Ernie The Attorney: Remember when President Bush gave the old "let's help 'em" speech from New Orleans?

From Ernie The Attorney:

Remember when President Bush gave the old 'let's help 'em' speech from New Orleans?

Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times Picayune had a great op-ed in the Atlanta Constitution (reg req'd). Here are the first few paragraphs:

President Bush flew into New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His staff had to fire up giant generators to bathe St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in floodlights, as a backdrop for his promise that he would ''do what it takes'' to rebuild New Orleans.

''There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans,'' he said, ''and this great city will rise again.''

Then the lights went out, and the president left. Vast swaths of the city have been in darkness ever since.

Yeah, no surprise there. Our politicians have spent the last few decades learning about the importance of 'playing to the cameras.' And it's become a very intricate process. They not only get the best cameras, but they also have location scouts and lighting directors. Hell, even if the optimal location is without power they can bring generators.

Man, is this a great country or what?

Publish, Perish, or Cave In?

From Inside Higher Ed: Twisting in the Wind:

When Merle H. Weiner was hired as a law professor at the University of Oregon, she was told that one of her duties was to write articles and books — and she did just that, publishing extensively on her areas of expertise, one of which is domestic violence.
But Weiner found out this year that even if the university expects her to publish, she was on her own when she faced a threatened suit over one of her articles, even though the university never contested the quality of the article and even though she had obtained legal opinions that she would prevail in court — if only someone had agreed to pay the bills necessary to fight.
When no one would commit to paying the anticipated legal bills, the journal that published Weiner — also unable to pay for a defense — removed from its electronic archive the reference that led to the threatened lawsuit. While the University of Oregon’s lawyer had urged her to have the journal do just that as a way of avoiding a suit, Weiner opposed this action as giving in to a threat and denying her the right to publish her work in full....
The article in question, published last year in the University of San Francisco Law Review, concerns the handling of child custody suits under international law in cases where one possible home for a child may not be safe. The article made two brief references to a court dispute in one such case and one of the parties to that dispute threatened to sue....
The University of Oregon, however, viewed the matter in a different way. In a statement released by the university, it said that — as was “customary” — Weiner had agreed to indemnify the University of San Francisco against actions arising from the article. While the university was happy to advise Weiner on the case, it did not feel any obligation to defend her, the statement said.
“The Board of Higher Education does not view an academic staff person’s general obligation to produce scholarly works as a specific assignment. As a result, the board and university do not participate in the specific relationship between a faculty member and the faculty member’s publisher of scholarly materials,” the statement said. “Also as a result, the State of Oregon has not historically provided legal representation or advice regarding matters related to faculty members’ scholarly publications.”

See the full story here.

"Attica! Attica!" -- I mean "Limbo! Limbo!"

From Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Babies to be freed from limbo:

It is an odd place. The inhabitants include Plato, Moses, Abraham and lots of babies. Now after more than 700 years of shadowy existence, limbo faces closure. The world's 30 leading Roman Catholic theologians were meeting behind closed doors in the Vatican yesterday to discuss a document which would sweep the concept out of the church's teaching.

See more here.

Racism is a Cancer that affects us all

Racism is a cancer that affects us all. Those of us who are “white” may believe, as I have seen posted, we don’t think about racism most of the time. Actually, I don’t think that’s true at all. We are all twisted every day by the racism that lives at the heart of American society. We negotiate the matter of race in every personal transaction, every day, whether we are aware of it or not. For some of us, it’s just a great deal more painful than for others.

When our forefathers made the decision to import slaves they felt obliged to square it with their Christian consciences. Unlike previous societies that kept slaves, slave-holders in the United States justified the practice by arguing that human beings from Africa are somehow less human than those from Europe. They actually argued that the state of slavery was somehow better for the slaves than freedom, and that the slaves were happier in slavery! (See a little article online at http://www.slate.com/id/9089#ContinueArticle). The resulting twisted logic and societal views have resonated down through our history. We continue to have problems with people making assumptions that people of African ancestry are “less” in some way than other people, despite many proofs to the contrary.

We cannot help, growing up in such a toxic society, either being twisted ourselves, or, ironically, counter-twisting to prove that we are NOT racist. Or, if we are persons of color, how difficult to gauge every encounter and either wonder whether that was a matter of racism or just rudeness or carelessness, or to really be amazing and just not wonder at all. I see every day ways in which either I or the people around me are contorted and damaged by racism on some way or another. We fool ourselves and others if we live in America and try to say, I am not racist. We all are. The trick is to try not to let it be a really damaging thing, and to try to get past it, I think.

So, here’s to Rosa Parks, a hero of America’s struggle against racism. Let us try to be as brave as Rosa, and as steadfast, in fighting, even little fights, every day.

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

A bit of humor for the IP-savvy, from The Onion:

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

November 30, 2005 | Issue 41•48

LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. 'We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,' a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. 'We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves.' RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth 'favorites-sharing' sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

December 1: Blog Against Racism

Reminder: This Thursday, December 1 -- "the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' heroic act of civil disobedience on that Montgomery bus" -- is Blog Against Racism Day. See Chris Clarke's blog for more.

J'Accuse!

J’Accuse

I borrow that immortal title from Emile Zola, who wrote the accusation in a newspaper article against the French military and political establishment in 1898. The public debate aroused by Zola’s newspaper article eventually led to the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, an innocent military officer wrongly accused and court-martialed because he was Jewish.

