon's Selling of Law Review Articles

From a memo posted by Marlyn Robinson, senior
reference librarians at the Tarlton Law Library,
U. of Texas -Austin, on the LAWLIB law
librarians' listserv, 4/28/2005:

"In 2002 Amazon and Gale Publishing (a
subsidiary of Thomson) began an online sales
program by selling Gale-produced e-documents,
mostly student study guides for literature and
business planning guides for small business
owners. They have now branched into what
appears to be all Gale databases.

... If you compare a list of law reviews for sale on
Amazon, you will see they correspond to the full text
articles available via the LegalTrac index. Most of the
articles in this database have a citation only, but some
have abstracts and some have full text. Obviously,
this is resulting from Gale's license with the specific
journals.

Thomson/Gale has the following caveat on the main
page of its databases:

'Thomson Gale respects the intellectual property of others.
The licensors of all articles appearing in our databases have
assured us that they have the right to authorize electronic
distribution of the materials they provide to us. If you are a
writer, and if you have questions or concerns regarding
the electronic distribution of your materials, we
recommend that you contact your publisher directly.

If you dispute the right of your publisher to authorize
electronic distribution, you may provide us with a written
notification of your claim and we will disable access to
the materials.'"

Translated Foreign News at "WatchingAmerica"

"WatchingAmerica" translates into
English a variety of foreign news sources on
events relating to the U.S. The site also
includes foreign multimedia content for
some postings.

More information from the Watching
America web site:

"It is not our purpose to find favorable or unfavorable
news and commentary, but to reflect as accurately as
possible how others perceive the richest and most
powerful country in the world. WatchingAmerica makes
available in English articles written about the U.S. by
foreigners, often for foreign audiences, and often in other
languages. Since WatchingAmerica offers its own
translations, regular users of our site will be able to
enjoy articles that are not available in English anywhere
else... In addition, by integrating the latest translation
technology into the site, visitors are able to surf all of the
content of foreign-language news outlets at the push of
a button - in English. "

New Titles & Editions from West

The Law Librarian Blog, 4/27/05, has posted an
annotated list of new titles (or new editions) of
possible interest from West.

If you would like the Law Library to acquire
an item listed here, or if you would like more
information about a title, please contact
your Law Library liaison.

Cornell Law School Faculty Issues Statement on Solomon

The Cornell Daily Sun, 4/22/2005, reports
that law faculty have adopted a formal statement
on the Solomon Amendment, calling the legislation
'unconstitutional.'

According to the article, the faculty's resolution states:
"By effectively preventing the Law School from
implementing its non-discrimination policy against the
military, the Solomon Amendment endorses and
perpetuates a form of discrimination that is not only
deeply invidious but unconstitutional as well."

Law Review Articles for Sale on Amazon

Amazon.com is now selling law review articles for
$5.95 a piece. Coverage is not complete.
You can search articles by author or title, as you
would for books.

See comments on this development at:

TaxProf Blog
Buying Law Review Articles on Amazon.com

Guide to Unpublished Judicial Opinions

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 4/24/2005:

"Joseph L. Gerken, a law librarian at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, is the author
of "A Librarian's Guide to Unpublished Judicial Opinions"
[96:3 Law Library Journal 475 (Summer 2004)].

The format is questions and answers, which are divided
into the following categories: history and context,
constitutional challenges, the Supreme Court,
depublication, citing and using unpublished opinions,
practical implications, and critiques. A selective
annotated bibliography begins on page 25."

GATT Digital Library Launched

From the Law Librarian Blog, 4/22/2005:

"Over 30,000 public documents and 300
publications of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) from 1947-1994
are accessible at the GATT Digital Library.

(Free registration required to view the pdf
version of the full text) The site was created
in a partnership between the Stanford University
Libraries & Academic Information Resources
(SULAIR) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)."

New Law School Academic Support Blog

The Law Professor's Blog Network has a new
member, the Law School Academic Support
Blog, published by Richard Litvin (Quinnipiac
University) and Dennis Tonsing (Roger Williams
University).

Recent articles on the blog include:

Taking Steps toward Solving the Anxiety Problem
Disabilities, Law Schools, and Law Students
Bar Examination Resources

First Federal "No Child Left Behind" Case

Contributed by Reference Librarian,
Christine Demetros:

The first federal "No Child Left Behind" has
been filed by the largest teachers' union and
school districts in 3 states.

see:

CNN Article 4/20/2005
New York Times Article, 4/21/2005

The Impact of the Internet on Scholarship

David M. Levy, a computer scientist at the
University of Washington, voices his views about
information overload and whether it threatens
the quality of research and teaching in
Knowing When to Log Off. (Chronical
of Higher Education Online, 4/22/2005.)

