NALP Releases its "Perspectives on Fall 2008 Law School Recruiting"

NALP has released a 2o-page report that reveals
a dramatic decline in available 2L summer associate
positions from 2007 to 2008.

"The median number of offers to 2Ls for summer associate
positions at firms of all sizes fell from 15 in the fall of 2007
to 10 in the fall of 2008. The decline was even steeper at firms
with 700 or more attorneys, where the median number of
summer associate offers fell from 30 in 2007 to 18.5 in 2008.
Additionally, fewer callback interviews yielded summer
associate offers in 2008. In recent years, about 60% of
callback interviews led to summer associate offers.
Last fall, however, only 47% of callback interviews led to
offers."

A synopsis of the report appears in the National
Law Journal of 2/25/2009.

How Law Schools are Using Twitter

The Social Media Law Student blog (2/20/2009)
reports that an increasing number of law schools
are using Twitter to communicate with
students and promote their law school websites.

According to the blog, Twitter has been
adopted by law schools such as Harvard,
Yale, Duke and Buffalo to instantly communicate
with the law school community through a single
web page (a Twitter feed on the law school web
site). News, events, website updates and student
and faculty accomplishments are all being shared
through this popular message delivery service rather
than through email, which may not reach everyone
in a timely manner.

The Twitter feeds also serve as promotional
tools because they attracts visitors to law school
web sites and offer 'up-to-the minute' information
about activities at the schools.

See the blog post for a list of law schools currently
using Twitter.

NAACP Top 100 Films of the Century (1909-2009)

The NAACP is recognizing people of color in film
on its "NAACP 100 Years, 100 Films" web page.
The site groups films by theme. Films of possible
interest to law faculty and students are included
in categories such as Biography, Crime, Documentary,
and Drama. For each title, you will find a synopsis
of the film, a list of cast members, the film
trailer, and availability on Blockbuster.

There are more than 100 film titles included
on the site - the final 100 will be selected with
input from web site visitors.

"Fewer Loans Available for Bar Prep"

Petra Pasternak (Law.com) reports on the
decrease in availability of private loans for
bar prep courses. Pasternak spoke with
Hasting's director of financial aid, Linda Bisesi,
who indicated that "a larger number of students
than usual have been denied private loans [for
bar prep courses] than usual."

In the article, other law school financial aid staff
report that the problem hasn't yet surfaced
in their law schools, but they see the potential
for future problems as as lenders tighten their
belts or go out of business altogether.

Chicago Law Faculty Blog Discussion on the Future of the WTO

This week, the University of Chicago Law School Faculty
Blog is hosting a discussion on the question of "how the
shifts in the balance of economic power challenge the
existing international economic order in general, and the
World Trade Organization in particular."

Assistant Professor of Law Anu Bradford will initiate the
conversation, and she will be joined by Assistant Professor
of Law Daniel Abebe, Gregory Shaffer of the University of
Minnesota, and Richard Steinberg of UCLA.

All are welcome to join the discussion.

Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts Project: RULAC

From the RULAC Web Site (About Us):

The Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts (RULAC) Project
is an initiative of the Geneva Academy of International
Humanitarian Law and Human Rights to support the
application and implementation of international law in
armed conflict. Through its global database, the Project
aims ultimately to report on every State and disputed
territory in the world, addressing both the legal norms
that apply as well as the extent to which they are
respected by the relevant actors.

Hat tip to Cornell Law Library InSite.

Law Profs Blog on Legal Education and the Economic Crisis

A "property prof" on the Faculty Lounge blog
(2/16/2009) speculates on what legal education is
going to look like after the economic crisis. Larger
class sizes (because of fewer faculty), elimination or
reduction of low enrollment (seminar style) courses,
more adjuncts and bigger teaching loads are
among the pessimistic projections.

Michael Cahill on Prawfsblawg (2/15/2009) suggests that
"a contraction of some form in the legal-education market"
might be a good thing, since "odds do not favor [law grads]
obtaining high-paying employment after law school."

Back in October of 2008, Alfred Brophy wrote on the Faculty
Lounge blog about a slow down in faculty hiring and
hiring freezes at some law schools.

Khmer Rouge Genocide Tribunal Site & Databases at Yale Cambodian Genocide Program

The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale has developed
an extensive web resource on the Cambodian genocide of
1975 -1979 that claimed more than 20% of the Cambodian
population.

Included in this rich collection is a page devoted to the Khmer
Rouge Genocide Tribunal and four Cambodian Genocide
Databases containing information on human rights violations
in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal web page includes news,
tribunal documents, articles and related readings,
and photographs.

The Cambodian Genocide Data Bases consist of the
following databases:

1) a bibliographic database of records on 2,963 primary
and secondary documents, articles and books dealing
with atrocities during the Khmer Rouge regime

2)a biographic database on 19,049 Khmer Rouge military
and political leaders and many victims of the Khmer Rouge
regime.

3) a photographic database of more than 5,000 prisoner mug
shots taken at Tuol Sleng prison

4) a geographic database that includes an interactive
computerized map, plus a collection of approximately 100
scanned maps showing the locations of mass grave pits
and Khmer Rouge-era prisons and memorials

NEW! Legal Information & Technology eJournal on SSRN

Legal Information & Technology is a new e-journal on
SSRN that includes working papers, forthcoming articles,
and recently published articles in all areas of legal
information scholarship. The journal is edited by
Randy J. Diamond (Missouri School of Law) and
Lee F. Peoples (Oklahoma City University School
of Law).