It is time to look coldly at the political reality in the United States of America, and make some objective judgements. I was appalled by what Hurricane Katrina revealed about our nation’s lack of political will to assist largely poor and black regions. I was disgusted by the apathy and willingness to tolerate the poor response and the totally unacceptable statements by people such as Barbara Bush! I cannot believe that we don’t have rioting in the streets right now.

But what has made me most sick at heart is what Katrina revealed about New Orleans itself. I knew from a visit there on a look-see for a possible job at Tulane that New Orleans was more like a foreign country in many ways than part of the U.S. What made it so distinctive, for good and for bad was the fact that there was such a huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor. This was largely caused by long-term political corruption tolerated at all levels of government, we are now told. There was a lot of money siphoned off from welfare projects that never got to recipients, I guess, and lots of tolerated crime that took more off the working poor, too. The media makes it sound as though New Orleans was a unique example.

I am here to tell you that it is not. It was certainly the most extreme. It was lovely and unique in lots of ways, but in this way of grinding the poor and making of their bones a bread for the wealthy to eat, it is not at all unique.

I lived in St. Louis for ten years, and it is similar, in that it is a tough town, with a lot of crime and a lot of desperate people. There are a lot of wealthy folks who left the city proper when forced busing came in for integration. They took their money, and figure that the city schools are not their problem. They figure the felons being dropped off without any job training or half-way houses when they finish prison time, are not their problem. So, if you live in the city of St. Louis, you have these gracious old houses sort of crumbling, and the desperate folks left in the poorest districts would come in the broad daylight to steal your original copper downspouts and stained glass windows right off the house while you are inside. There are lots of hard-working, honest folks in St. Louis, and lots of reasons to like the city, but this extreme disparity between the city and the county, the wealthy and the poor with hardly any middle class, is TROUBLE.

In Baltimore, they are having a problem right now with very organized thieves stealing aluminum street light poles off the streets, in broad daylight and at night, too. See the exciting story at N<span style="font-style:italic;">ew York Times, Nov. 25, 2005, Sect. A, 26, “Light Poles are Vanishing and Baltimore’s Police are Baffled” by Gary Gately (2005 WLNR 19017298). This is another American city with a crime problem where the folks with money have left the center city to its own devices. Other similar cities that spring to my mind might be Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and lots of the boroughs of New York to name a few.

What do I hope to accomplish with this little essay in a little-known law librarian blog? Well, probably, I’m just spitting in the wind and need to take a chill pill. But I DREAM that I could start a debate, like Emile Zola. I HOPE that enough people would become outraged at the way our country is failing more and more people. Honest people are working their buns off and still not being able to make ends meet. They are devoting their lives to a company that casually tosses them in the ash-heap when they find they can out-source to China and make the product for peanuts. We continue to educate people for a world that is passing away and will be gone before they graduate with the huge debts we are loading onto them. And Congress has changed the bankruptcy law so they cannot shrug off their student loans without shedding a pint of blood, sweat and tears first. And all this is in aid of making the tiny percent of very wealthy people even more obscenely richer. We invade Iraq to keep people from thinking about that and to ensure oil profits for the companies most closely allied to those merchants of death.... Is this democracy or what?

Then at least let us unplug from the televisions that lull us into dreams that we might win a lottery or fame as a star on TV. Let us begin the task of thinking for ourselves. Let us throw off the spells of the lotus-eaters and take our destinies in our own hands. What kind of society do we want to have? What kind of world do we want to live in? We have more power than any people before in history to make our destinies, and we have let ourselves be lulled and confused. Wake up! Wake up! Do not go on down this path! We are all Americans together. If we let them make us fear each other, we make a very big mistake. Get out of your SUV and sit down and talk to somebody who is a little bit different from yourself. Chances are, you will find that they care about the same basic things as you do – they want their kids to be safe, to go to a decent school, and to have nice parks to play in. They want to have a job that pays enough to make ends meet. They want convenient, decently priced food stores with safe food. They want to be able to walk in their neighborhood in safety, and with their heads up, without fear or shame. This is what we all want, and should be the minimum for all Americans.

Law Librarian Blog: A Lexicon of Secrecy

Courtesy of Ron Jones, U. of Cincinnati Law Library, at Law Librarian Blog: "A Lexicon of Secrecy"

The very words by which official secrecy policy is formulated and carried out are often obscure to the outsider. They embody a latent knowledge of statute and regulation, policy and practice that cannot be inferred from the words themselves.

An excellent new publication helps 'the outsider,' i.e. the ordinary citizen of the United States, to comprehend the vocabulary of government information policy, and to discover its genealogical roots in official documents. From 'access' and 'accountability' to 'Yankee White' and 'Xn,' author Susan Maret, an adjunct professor of library science at the University of Denver, provides a concise definition of terms as well as links to official sources.

Dr. Maret's Lexicon is published for the first time on the FAS web site. See Susan Maret, On Their Own Terms: A Lexicon with an Emphasis on Information-Related Terms Produced by the U.S. Federal Government (November 2005).

Friday cat blogging

Trjegul, Bygul, and Christopher

When US bars its door to foreign scholars | csmonitor.com

From The Christian Science Monitor, November 23, 2005 edition:

When US bars its door to foreign scholars

NEW YORK – Concern is mounting that the US government is using antiterror laws - namely, the Patriot Act - to revive a now-discredited practice common during the cold war: the prevention of foreign intellectuals who are critical of administration policies from entering the country and sharing their views with Americans.

