LexisNexis Headnotes Integrated with Shepard’s Citations

The E-LawLibrary Weblog, 6/29,2005, brings
our attention to LexisNexis' announcement
that its Headnotes feature is now integrated
with Shepard’s Citations Service. The new feature
provides researchers the ability to narrow a Shepard's
list of cases by subject matter.

The service provides a similiar function to searching
in Westlaw's KeyCite by West headnote keynumber.

See this interactive tutorial:
Using LexisNexis Headnotes in Shepard's Reports.

Alert: Lexis ID Changes - Read This Before You Log In

From Reference Librarian, Ted Holynski,
6/29/2005:


From: Michael D. Poitras, Account Executive
michael.poitras@lexisnexis.com
Toll Free: 800-922-1015 x6736
Direct: 315-449-1317 - Fax: 315-449-1317
http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool
Re: New Lexis ID Policy

LexisNexis is implementing several ID policy changes
specifically for law school customers that will go into
effect today, June 29th.

(1). First, all law school IDs (student, librarian, faculty,
and staff IDs) that have not been used during the past 12
months will be deactivated today. Please contact Customer
Service or your Lexis Representative for assistance
regarding questions about deactivated IDs.

(2). Effective today, each current law school customer
(students, librarians, faculty, and staff) will be required
to register his/her 7-digit lexis.com ID AND create a
custom ID and password that will be used to access the
LexisNexis services.

(3). First year law students will receive a 7-digit activa-
tion code via the normal ID distribution process at your
school. To create their custom IDs and passwords, first
year students will be given instructions to go to the Law
School Home Page at http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool/.
Click on the "Register Your ID" link and follow the steps
on the screen.

(4). Second and third year students and faculty
members who have not already created a custom ID
and password will be stepped through the process
when they first access the LexisNexis services on or
after June 29th. They must start at the Law School Home
Page at http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool.

(5). Those students, librarians, faculty and staff members
who have already created a custom ID and password will
not be affected by the above changes. However, they must
use their custom IDs and passwords to access the Lexis-
Nexis services.

(6). LexisNexis sales representatives, Customer Support,
and the main contacts at your schools will not have the ability
to obtain or view any customer passwords.

(7). Law School customers that need password assistance can
use the "Forgot Password" link on the Law School Home Page,
or call Customer Support.

(8). If you have any questions regarding our new law school ID
policy, please contact Michael Poitras or call Customer Support
at 1-800-45-LEXIS.

New from LLRX

LLRX.com has the following new (or updated)
offerings on its outstanding legal research web site:

Using EISIL to Research Private International Law
by Louise Tsang

Revolutionizing Client Relations with CaseMap's
New ReportBooks, by Dennis Kennedy

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Working Around
Document Profiling to Improve Work Product
Retrieval Efforts, by Angie Turner and Peter
Ozolin

Legal Protection of Cultural Property: A Selective
Resource Guide, by Louise Tsang

Update to Researching Australian Law,
by Nicholas Pengelleya

The Government Domain: GPO Access and
THOMAS for Legislative Research
By Peggy Garvin

HIPAA Legislation on askSam Database

From the LawLibrarian Blog, 6/28/2005:

The askSam database announces it HIPAA
Act collection:

"The text from HIPAA is available in a searchable,
hypertext-linked askSam database. The individual
sections of the legislation are divided into separate
documents in the database. This allows you to easily
locate sections pertaining to specific topics. The ask-
Sam version allows you to search, browse, and analyze
the HIPAA text. You can either view the text on-line,
or you can download the searchable version of HIPAA
with a free askSam viewer."

New UN Blog

From Peter Scott's blog, 6/21/2005:

"Dag Hammarskjold Library has announced
the creation of a new blog called UN Pulse:
Connecting to UN Information. The blog focuses
on just-released UN system-wide online information,
major reports, publications and documents. Created
and maintained by a team of reference librarians at
the United Nations headquarters in New York, UN
Pulse is updated as new information is published and
received."