Topics include (but are not limited to):

1) the impact of legal information on domestic, comparative,
and international legal systems

2) the treatment of legal information authorities and
precedents

3) the examination of rules, practices, and commentary
limiting or expanding applications of legal information

4) the study of economic, legal, political and social conditions limiting
or extending access to legal information

5) the finding and use of legal information by academics to produce
legal scholarship, by law students to learn the law, by attorneys in
practice, and by judges and others decision makers to determine
legal outcomes

6) the history of legal information systems and technological
advancements

7)legal information system design and assessment

8) the relationship of substantive areas of law (such as information
law, intellectual freedom, intellectual property, and national
security law) and other academic disciplines to legal information.

Guantánamo Docket

The New York Times has developed an interactive
database of Pentagon documents and NY Times
research regarding the 779 men who have been
detained at Guantanamo since January, 2002.

"This interactive database includes information about
the detainees, thousands of pages of government
documents and links to court records and news media
reports."

The database may be searched or browsed by
by detainee name, citizenship, and status. A
sidebar provides information about the latest transfers.

Hat tip to the Librarians' Internet Index (1/29/2009).

Adobe PDF Guide and Tutorial

The Digital Inspiration Blog has posted a handy
Adobe PDF Guide and Tutorial that tells you
how to do such things as: merge two or more PDF
files into one; create a single PDF package by merging
files of different formats; directly save a web page as PDF
without having to save that page as an HTML file first, and;
convert PDF files into other formats like Word documents,
images, HTML web pages, etc.

Justice Scalia Calls Student's Question "Nasty and Impolite"

The Blog of the Legal Times reports that United
States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
responded harshly to a student's question
at a public appearance on Tuesday in West Palm
Beach, Florida.

According to the article, Sarah Jeck (a Florida Atlantic
University honors college junior) asked whether the
rationale for Scalia's well-known opposition to cameras
in the Supreme Court was "vitiated" by the fact that
the Court allows public visitors to view arguments and
releases full argument transcripts to the public, and that
justices go out on book tours (Scalia's latest book was
for sale at the West Palm Beach venue). Scalia initial
response was, "That's a nasty, impolite question."

A report of the incident in the Palm Beach Post
indicates that Scalia eventually returned to
Jeck's question, saying that - although he originally
supported the concept of cameras in the courtroom
- he eventually came to oppose it because the
"30 second take-outs" would not provide a true
picture of the proceedings.

Feminist Law Professors Blog Has A New Location

Update your bookmarks and aggregators!
The Feminist Law Professors Blog has a new
location.

Who Are the Most Cited Authors in HeinOnline?

The HeinOnline Weblog has published a list of the 50
Most Cited Authors, which includes the number of
articles authors have written and a cumulative
number of times all of their articles have been cited.

The analysis was run over the 1,200+ legal periodicals,
30,000+ volumes, 1,000,000+ articles, and over 19 million
pages of content in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.
The analysis was done using Hein's new citation
analysis tool, Hein's ScholarCheck.

Harvard's Olin Center Launches "Journal of Legal Analysis"

The John M. Olin Center at Harvard Law School
has launched the Journal of Legal Analysis, a faculty-
edited online journal.

From the announcement:

The Journal of Legal Analysis aspires to publish the best
legal scholarship from all disciplinary perspectives and in all
styles, whether verbal, formal, or empirical. The JLA is faculty-
edited. All articles are subject to peer review. The Journal is co-
published by Harvard University Press and the John M. Olin
Center for Law, Economics, and Business. JLA articles are free
on the web. Published articles will be gathered into bound volumes
once a year and made available for purchase.

How to Email Search Results on HeinOnline

It's easy to share your search results on HeinOnline!

HeinOnline's most recent Tip of the Week tutorial describes
and illustrates how to email your search results from HeinOnline
databases. It also gives you steps on how to export Law Library
Journal search results to CSV, EndNote, or Refworks (currently,
this is the only library from which you can export search results).

New Research Resources from the United Nations

From the UN Pulse (1/23/2009):

The UN Office of Legal Affairs, Codification Division
has launched several new online resources:

Official Records of Diplomatic Conferences;

A new portal for all legal publications;

UN Legal Publications Global Search; and

RSS feed for the Audiovisual Library of International Law.

Hat tip to Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog.

New Int'l, Comparative & Foreign Law Research Articles on GlobaLex

The following new and updated research articles are
now available on GlobaLex (Hauser Global Law School
Program at NYU):

Civil Procedure: A Guide to Primary and Secondary Sources
(Radu D. Popa & Mirela Roznovschi)

Malawi: Legal System and Research Resources
(Redson Edward Kapindu)

Sri Lanka: Legal Research and Legal System
(Aquinas V. Tambimuttu)

UPDATE: Researching Law in Denmark
(Rasmus H. Wandall & co-author Steen Rosendahl)

UPDATE: A Legal Research Guide to Pakistan
(Omar Sial)

UPDATE: A Guide to Turkish Public Law and Legal Research
(Serap Yazici)