The practice, called ideological exclusion, became illegal in 1990. But a recent lawsuit - brought by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the PEN American Center under the Freedom of Information Act - is asking the Bush administration to explain its decisions to revoke or deny visas to several foreign scholars, and why they don't violate free-speech protections.

Read the full story.

Windhover 3

Windhover 3

The woman keeps obsessing about this poem but here we go again. This wonderful pencil sketch of a kestrel, or windhover (assuming the dratted photo blog actually posts it) is courtesy of Gary Theobald at http://www.saa.co.uk/art/escribble/picture.asp?imgID=3216.

To Christ our Lord


I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.



The crux of the poem is the line
“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! ...”

The first large portion of the poem is the lovely sweeping image of the bird’s mastery of the wind. The little sparrow hawk is totally at home in the air, loving the wind and challenge of flight. He is a prince, heir-apparent, and full of pride in his glory.

But the crux of the poem, and the difficult, hard message is in that second stanza. All that beauty, valor and glory must give way, must buckle! Wow! That is a harsh demand. This is the part of the poem that I evaded for a full thirty years of my life, while just loving the beautiful word flow and images in the rest of it. And this is what we must all come to if we are to really grasp what Hopkins demands of us with this poem.

When I was a college student, I had a real fight with my English professor about this poem. I loved it, and he hated it. He wanted me to agree with him that Hopkins’ “Dappled Beauty” was a better poem. I absolutely disagreed, and I still disagree. This is a better and much more powerful poem. But now I understand why that sad man was afraid of this poem. Whether you are going to go the way of the plow, polished by constant rubbing through the soil (sillion) or the more dramatic and probably painful embers cracking open to reveal their glowing interior beneath the ashy outsides, breaking up is hard to do. (OK that was a really cheap shot wasn’t it?)

Thanks, Lee

I'd like to (belatedly) thank Lee Peoples for his thought-provoking contributions last week. I particularly appreciated the way Lee expanded on his LLJ article, and his openness to comments here on the blog. I'm sorry I wasn't around to contribute as well, but Lee et al. did fine without me. Thanks again, Lee.

Adventures in Subject Research Teaching

Lee brought up the question of teaching legal research in the context of substantive law courses. I think Lee was thinking of what I call "cameo guest shots" where the librarian comes in the class for a class visit to explain how to do reseach in the various specialized resources for the subject area. This is always fun, and builds cred with the students and faculty. I certainly recommend it -- Nice work if you can get it as they say. Actually, the demand for it builds if you do good work in one class, the faculty member is likely to tell others about it and voila! Your dance card begins to fill up.

What I actually had in mind is a course I co-taught several years back, a semester-long class in Federal Tax Research and Practice. You could not have picked a more intimidating subject to ask me to co-teach! But I really had a great time and am very good friends with my co-teacher now. I really had to teach myself a lot, since tax research is probably the most distinctive area, and maybe the only one worth a whole semester, even mixed in with practice.

It was hard at first to find a good book about tax research, but now there are a couple to choose from. We had always had Gail Richmond's Federal Tax Research: Guide to Materials & Techniques, and West’s Federal Tax Research, by Raabe, Whittenburg. Bost & Sanders, but near the end of teaching the class, another book that I liked even better as a textbook came out: Tax Research by Barbara Karlin (Prentice Hall). the nice thing about this as a textbook is that it has very nice flow charts and explanations about the federal tax procedures and publications.

We finally stopped offering the class when the demand dropped to one student (wow! a two prof. to one student ratio!). But before that happened, we offered the class once a year for about 3 or 4 years, and had many students who were working for the IRS while they were going to law school. It was always an interesting class to teach, and I learned a lot co-teaching with my colleague, who is actually 10 year younger than I but had been at Suffolk a year longer than I. That's what the librarian ladder will do for you, I guess. Still, it was a terrific experience, in both senses of the word. I could not have been asked to co-teach anything more terrifying, but I guess once you've faced a really angry judge and had 2 C-sections, the rest of life is a piece of cake, hey? I still have the syllabus if anybody wants it. E-mail me at emckenzi@suffolk.edu, sometime after Turkey Day.

Thanksgiving Wisdom

A year ago or two, Gail Partin shared this. I thought it was wonderful. This is a good time of year to bring it back out:

Was reading in the GOOD BOOK and I came across this passage..

And it came to pass that it was decreed that all the women of the land should be taxed to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance in preparation for the season of Chaos. And this decree was made as soon as the Thanksgiving turkey had been cleared from the table and all the leftovers stored in every available Tupperware container. And all the women went from their homes to prepare for the ordeal, which began with The Biggest Shopping Day and continued until K-Mart closed at 6 pm on New Year's Eve.

And they also went unto their homes, there to face the boxes ofdecorations, and the cookie recipes with the chocolate smudges, and the leftover cards with envelopes that don't fit, and the shopping lists, and the family holiday picture, and the tangled lights that worked last year but now refuse to light on one side, and the instructions reading "some assembly required."

And there were also other women, and they were running to and fro, shopping and baking and wrapping and decorating and cleaning and worrying and fretting and fussing and spending more than they had in their goatskin handbags.

And lo, the spirit of MasterCard appeared unto them through the miracle of direct mail and said, "Be not afraid, for in December, charge what you will, and remember you have all next year to pay!"

And there was much rejoicing because of the good news.

And the children were also getting into the spirit of Chaos by adding to the confusion with their cries of "I Need, I Want, Get Me!" and "But All The Other Kids Are Getting One!"