Center for Gender and Refugee Studies

From Cornell Law Library's InSite current
awareness service, June 20, 2005:

"The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS)
provides legal expertise and resources to attorneys
representing women asylum-seekers fleeing gender
-related harm, at both the practice and policy levels,
and seeks to track decisions in these cases. CGRS also
works to co-ordinate legal and public policy advocacy
efforts through domestic and international networking,
and engages in public education efforts in order to con-
tribute to the formulation of national and international
policy and practice.

Researchers will appreciate the Center’s site for its
summaries of gender asylum cases and compilations
of decisions by immigration judges, the Board of Immi-
gration Appeals (BIA), and U.S. Federal courts of
appeal. This section also provides a selection of
international gender asylum case law; governmental
gender guidelines; UNHCR and other UN documents;
and a select bibliography of scholarly articles and news
on gender and asylum. Sample briefs in gender
asylum cases are also available."

Current Copyright Literature

The BeSpacific blog, 6/24/2005, brings our
attention the new Current Copyright Literature
current awareness service, developed
by Tobe Liebert, Assistant Director for Collection
Development & Special Projects at the Tarlton Law
Library (U. of Texas).

Here's Tobe's description of the site:

"I review law journals and law reviews (and a great
many other legal periodicals) as they are received in the
library. I examine the table of contents of all of these
publications and identify any article concerning U.S.
copyright law. I then input the basic bibliographic
information about each article into this database, and
scan the first page of the article. The availability of the
first page of the article should better enable readers to
know if they are interested in reading the whole article."

CRS Reports Now Available at U. of North Texas Web Site

From the Law Librarian blog, 6/21/2005:

"The University of North Texas Libraries is doing
a great public service by making available an online
archive of Congressional Research Service Reports.

The site, available at
http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/, provides
integrated, searchable access to many of the full-text
CRS reports that have been available on the Web since
1990."

This service currently offers permanent public access to
over 6500 reports. The collection can be browsed
by topic or searched by keyword, title, author, subject,
and report number.

The UNT Libraries will continue to add reports as they
become available.

New Health Search Engine

The BeSpacific blog, 6/20/2005, brings our
attention to Health Search, a new product released
in beta version by Mamma.com that, according
to the press release, "...does more than aggregate
results from various content providers [WebMD,
MedLine Plus, HealthAtoZ, MayClinic.com,
MedicineNet.com, NHSDirect Online] for medical
information...we crawl deep into the websites of
certain handpicked, trusted, medical websites to
extract and format results in a easy to understand,
and comprehensive manner."

Supreme Court Nomination Blog

The law firm of Goldstein and Howe (whose SCOTUS
blog is one of the most popular legal site on the web)
has started the Supreme Court Nomination Blog.

The blog currently brings readers relevant news items
and profiles of potential candidates as well as
discussion of the nomination process.

Are You Eligible for Payments Under Tasini

From Robert Ambrogi's LawSites, 6/14/2005:

"Have you published any articles on a freelance basis
since 1978? If so, you may be eligible to receive
additional payment for your work as part of a class
action settlement. Complete details, including claim
forms and important deadlines, can be found at
CopyrightClassAction.com.

The proposed settlement stems from the landmark
case Tasini v. The New York Times, in which free-
lance writers charged major publishers and electronic
databases with copyright violations for reuse of their
work. After almost three years of negotiations, the
parties reached this proposed settlement. It applies
to anyone who owned a copyright in an English-
language work that, at any time after Aug. 14,
1997, was made available in electronic format with-
out the author's permission. Claims can be filed for
any story written after 1978, provided it was
available in electronic form any time after Aug.
14, 1997. The Web site lists the participating
publishers and databases.

For writers who registered their works with the
U.S. Copyright Office, they may be entitled to
payments of as much as $1,500 per article. Those
who did not register their articles will receive a
maximum of $60 per article.The settlement has
been given only preliminary approval by the court.
A hearing to decide whether to give final approval
is scheduled for July 28 in U.S. District Court in
Manhattan."