According to Levy, "We're losing touch with
the contemplative roots of scholarship, the
reflective dimension...When you think that
universities are meant to be in effect the think
tanks for the culture, or at least one of the major
forms of thinking, that strikes me as a very
serious concern."

Clemency & Capital Punishment Web Cast Tomorrow

Ohio State University Moritz College of Law is
hosting a live webcast on Friday, April 22, on
clemency and the executive's power to spare
life or let someone die.

Amherst ProfessorAustin Sarat will present
the Schwartz Lecture on Dispute Resolution,
entitled Mercy, Clemency, and Capital
Punishment: Two Accounts. Sarat will
examine two examples of how "governors use
rhetoric and narrative in coping with the
decision to spare a life or let someone die,
and how they explain or justify their use of
this extraordinary power."

Webcast information may be found on the
OSU Moritz College of Law web site.

Google Launches "My Search History" Feature

From the BeSpacific blog bySabrina I. Pacifica,
April 21, 2005:

"Google has rolled out a beta version of
My Search History, which allows you to easily view
and manage your search history from any computer
on the Internet. It's free to use, but you have to be
logged in for your search queries to be recorded.

You can run your search from the main Google page
or the Search History link mentioned above. The Search
History page displays a list of your searches by date or
relevance. As your search queries start to build,
Google tries to group them together, to make it easier
for you to find related concepts.

DeLay Attacks Justice Kennedy for Researching on the Internet

In its Inside Politics section today (4/20/2005),
CNN reports that House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay thinks it is "incredibly outrageous" that
Justice Kennedy does his own research on the
Internet.

For more on Mr. DeLay's comments, click here.

Daubert Tracker : Evidentiary Gatekeeping Decisions

From the Law Librarian Blog, 4/19/2005:

"In 1993, the Supreme Court decided in Daubert
v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals that scientific
testimony must be not only relevant, but reliable.
In Kumho Tire v. Carmichael, the Court extended
that rule to all experts. Accordingly, evidentiary
gatekeeping entails assessing whether expert
knowledge is relevant and reliable for admissibility.

The Daubert Tracker is a fee based database of all
reported evidentiary gatekeeping decisions, trial
and appellate going back to 1993, backed up when
available by full-text briefs, transcripts, and docket
entries. If you want to find out how specific experts
or areas of expertise fared in the courts, this is the
resource."

Daubert Tracker is on Lexis/Nexis.
at LITGAT > File: DAUBTR.

Federal E-Case Management Systems

From the BeSpacific blog bySabrina I. Pacifica,
April 20, 2005:

"From the Federal Judiciary Newsroom today:
"Implementation of the federal judiciary's Case
Management and Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF)
system continues in appellate, district and bankruptcy
courts across the country. The new system provides
courts with the option to have case file documents in
electronic form, and to accept filings over the Internet."
Details.

Papal Election Procedure

Paul Goda S.J. (Santa Clara University School of
Law) offers a fascinating glimpse into Papal
Election Procedure on Jurist Forum, 4/15/2005.

New Titles Lists from the Law Librarian Blog

The Law Librarian Blog regularly announces new titles from
the major legal publishers. As a service to our faculty, I will
begin providing links to these posts. If you would like the
Law Library to acquire an item listed here, or if you would
like more information about a title, please contact
your Law Library liaison.

This week:

New Legal Resources Added to Lexis

Typical Teaching Loads at Top Law Schools

Gordon Smith (Law, Wisconsin) has compiled
a list of law faculty teaching loads to support
his contention that the norm among top law
schools has shifted to three courses or 10
credits per year. His data is based on "a FOG
(Friends of Gordon) survey and represent
the "standard teaching load" at the Top 25
law schools, as currently listed in U.S. News
& World Report."

Leiter on Academic Bill of Rights in Florida

Professor Brian Leiter (U. Texas) speaks out
and invites comments about the Florida bill,
HB 837, entitled 'Student and Faculty Academic
Freedom in Postsecondary Education', filed
by Dennis Baxley in the Florida House of
Representatives.

According to Leiter, the three themes of the bill
are:

[1] (i) Students should have access to a broad range of
serious scholarly opinion and (ii) institutions should
promote a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies
and perspectives in the humanities and social sciences
and arts.

[2] (i) Student funds should be distributed on a
viewpoint neutral basis and (ii) the institution
should maintain a posture of neutrality on
substantive political and religious disagreements,
etc.

[3] Instructors should not (i) persistently introduce
(ii) controversial material that has (iii) no relation
to the subject of study and (iv) serves no legitimate
purpose.