And on TV and in the shopping malls, the children's baser instincts were being reinforced with the message that it is more blessed to receive and still more blessed to receive MORE.

And there were husbands also, abiding in their homes keeping watch over their football games.

And so it was that as the women were stringing out their lights and their credit accounts, they were filled with disbelief for it was reported that there were those among them who were not joining in the spirit of Chaos. It was said that these women had shopped for their presents during the July sales, and did their baking in October so that their freezers were full unto bursting, and mailed their cards in November, and picked up gift wrap half-price last January.

And the women wept and tore their hair, and after they let Calgon take them away, they came joyful to the knowledge that they could not do it all in eighteen days, or even twenty-five.

And, Yea, they didn't have to.

They realized that one more string of lights was one too many, and that the PTA Cookie Exchange would go on without them, and that the kids actually preferred CoolWhip to the real thing, anyway.

And the women put down their burdens, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land.

And the women were peaceful and rested and full of joy.

They had time to spend with their families and friends and neighbors. They had energy to read to their children and sing around the piano. They had money to give to the poor. And they all talked of a change in their lives when they had stopped following the decree to join the Chaos and had begun instead to celebrate.

And as they spoke, their faces shone with the light of love, for it was said they had found the true meaning of the season.

Read this and Weep

The Future of Teaching

What does the future hold for teaching legal research? A recent post on the Legal Writing Institute's Discussion List floated the idea of teaching legal research using online resources without access to a law library. Other list members commented that this is already occurring at online only law schools.


Whenever someone asks whether I will have a job in 10 years because everything will be online I can't help but think of the character Vox from the movie The Time Machine. Vox is the virtual compendium of all human knowledge seen here conducting a reference interview. (image source)

One of the reasons I don't think we will all be replaced by Voxes in the future is because of our teaching role. When we teach we decide what structure to give knowledge and how to impart it. We give students the human interaction they can't get from reading a textbook or clicking around a database.

Another reason we won't be replaced by Voxes is that someone will have to be around to manage such a device. Which leads me to an idea I have been kicking around for some time. At Oklahoma City University we are in the process of becoming an Apple Campus. If and when this happens I will be the technology guinea pig representing the library (ie: a new laptop, iPod and camera to play with, yeah!) One of my ideas is to deliver segments of legal research lectures through digital video and as podcasts. The challenge in doing this it to not cut yourself entirely out of the picture. Could I give out a password during the live lecture for students to come back and watch the lecture online? Surely we can learn something from the entertainment industry about giving away just enough free content online.

Anyone else experimenting with this?

I have really enjoyed being here this week. It has allowed me to pontificate on some things I didn't have time to get to in the article. I now head back to my "normal" blogging role as Contributing Editor of Law Librarian Blog.

Teaching in "Real" Courses

I have been working for several years to integrate library instruction into the substantive law school curriculum. In other words, teaching legal research in “real” classes: Administrative Law, Contracts or Legal Ethics for example. When you think about it every doctrinal legal subject has its own research quirks. At the very least students who have completed a doctrinal course should know the authors of the major treatises and names of any looseleafs relevant to the course.

Other courses have more research intricacies. Administrative law students should at least be familiar with the Federal Register, CFR, how to update a regulation and find an administrative agency decision. Legal Ethics students should know what ethics opinions are, what precedential weight they have and where to find them. And tax law research is a beast unto itself.

One initial hurdle that can be difficult to clear is gaining access to teach. The schedules of most courses are extremely crowded. Approaching a faculty member well in advance of the course is a good practice. Some faculty may question the value of taking time for a skills exercise in their doctrinal course. I have found that the more I lecture the more I am invited into other courses. If your presentations are well thought out, carefully delivered and supported with quality handouts or bibliographies you will quickly be in demand.

These presentations have numerous collateral benefits. Law librarians who make them are seen in a different light by students. Students realize we don’t just sit around surfing the web all day. Students often approach me weeks or months after a presentation and introduce themselves by saying … I saw your administrative law presentation in Professor X’s class and I have a question. Teaching is also a great way to learn about research in a particular area and to test the strengths of your collection. These talks also look great on your resume and annual report.

What experiences have others had? Post your comments.

Improving Research Skills

The students who participated in my study are now practicing lawyers. They research and argue for changes in the law on a daily basis. If, as Barbara Bintiff argues in her seminal piece Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Libr. J. 338 (1996) electronic searching deprives these lawyers of a full understanding of legal rules and principles, promotes ill conceived arguments, and impedes their ability to think like lawyers then something must be done.

After revealing the sub-par skills of my students it would be hypocritical for me to not make any changes to the way I teach legal research. This summer I spent a month or so revamping the first few weeks of my Advanced Legal Research class. My old model for the course was based on the assumption that students who took the upper division elective class already had basic research skills. I focused almost entirely on research in specific subject areas: legislative history, administrative law, environmental law and other perennial favorites. The results of my study threw the gauntlet at my feet. I developed three new sessions designed to do the following:

Reinforce basic skills; Expose the shortcomings of researching in the print and electronic environment; Skills to select the most appropriate research methods and tools; Electronic database training with emphasis on shortcomings and comparisons between vendors.

In developing these new sessions I found materials from two of our colleagues extremely helpful. Paul Callister, Director of the Leon E. Bloch Law Library & Associate Professor of Law, has an excellent online tutorial that served as a partial pedagogical model for the revisions to my course. I am especially fond of his discussion of precision and recall which I introduced to my students this year with some success. I would be interested in hearing any comments from others who have delved into the precision vs. recall discussion in legal research courses.