U.S. Sentencing Commission Annual Report 2003

Thanks to the E-LawLibrary Weblog,
6/15/2005, for bringing this to our
attention:

The 2003 U.S. Sentencing Commission
Annual Report is now available on the
internet in pdf.

Creative Commons and Science Commons Announce Open Access Law Program

Thanks to the ublaw phoenix blog, 6/14/2005,
for this announcement from Creative Commons:

"Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that provides
flexible copyright licenses for authors and artists, and
Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons that
works to encourage sharing of scientific and academic
knowledge, today unveiled their Open Access Law
Program. The Program is designed to make legal
scholarship “open access,” that is freely available online
to everyone, without undue copyright and licensing
restrictions....

Staff at Science Commons’ offices in Boston worked with
program leads Professor Dan Hunter of the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania and Professor Mike Carroll of
Villanova Law School, who serves on the Board of Creative
Commons, to produce the Principles and the Agreement.

Professor Hunter said 'Open access to law articles is an
idea whose time has come. All of the players in US
scholarly legal journal publishing have an interest in
the widest possible audience for their material. The
authors benefit, the journals benefit, and law schools
benefit. And more importantly, the public benefits.
Everyone walks away a winner.'"

Law Professor Blogger Census

PrawfsBlawg (6/13/2005) has completed a census
of + 100 law professors who blog. In addition
to some interesting statistics (20 of the bloggers
are female, 83 are male), there is a handy chart
of the law prof bloggers by institution, name and
blog name. The chart is not comprehensive -
we can expect a more complete census from
PrawfsBlawgs in the future.

A Search Engine for Acronyms

ResearchBuzz, 6/7/2005, highlights
a new search engine for Acronyms
called Acronyma.

You can serach Acronyma in several
languages by keyword or by acronym.
You can chose to view results by relevance
or alphabetically. You can also submit
a new acronym to the database.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With Email

The inter alia blog, 6/7/2005, brings our attention
to the amusing, but valuable, How to Lose
Friends and Alienate People with Email, on the
Open Loops blog. My favorite: "Ignore the
Topic When You Reply."

Supreme Court Nomination Blog

From the E-LawLibrary Weblog, 6/10/2005:

"The Supreme Court Nomination Blog (SCtN) is a new
blog from Goldstein & Howe, P.C. It is meant as a sister
blog to SCOTUSblog. SCtN is intended 'to serve as a
clearinghouse for information on the process of nominating
and confirming a Supreme Court Justice. Some of our posts
will simply attempt to keep up with all of the relevant press
coverage and interest group advocacy. But we will also add
our own coverage and analysis.' (quote from the first post
on June 6)." (Source: BoleyBlogs! : June 8)

Search Engines Compared

The inter alia blog (6/9/2005) brings our attention
to an article on CNET which compares nine online
search engines.

"Searching Beyond Google and Yahoo" examines
the interfaces, features, and functions of well-known
and lesser-known products. Athough Google and
Yahoo come out on top, it's worth having
a look at the comparison chart to see what features
the competitors have to offer.

SU Library Subject Guides on the Web

The Syracuse University Library web site
offers subject guides "...intended to provide
subject-oriented World Wide Web sites which
are useful and relevant to Syracuse University
students, faculty, and staff. Each site has been
selected by a Subject Specialist."

Among the guides of potential interest to
law students and faculty are:

Business/Management
Child/Family Studies
Economics
Education
Government
International Relations
Mass Communication
Native American Studies
Political Science
Public Administration
Social Science
Women's Studies

In addition to print and online resources relevant to a
particular area of study, the guides provide contact
information for the subject specialist librarian in that
area.

New on the LawProf Blog Network

The E-LawLibrary Weblog, 6/8/2005, brings
our attention to new blogs on the Law Professors
Blog Network:

China Law Prof Blog,
by Donald C. Clarke (George Washington)
Clinical Law Prof Blog,
by Pamela R. Metzger (Tulane)
Corporate Compliance Prof Blog,
by Paul R. McGreal (South Texas)
Environmental Law Prof Blog,
by Susan L. Smith (Willamette)

Latest Release From Hein Online : It's HUGE

From the Law Librarian Blog, 6/7/2005:

"The latest release of new material to HeinOnline
contains nearly a quarter-million pages and includes
updates to the Law Journal Library, the Treaties and
Agreements Library, the Legal Classics Library,
and the Federal Register Library.