International Legal Compliance: An Annotated Bibliography

From the Law Librarian Blog, 4/13/2005:

"Professor William C. Bradford (Indiana) has
compilied a bibliography on a subset of international
law he has naming rights to, namely, "international
legal compliance". See Willian C. Brandford,
International Legal Compliance: An Annotated
Bibliography, 30 N.C.J. Int'l L. & Com. Reg. 379 (2004)."

What is international legal compliance (ILC)?
The E-LawLibrarian blog quotes Bradford:

'International legal compliance (ILC)...

was born in the early 1990s from the revived debate

between legalization theorists, a group committed to

the belief that the transformation wrought by the

end of the Cold War has rendered international law

independently capable of constraining and shaping

the behavior of states, and their critics, a group

committed to the contrary notion that international

law remains primarily an aspirational enterprise

subordinate to politics and epiphenomenal to state practice.'

The literature relating to the questions of

whether, why, and under what circumstances

states choose to comply with international law

has produced a body of scholarship consisting of

eight books and nearly one hundred substantive

articles, according to Professor Bradford."

New Features on Google

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 4/13/2005:

"Google has been providing definitions of words for
some time (just type in define:[word]) to get definitions
of the word from other web sites). Now you can also
get words in other languages, because Google Definitions
has gone multilingual.

Google is also catching up to some of the other search
engines that will answer your questions. With
Google Q&A, you can ask most any question of Google
(try where is Addis Ababa?), and the answer(s) will
appear at the top of the results page."

bePress Launches Review of Law and Economics

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 4/12/2005:

"The Berkeley Electronic Press and the European
Association of Law and Economics announce the
launch of a new peer-reviewed journal, the
Review of Law and Economics."

Visit the journal home page at
http://www.bepress.com/rle .

Papers in Legal History on the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository

The E LawLibrarian blog lists papers in legal history
by scholars in leading law schools available on the
NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository.

To access any of the papers at no charge, click on
the links below.

Stephen E. Sachs, "From St. Ives to Cyberspace: The Modern
Distortion of the Medieval 'Law Merchant'"
http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/student/papers/5

James Q. Whitman, "The Origins of "Reasonable Doubt""
http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/fss/papers/1

Michael Knoll, "The Ancient Roots of Modern Financial
Innovation: The Early History of Regulatory Arbitrage"
http://lsr.nellco.org/upenn/wps/papers/49

John Fabian Witt, "The Internationalist Beginnings of
American Civil Liberties"
http://lsr.nellco.org/columbia/pllt/papers/0482

Navoneel Dayanand, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: India"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/1

Yosea Iskandar, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: Indonesia"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/2

Calvin WL Ho, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: Singapore"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/3

Ngamnet Triamanuruck, Sansanee Phongpala, and
Sirikanang Chaiyasuta, "Overview of Legal Systems
in the Asia-Pacific Region: Thailand"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/4

Zengguang (Bill) Huo and Yuhua Shi, "Overview of Legal
Systems in the Asia-Pacific Region: People's Republic of
China"http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/5

Oh Seung Jin, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: South Korea"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/6

Junko Gono, Mitsutaka Hibino, Koh Hinokawa,
Sonosuke Kamiya, Hirofumi Maki, Shigeki Nishiyama,
Hirotoshi Osajima, Masahiro Oshima, and Yurika
Yamauchi, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: Japan"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/7

Peggy (Pei Yi) Wen, "Overview of Legal Systems in the
Asia-Pacific Region: Republic of China, Taiwan"
http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/lsapr/8

DoD Website Taken Offline in Controvery Over Access to Gov't Docs.

From the BeSpacific blog by Sabrina
Pacifica, 4/8/2005:

"The message on the Defense Technical Information
Center (DTIC) Joint Electronic Library website on
4/8 reads as follows: 'This website is under review.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.'

Secrecy News reported 'that the site was taken offline
overnight after unclassified documents on the site became
the subject of news stories and public controversy.'
This report also links to an archive of some of these
documents that are maintained on the Federation
of American Scientists' website. Links to additional
documents are available via Cryptome (scroll down
the page to view the list)."

WMD Report Now Available

The unclassified version of The Report
of the Commission on the Intelligence
Capabilities of the United States Regarding
Weapons of Mass Destruction is now available
from the U.S. Government Printing Office.

The Full Report (3.3 MB, 618 pages) has been
made available in its entirety as a single PDF file
on the GPOAccess web site. The report is also
available as a collection of smallerPDFs arranged
in a browse table based on the Final Report's
summary of contents.