Charles Ten Brink, Professor of Law & Director of Library & Technology Services at Michigan State University College of Law, wrote an excellent article, A Jurisprudential Approach to Teaching Legal Research, 39 New Eng.L. Rev. 307 (2005). He argues that advanced legal research courses must introduce students to “the underlying principles of research” including jurisprudential concepts.

Is anyone else aware of other excellent materials for teaching fundamental basic research skills?

What experiences have others had in teaching basic skills and the pros and cons of electronic searching? Post your comments.

Irrational Exuberance

(continued from yesterday's post)
In the study I looked for a relationship between students’ opinions of a resource and their ability to use it. I asked for students’ opinions of the effectiveness of a resource both before and after they completed the exercises. Students were irrationally exuberant when it came to terms and connectors searching. They ranked it the most effective resource for finding facts and rules both before and after completing the exercise. Their support for this search method was unflappable. Even students who missed questions using a terms and connectors search refused to give it a lower effectiveness rating.

However, students who missed questions using the print digest and KeySearch were not as kind and punished the resources with lower ratings. Students said they were unwilling to give terms and connectors a lower effectiveness rating because it was so much easier to use than KeySearch or the print digest. This finding is in line with previous studies where subjects exhibited a high level of confidence in the results of an electronic resource simply because it was easy to use.

Click here for a graphical representation of my findings.

Students overwhelmingly stated that it took them the least amount of time to feel satisfied and confident in their research when using terms and connectors and the most amount of time when using the print digest or KeySearch. This quickly developed confidence in using terms and connectors searching did not translate into exceptional performance as students answered the most questions correctly using the digest and not terms and connectors searches. This result is in line with previous studies that have found researchers using electronic resources often stop researching too soon.

When I informed students that their answers confirmed some common shortcomings of electronic research they were anxious to learn more about these phenomena and any solutions to them. Many students admitted it was the first time they had heard anything negative about electronic searching and its effects on their ability to craft thoughtful arguments.

My students’ ignorance of these shortcomings is no surprise and is likely replicated at law schools around the country. When the majority of us leave first-year LexisNexis and Westlaw training up to the vendors it is no surprise that students only learn the good things about these products. LexisNexis and Westlaw training sessions don't examine the shortcomings of their products or the pitfalls of electronic searching in general. They make no comparisons between electronic searching and print resources. During the sessions students complete a carefully scripted series of exercises where nothing goes wrong and they find relevant results fairly easily. Those of us who use these products on a daily basis know that in reality relevant results aren't always that easy to come by. We must be more involved in the training sessions, inform students of the shortcomings of electronic searching and equip them with strategies to overcome them.

Librarians have also not taken any initiative in developing information literacy standards for the discipline of law while standards exist for over thirty other disciplines.

See the excellent study by Kathryn Hesniak, Donna Nixon and Stephanie Burke-Farne on law students' lack of information literacy skills (40% of 1Ls didn't know what the library catalog contained). We must be more active in this area if we expect our students' to be effective researchers.

Tomorrow I will discuss what we can do about all of this.

Another Nail in the Coffin

I was kindly invited to guest blog this week after Jim noticed a preliminary draft of my recent article The Death of the Digests and the Pitfalls of Electronic Legal Research on SSRN. The article was published this week in Law Library Journal. The article reports the results of a study I conducted last Fall using my Advanced Legal Research students as subjects. I wanted to test the old adage that print digests are the tool of choice for researching legal rules while electronic databases are best suited for finding cases discussing unique factual situations. Students completed in class training and then located cases discussing legal rules and unique factual situations using West’s Federal Practice Digest 4th Series, a terms and connectors search and KeySearch.

The results of the study did not confirm the old adage. In fact students were slightly more successful at answering fact questions with the print digest than they were using either of the electronic resources. Students were also more successful at answering rule questions using a terms and connectors search than they were using the print digest or KeySearch.


The results were surprising. In my opinion they show that today’s law students are a versatile bunch. Students took the digest, a tool designed around and universally proclaimed to be excellent at researching legal rules, and successfully used it to find cases with similar factual situations. They took terms and connectors searching and used it to find legal rules, who needs the old digest structure after all.

BTW: those of you who attended STCL Professor Tracy McGaugh’s talk at the AALL Middle Manager’s Breakfast this year may recall her discussing versatility as a key trait among Gen-Xer’s who grew up with the first generation of personal computers, DOS and no plug and play. Millennials aren’t so versatile as they grew up with technologies that were much easier to use.

They Can Use the Print Digest – But They Won’t
While these students may be capable of using the print digest their answers to opinion questions about the print digest drove another nail in the digest’s coffin. I asked for students’ opinions of the effectiveness of a resource both before and after they completed the exercises. Students were especially fond of terms and connectors searching and consistently ranked it the most effective method of answering both rule and fact questions before and after training and completing the exercise. Opinions of the print digests’ effectiveness at answering both types of questions were consistently very low both before and after receiving training and completing the exercises. The majority of students, 69%, said they found the digest cumbersome and unwieldy to use.

These young members of Generation X and older Millennials cut their teeth on personal computers in grade school. By the time they reach law school these students prefer and expect to conduct legal research for facts, rules, and everything else electronically. Even when I revealed to the students how successful they were with the print digest they responded that they still preferred electronic resources over the print digest. Today’s students do not share some law librarians’ devotion to the print digest. For all practical purposes the print digest is dead to these students before they learn it exists.

