"Future Trends in State Courts 2007"

The beSpacific blog points us to Future Trends in
State Courts 2007. Published by the National Center
for State Courts, the report "helps to make courts more
aware of important trends in society and judicial
administration that could affect court operations—and
public trust and confidence in the judicial system."

An archive of trends reports (1998-2006) is also
available on the NCSC web site.

Worth Noting: OpenCongress Blog

OpenCongress "brings together official government data
with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind
each bill." A project of the Sunlight Foundation and the
Participatory Politics Foundation, OpenCongress aggregates
information and news about what's going on in Congress,
including:

*Official Congressional information from Thomas
*News articles about bills and Members of Congress
*Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress
*Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress
*Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress

"Deep Web Research 2008" on LLRX

What are you missing on the Internet?

Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A., Executive Director of the
Virtual Private Library and an Internet expert, brings us
up to date on researching the "Deep Web," i.e., files and
formats that search engines on the Internet don't retrieve
through usual searching techniques. According to
Zillman, the Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity
of 900 billion pages of information compared to about
20 billion pages accessible through traditional search
engines.

Deep Research 2008 is "designed to give you the resources
you need to better understand the history of the deep web
research, as well as various classified resources that allow
you to search through the currently available web to find
those key sources of information nuggets only found by
understanding how to search the "deep web".

The list of resources is extensive. Faculty may be
particularly interested in:

Deep Web Internet Tutorial

Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources (PDF)

Gray Literature: Resources for Locating Unpublished Research

More Law Students Suing Their Alma Maters

In today's National Law Journal, Vesna Jaksic reports
on the growing number of law students who are suing
law schools for "exam grades, readmission policies and
even administrators' conduct." The article details
recent law suits brought against Regent, Dayton,
American Justice, Florida A&M, and Southern Illinois.

David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University School
of Law and president of the American Law Dean's Association,
is quoted as saying that the reason for the increasing number
of suits may lie with "increasing costs of law schools."
Carl Monk, executive director of the Association of American
Law Schools, suggests here that "the recent spike in suits
may be a coincidence."

The article links to the following documents:

The complaint in Valente v. University of Dayton School of Law
The complaint in Rittenhouse v. Southern Illinois University School of Law

Worth Noting: Health Wonk Review & HealthBlawg

Health Wonk Review is a "biweekly compendium of the
best of the health policy blogs. More than two dozen health
policy, infrastructure, insurance, technology, and managed
care bloggers participate by contributing their best recent
blog postings to a roving digest, with each issue hosted at a
different participant's blog."

The HealthBlawg, by health care lawyer and consultant
David Harlow, is devoted to health care law, including
legal, policy and business issues facing the health care
community. Recent posts include:

Private equity, public accountability, nursing facilities
and grandstanding

Organ procurement in a world gone wild

How the World Rates Women as Leaders

Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Research Associate at the
Pew Global Attitudes Project, surveyed male and
female citizens of 46 countries and the Palestinian
territories on their opinions regarding women and
political leadership.

A summary of the study (on the Pew Research Center
web site) reveals which regions' and countries'
publics rate men and women as equally good political leaders,
which believe men are better political leaders and
which prefer women as leaders.

Hat tip to beSpacific.

Highlighted Search Terms to be Available in All HeinOnline Collections

The HeinOnline Weblog (12/10/2007) reports that
"by the end of this month, the HeinOnline development
team will complete the application of highlighting search terms
across the entire collection of 31 million pages in HeinOnline."

With this functionality, HeinOnline will locate and highlight
your search terms within the text-based image pages retrieved
through your search (similar to the highlighting function
in PDF files).

Overview and Documents: Guantanamo Habeas Cases

JURIST has posted a useful overview on the
consolidated Guantanamo habeas cases of
Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States.
In addition to summarizing the issues, the article links
to case dockets, merit briefs, questions presented, the
transcripts of oral arguments, and news sources.

New Empirical Legal Studies Database

Cornell and UCLA law schools have developed an online
database of empirical legal studies articles. Researchers
may search for ELS articles by author, title, subject, or year.

The database contains articles published (primarily) after July
2005 and includes "law reviews from the top 40 law schools in
the country (USN&WR '06), selected major specialty journals
(economics, business, etc.) from law schools, ... legal journals
not published by law schools (e.g., JELS), and ...top journals
in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology and
psychology."

Lawyer2Lawyer Podcast: "The Tavares Case"

Robert Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams are discussing
the Tavares case in this week's Lawyer2Lawyer podcast
on the Legal Talk Network.

"A Massachusetts' judge's release of Daniel Tavares [has]
become part of the national political debate after Tavares
allegedly shot and killed a newlywed couple in Washington
state and Republican presidential hopeful and former Bay
State Gov. Mitt Romney called on the judge -- his own
appointee -- to resign."

Guests are: lawyer and radio host Dan Rea, host of WBZ
Radio's NightSide with Dan Rea, and David Frank, attorney
and reporter with Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Listen to or download the show from this page.

Web-Based Video in Education - Ideas, Sources & More

If you are interested in adding video clips to your
Blackboard course site, you may want to become
acquainted with the Web-Based Video in Education
Blog. "This blog focuses on instructional strategies,
research, Web-based video archives, and video reviews."
The site, developed by Dr. Chareen Snelson (assistant
professor of educational technology at Boise State University),
links to sources for digital video archives, addresses
pedagogical issues surrounding virtual culture, and
offers practical guidance on how to incorporate
videos into your courses.

Worth Noting: HeinOnline's "Citations on Page" Features Facilitates Quick Navigation

The HeinOnline Weblog (12/02/2007) features a
tutorial on how to use the Citations on Page
function to quickly cross reference various titles in
HeinOnline.

"When browsing a title in HeinOnline, select the 'Citations
on Page' option from the page toolbar at any time when viewing
a page. This will look for all citations in the text of the page that
you are viewing and highlight the citations in blue. If the cited
material is available in HeinOnline, the citation will contain a
direct link to the page allowing you to jump to the cited material
with the click of a mouse."

For illustrations and examples of how to use this feature,
check out the original blog post.

State Court Organization, 1987-2004

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released
State Court Organization, 1987 - 2004. The
report "presents trend data from State Court
Organization data collections covering the years
1987-2004. The report examines changes in the
organization and operations of the Nation’s state
trial and appellate courts over this time period.
Topics include the selection and educational
requirements of judges, regulations of criminal and
civil juries, the development of unified court systems,
and adjustments in court management and staffing
to address growing caseloads."

Hat tip to beSpacific.