Timely Bibliographies Compiled by AAUP

From the Law Librarian Blog, 4/7/2005:

"The American Association of University Presses'
"Books for Understanding" Program is an ongoing
project that seeks to identify university press books
relevant to the news of the day." The series includes
a number of law-related titles.

Examples of current titles of potential interest:

*Books for Understanding Civil Liberties
*Books for Understanding the Enron Affair
*Books for Understanding the Mechanics
(and Manipulation) of Democracy

Search Engine Cheat Sheet

There is more to the world of search engines
than Google & Yahoo.

Phil Bradley's Finding Information: Search Engines,
[is] a simple chart that provides suggested search sites
based upon the kind of information you need.

For example, if you wanted to perform a
comprehensive search across search engines,
look under comprehensive search in the left
column of the page; the right column suggests
you try eZ2Find, Ixquick, or Fazzle .

Revised UCC Article 1

ContractsProf Blog is reporting state enactments
and legislative updates of state versions of Revised
UCC Article 1.

Law in Popular Culture Collection

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 4/5/2005:

"The Tarlton Law Library at The University of Texas
at Austin maintains a Law in Popular Culture Collection
on its Web site.

Some of its features include:
The Lawyer in Popular Culture: A Bibliography
Collins to Grisham: A Brief History of the Legal Thriller
The Lawyer's Story - Legal Narrative E-Texts
The Mouthpiece: Lawyerly Quotations from Popular Culture"

Side by Side Comparison of Search Results from Google and Yahoo

From the BeSpacific blog, 4/5/2005:

"The UK Inquirer reports on a site called Yagoohoogle
that provides side by side search results using two
window panes for Google and Yahoo respectively,
allowing users an interesting, albeit compressed
perspective on the "big two" search engines."

Amnesty Death Penalty Report Released

From Jurist Paper Chase, 4/5/2005:

Amnesty International has released its 2004
report on the use of capital punishment,
The death penalty worldwide: developments
in 2004.

According to the report, the number of executions,
which does not include executions that many governments
fail to officially report, is the second highest figure the
organization has recorded in the 25 years Amnesty
has been monitoring capital punishment. The number
of death sentences is the highest figure Amnesty has
reported in 10 years. At least 3,797 people were
executed in 2004 and at least 7,395 people in 64
countries were sentenced to death last year.

"Scholarly Profit Margins and the Legal Scholarship Network"

Lawrence Cunningham (Professor of Law at
Boston College) has published Scholarly Profit
Margins and the Legal Scholarship Network:
Reflections on the Web.

According to the abstract of the article at SSRN,

"...Legal researchers use various methodologies

to assess scholarly production and impact but

all suffer from inherent limitations and none

provides data useful to scholarly self-reflection.

The 10-year old Legal Scholarship Network

(LSN) offers potential to improve considerably

on both scores of public and personal assessment.

This Essay critically evaluates approaches to

conceptualizing scholarly profit margins, explores

how LSN can enhance these conceptions, and opens

new frontiers for this innovative Web-based

repository of legal writing."

Subscribers may click on the Document Delivery

button to access the full-text of the article.

Coming Soon From Hein Online

The William S. Hein Company has announced
plans to begin indexing 'e-only' journals on its
popular Hein OnLine Service. E-only journals
are journals only available in electronic format.
According to Hein's marketing unit, they plan to
index articles by author name and article title.

"Once included in HeinOnline, researchers
will be able to click on one of the e-only journal
results appearing in HeinOnline, and then be
directed to the website of the journal to do
further research."

Hein is also planning to release a legislative history
library of select federal acts, including the ADA,
Administrative Procedure Act, and the Civil
Rights Acts of 1991.

We'll keep you posted!

The ABA 2003 Survey on Lawyer Discipline Systems

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 3/31/2005:

"The 2003 edition of the Survey on Lawyer Discipline
Systems is available at the American Bar Association's
Web site. The Survey, which the ABA Standing
Committee on Professional Discipline publishes,
reports that disciplinary actions were taken against
3,725 attorneys for misconduct in 2003...

The 2003 Survey consists of eight charts arranged
alphabetically by jurisdiction. (The charts are Excel files.)
Survey results are available back to 1998
Source: "ABA: 3,700 Lawyers Disciplined in 2003," United Press
International, 31 March 2005, Available at The Washington Times."

WMD Report Distributed to Congress

Report by the Commission on the Intelligence
Capabilities of the United States Regarding
Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.
(PDF)

See also:

New York Times, 3/31/2005, "Panel Says 'Dead
Wrong' Data on Prewar Iraq Demands Overhaul"
and related references on the beSpacific Blog.