Tomorrow I will discuss the common pitfalls that students fell into when using electronic resources and discuss what librarians should do to correct these shortcomings.

Podcast feeds on Infotrac

From Library Stuff:

Wowza! The good folks from It's All Good point us to the great news. From the press release:

'Thomson Gale, part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), announces the addition of podcast feeds to InfoTrac on Thomson Gale PowerSearch and its Student Resource Center, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center and History Resource Center databases. Weekly presidential radio addresses by George W. Bush from January 2005 to the present will be podcast beginning today. New presidential radio addresses will be added weekly.'

'While this addition marks the first podcast ever loaded to Thomson Gale reference databases, the company will add more podcasts in the coming months. Podcasting is included in Thomson Gale database subscriptions.'

Ok Thomson, here's a challenge for you. Let users record their own comments and have the ability to upload them to the relevant articles in Mp3 format so that other interested users can download them and learn from others. It'll be the two-way street library database that I've been dreaming about.

"Everything I know about doing reference I learned on the job."

From NexGen Librarian:

For all of you new reference librarians just starting out on the job, here's something I recommend: ask your new supervisor to take you up and down every aisle of the reference stacks and show you his/her favorite reference books. These books will curb your overreliance on Google, and give you further ammunition against those who would say 'if it's not on the Internet, it must not exist!'

If your supervisor is a seasoned librarian, particularly the kind who loves doing reference, this request will impress. This will also get you in the know about any localized resources - tax maps, county documents, evacuation plans - that you wouldn't have otherwise known about, especially if you aren't from the area.

Then, take it a step further: every day, pull 5 reference books you've never seen before, spend about half an hour looking them over and making notes about their scope and what kinds of information requests they might be good for. Keep a log, and organize it by Dewey number. This is how I found hidden gems like a book on how to pose taxidermied animals so that they looked natural, a book of old treasure maps from the Library of Congress, and instructions on how to construct a hamburger-shaped bed, complete with pickle pillows.

Not that anyone ever ended up needing these things, but if they had, I'd have known where to go!

ACRLog on Understanding Books - and the Changing Marketplace

From ACRLog:

The Economist has yet another analysis of Google Print and its “threat” to publishers. They buried the lead, though: the real impact of the Internet on traditional publishing is online sales of used books - jumping from 1% of market to 20%. (That was 2002 - I suspect it’s higher now.) Funny how that doesn’t seem to have made trade publishers reconsider their traditional practice of embargoing mass market availability for a year after hardcover. Now you can buy the hardcover at paperback cost within weeks of publication. If an industry can’t adjust to that reality, it has bigger problems than Google.

Concurring Opinions: Academic Blogging Scandal

Reported by Daniel J. Solove at Concurring Opinions:

A developing case about academic bloggers contains a chorus of major issues swirling in the blogosphere: the career consequences of blogging, moderating blog debates, hot-button political issues, and defamation.

The case involves Paul Deigan, an engineering PhD candidate who has a blog called Info Theory. Deigan got into a debate with the anonymous blogger Bitch Ph.D. over abortion. Deigan is pro-life; Bitch Ph.D. is pro-choice. They exchanged posts on their mutual blogs, and Deigan also placed a comment on one of Bitch Ph.D.'s posts.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed:

Then he posted a seemingly innocuous entry on the Bitch Ph.D. site: “Your linking talking points w/o analysis. Already I see several points that are exaggerated and misconstrued without even needing research…”

Feeling that this comment and subsequent ones from Deignan did not qualify as “substantive debate,” she soon deleted his comments and banned him from her site. Her policy states, “Comments are great; obnoxious comments get deleted. Deal.”

If this were all, the story would be just a typical tale of the blogosphere. But things got much uglier:

A frequent visitor to the Bitch Ph.D. site, the University of Northern Iowa history professor Wallace Hettle, felt obliged to defend Bitch Ph.D.’s liberal end of the blogosphere. Hettle found Deignan’s curriculum vita at Info Theory, which lists his academic advisers, the Purdue mechanical engineers Galen King and Peter Meckl, who will play a big part in deciding if he will ultimately receive a Ph.D. Hettle e-mailed them, indicating that Deignan’s comments were “unprofessional” and “contrary to the spirit of free enquiry.” Hettle announced his actions within the comment section of Bitch Ph.D.

Go read the posting and the Inside Higher Ed report. The comments to Daniel's posting note that there is nothing about this dispute that is necessarily unique to the Internet or to blogging, but it is clear that blogging is not immune from such disputes either.

Books, online, and substitution effects

From The University of Chicago Chronicle:

A new student survey backs the hunch of University faculty and administrators that the demise of the book has been vastly overstated.

The poll of 5,700 students’ library usage habits on campus reveals the use of electronic resources is not crowding out use of libraries for research using conventional stacks, reference materials and other physical resources, as some have feared. ...

“These things are synergistic: we found if you are taking out lots of books, you are also more likely to be a high user of electronic resources,” said Andrew Abbott, the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and the College, who chairs the faculty task force on libraries....

Many universities across the country are scaling back on book buying in favor of beefing up digital resources. But the poll findings suggest that “there is no real evidence of substitution,” Abbott said. “Users do seem to be using on-line rather than physical journals. But usage of other physical materials is up, and the survey tells us very clearly that heavy digital media users are heavy physical media users and vice versa.”

I'm Sally?