The next release of HeinOnline will include the CFR
from the 1938 edition through the 1947 supplements.
Future releases will include expanded CFR coverage."

Click here for details.

Posner Proposes Mental Acuity Test for Professors/Judges

Get your number two pencils ready and
follow the instructions on your test sheet!

Judge Richard Posner has proposed that
"beginning at age 70, require every life-
tenured professor and every life-tenured
judge to take a test of mental acuity every
five years."'

The TaxProf Blog has posted several
comments - pro and con- from law professors
on Posner's suggestion.

Childwatch International Research Network

From Cornell Law Library's InSite current
awareness service, 6/6/2005:

"Childwatch International is a non-profit, non-
governmental network of institutions engaged
in research for children. The Network seeks to
strengthen child-centered research to contribute
towards real improvement in children's well-being,
using the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
as a common agenda."

Guides to Patent Searching

From the E-LawLibrary , 6/4/2005:

"Bill Heinze of I/P Updates points to two
patent searching guides; the second is oriented
toward a more advanced level."

1. Super Easy Guide to Step-By-Step Patent Searching Online!
(Mary Russell Sarao, 2002)

2. Patent Searching in the Product Development Process
(Bill Heinze, 2004)

Westlaw "Smart Database" Entry

Westlaw's e-alert newsletter of May/June, 2005
reminds users of features exclusive to Westlaw.

The Smart Database feature is particularly
useful when you don't know the exact
name of the database you wish to search and
don't want to spend time looking through the
full online directory. Here's a description of
this tool from the newsletter:

" To access a database in westlaw.com,
you don't have to know the exact name of the
database, or even the database identifier.
Just type a description of the database or
part of the database name in the Search
these databases text box. Then click GO.
A list is displayed of up to 20 databases that
most closely match your description or name."

Watergate Archive

Has the recent revelation about the identity
of "Deep Throat" rekindled your interest
in the Watergate scandal?

Law Librarian Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill
(AbsTracked blog) calls our attention
to the archive of Washington Post articles on
the topic published from 1968 to the present.

Grading Law School Exams

I thought you might appreciate this quote
(from an anonymous source) that appeared in
the Leiter Reports today:

On grading law school exams:

"It feels like you are watching endless re-runs of
episodes of Gilligan's Island, with the vague sense
that you had something to do with the plot."

Regulations.gov

The New England School of Law Library blog,
NESLReference, highlights Regulations.gov,
an official site that makes available "notice and
comment" provisions of the Administrative
Procedure Act for proposed regulations.

The site is searchable by agency, keyword, and
CFR Title & Part .

Recent Titles from Europa Publishing

The Law Librarian Blog (6/2/2005) has posted an
annotated list of recent titles from Europa Publishing.

National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology & Law

Stetson University Law School's new National
Clearinghouse for Science, Technology & Law is
featured in a recent article on LLRX by Diana
Botluk and Brittan Mitchell, two Clearinghouse
professionals.

According to the article, the NCSTL was developed
to offer "one-stop-shopping for judges, lawyers,
scientists and law enforcement officials who seek
information about the nexus between law, science
and technology."

The Clearinghouse offers educational programming and
a database of sources related to forensics and technology.

New LawProf Blogs

There are two new blog members in the Law Professor
Blog Network:

Business Law Prof Blog (Dale Osterle : Ohio State)

Elder Law Prof (Anne Kimberly Dayton : William Mitchell)

Tribe Decides Against Con Law Second Volume

According to Jurist Law School Buzz of May 27,
2005, Lawrence Tribe has decided that he will
not draft a second volume of the latest edition
of his influential Constitutional Law treatise.

The Jurist article provides a link to the letter Tribe
wrote to Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer
announcing his decision. It also links to
Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin's blog
posting about the symbolic significance of
Tribe's decision.