You are Sally!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Althouse: "We will be able to control what goes on ... in Ave Maria Town."

The Wall Street Journal reports on plans to move Ave Maria School of Law from Michigan to Florida. As commented by Ann Althouse:

"We'll own all commercial real estate," [Tom Monaghan, founder of the school and of Domino's Pizza] declared, describing his vision. "That means we will be able to control what goes on there. You won't be able to buy a Playboy or Hustler magazine in Ave Maria Town. We're going to control the cable television that comes in the area. There is not going to be any pornographic television in Ave Maria Town. If you go to the drug store and you want to buy the pill or the condoms or contraception, you won't be able to get that in Ave Maria Town."

What a creepy vision! I wonder how different the set of students that applies to the Florida version of the school will be from the set that applies to the Ann Arbor school. Obviously, Ave Maria is a school designed to attract Catholic students, but I should think a different sort of student is going to be attracted to this super-sanitized environment than would want to be in Ann Arbor. And what about attracting and retaining faculty? One alumnus complains about the shift in the school's mission, which he'd understood was "to create attorneys who were well versed in Catholic social teaching and the law, who would engage the world and not retreat from it."

Do you think there's something tainted about wanting an untainted environment?

I Laughed! I Cried!

From Discourse.net:

Yesterday, a student told me a very funny joke that he made up:

What's the difference between an onion and the Bill of Rights?

George Bush cries when he cuts into an onion.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice is a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal due to begin publication in the spring of 2006. The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for librarians to discover research which can contribute to best-practice decision making. Published quarterly by Learning Services, University of Alberta, this journal will provide original research and feature articles in the area of evidence based library and information practice as well as critically appraised reviews of existing research (evidence summaries).

Cornell LII Introduces Wex

New from the elves in the hollow tree in Ithaca:

Welcome to Wex, a collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia.

What is Wex?

Wex is an ambitious effort to construct a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia. It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School. Much of the material that appears in Wex was originally developed for the LII's "Law about..." pages, to which Wex is the successor.

Veteran's Day in a Time of Senseless War

Dear Friends,
I demonstrated against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Tomorrow is Veteran's Day. In honor of the loyal and honorable folks who are fulfilling their vows in the military and National Guard, regardless of any personal feelings about the tasks they have been given or the materiel they have been given to work with, here is a poem by that pre-eminent war poet, Wilfred Owen. You can visit a dynamite website and archive about him at http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/warpoems.htm#7

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Social computing?

OK, I'm "hip," I'm "down with" blogging, RSS, podcasting, and wikis. But can somebody explain del.icio.us to me?

The Death of the Digest?

Lee F. Peoples' excellent article, The Death of the Digest and the Pitfalls of Electronic Research: What Is the Modern Legal Researcher to Do?, 97 Law Lib. J. 661 (2005), has just come out. I read the article when it was released in pre-print form on SSRN, and immediately asked Lee to join us for a guest-blogging stint when the article was published. That time is now! Lee will be holding forth here next week, discussing his article, responding to comments, and talking about whatever he wishes. Congratulations on a great article, Lee, and we look forward to hearing from you next week.

Librarian Love Potion Number 9

Or, How to Cut Through the Law Porn and Win Their Hearts and Minds!

Jim throws down the gauntlet in "Librarians, Dark Secrets and Law Porn." I have been thinking about this for years, ruminating in my tower (well, my office). We really have turned into little library mousies ourselves, haven't we? I'm afraid we have started to believe their awful lies! Our students and alumni actually do have fond memories of the library (at least some of them do, darn it!)

I think the smartest thing I have seen in a long time is the current director of the Social Law Library here in Boston, Robert Brink's plan to bring senior partners back to his library. He began a series of talks and events several years before he knew his renovation would be complete. Inviting intriguing authors, including judges, to give talks, and then inviting select members of the senior bar, to these events. He figures out that what many lawyers longed for was to return to a rich life of the mind. They began to see the Social Law Library as a culturally enriching place where they could go to mingle with pals they knew in their professional life, remembered from school, but then could go a step beyond and stretch their brains. The Athenaeum here in Boston and one in Philadelphia has lasted a very long and disinguished time on the same career.

I think people still want to think of those stately lions outside the New York Public Library, the grand facade of the Boston Public Library, and other great libraries as the cultural bastions. They would like to ally themselves and bathe themselves in that aura. We would be smart to pick up on this and run with it, I think. I give a faculty tea once a year in the library. This is not an event at which you learn anything. But I have been astounded at the turn-out where faculty just love to come for a "civilized" moment in THE LIBRARY. Wow. I bake the stuff myself, and make tea in pots for them. After I did it the first time, it got a lot easier, and boy, the pay-off is great. It's a Boston-themed thing, so maybe you need to do something local, or that suits you. But faculty long to be loved. If you do something for them, it's amazing how pleased they are. And a tea party, for heavens' sake, is a pretty small taste of civilization. I think it's because I do the stuff myself, that I get the bang for the buck. Love Potion Number 9.

Law Librarian Blog: Yale Law School to Host First Conference on Search Engine Law

The Yale Law School Information Society Project will host "Regulating Search?," the first academic conference devoted to the developing law of search engines, on December 3, 2005. This event will bring together representatives from the search industry, government, civil society, and academia to discuss the emerging intersection of search engines and various forms of regulation. "Regulating Search?" will include speakers from Google and the Authors Guild.

The way in which law treats search functionality is still up for grabs, and with it, the potential to wield enormous power in the developing knowledge economy. This symposium will focus on trends in the search engine market and in recent litigation, identify the interests that are implicated by the increasing legal control of search, and discuss appropriate policy responses.

Registration for the conference and further information are available on the ISP website at http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/regulatingsearch.html. Registration is free for Yale students and faculty, $35 for other students, $75 for academic and nonprofit participants, and $165 for corporate and law firm participants.

Libarians, dark secrets, and law porn

I was out of town for a weekend in New York City (Hairspray--go see it! Sweet Charity was good too), and as usual my mailbox was full of glossy "law porn" when I returned. You know--law school bulletins, alumni magazines, "introducing our new faculty" brochures, and all the sort of things all the law schools mail out to try to bump up their reputation counts in the U.S. News rankings.

For some time now I've been browsing through these mailings, looking for law library news. Perhaps not surprisingly, I rarely find any. One of the law school admissions bulletins I received today didn't even mention a law library. On the other hand, the law library sections of most admissions bulletins are pretty much interchangeable--see how many volumes we have! We have computers too! And wireless!

I'm no better than anyone else at figuring out how to sell the law library in our admissions bulletin. I usually say something about our JD/MLS program, because we've had some excellent students and most of the our grads have received multiple job offers--not something that most law students can say. However, I realize I have internalized the librarian's traditional diffidence, and I don't really feel that I know how to make libraries interesting to the audience these brochures is intended for.

Even so, this seems to me like a significant problem for us as librarians and for the future of law libraries. I'm open to suggestions: has anybody come up with new ways to publicize their libraries, or new things to say about them? This is really a question about how we define libraries now and in the future: as a collection of information resources? A place? A service? A community?

Dark Secrets of the Blogging Queen!

My blogging fans are begging to know how I manage to do it? Present that well groomed, tactful exterior so well-known in the law library community, keep a sparkling library running like a top, work on my grant and blog like a maniac! Well, aside from the well-known tactic of delegate, delegate, delegate.... here is the dark secret of the Blogging Queen....

Desktop Ecology
by Betsy McKenzie

Does it ever seem to you that your desk has taken on a life of its own? Once I had a neat, clean desk, with everything stowed in its own folder. Then I went to work in a library. For one thing, I don’t seem to be able to lay hands on enough file folders, or at least folders of the right sizes. And then, it seems to make sense to leave it out when I know I’ll be working on that file in just a short while. But there are so many files that way. And then, something happens, and I fall behind and I start coping by just making piles on the desk and floor.

I call it filing by piling. You know where every thing is within the stacks... right up until the stacks start an avalanche! Curse those slick magazines! Literally slick. If you have the poor judgement to leave two coated journals next to each other in the pile – look out!

You know you are in trouble when your staff starts putting the new mail or important items on your chair so they don’t get lost. That’s because anything that gets set on the desk immediately assumes protective coloration and blends in. You can no longer pick it out from the background of catalogs, old memos and notepads. What do they call it on those nature shows? Camouflage! Of course, there are vendors who are aware of this. They send items in bright yellow or blue. But then, there gets to be so much bright yellow and blue on your desk that they rather defeat their purpose, and it turns out to be the white that stands out again.

I have always suspected that the paper actually multiplies. I could not possibly be responsible for all this paper myself! I remember reading articles in library school about paperless libraries. Ha! We not only get paper catalogs and ads from vendors, but at my school, the administration still follows up their e-mail announcements with a paper copy lest anybody miss the news. I am drowning in paper. I am starting to be a little bit afraid about this, and here is why.

My desk was nearly clean once for a few shining weeks last summer. I was conscientiously filing everything as it came, or throwing it out after I read it. But then I got busy, started to fall behind, and started to make little piles. First they were neat little piles. I was still filing and throwing out most stuff, reading things as they came. But then I got busier, and then I got sick and fell behind. When I got back, there were big piles of mail to go through, and all the new mail kept coming in as well (and placed on the guest chairs in my office -- a sure measure of trouble on the McKenzie Mess Index). Now there are huge piles, with, I hope, no slick paper next to other coated paper. But I feel that the piles are growing without my adding to them. Each day when I come in, they seem bigger...without my having added anything.

Is there some critical mass (to mix scientific metaphors) at which a messy desk can actually take on a life of its own? In fact, is there some sort of paper invasive species lurking out there? I suspect a sort of kudzu of memos and catalogs, springing up and spreading by many feet each night. The top of my desk seems more like a coral reef or jungle now than a work surface. It really is a complex ecosystem, with niches exploited by all types of desktop creatures. There are staplers, tape dispensers, and reams and reams of all types of paper, the most ubiquitous of all. There are archeological layers of memos, layers of mulched reports.

There may be an entire system of speciation at work here, with families branching off to take advantage of niches in the environment. Is it possible that paper can engage in mating rituals to find the most attractive mates? What would be the selection criterion? Does size matter (eek!)? Is it about color, images, coating or text? Or do the potential mates duke it out? I can well imagine competing memoranda butting heads. Maybe they fluff themselves up to intimidate a rival. That would account for a lot on my desk, I can tell you. I guess you have but to look at your desk to see what has been the driving factor for mating selection in your desktop ecology.

Do the mated pairs joust with other pairs to secure territory to increase the likelihood of the brood’s success? Again, this probably explains an awful lot about my desk. Many a morning the desk looks as though there had been quite a bit of territorial competition going on. And is there some grim Darwinian selection at work on our desks? That would explain the disappearance of some memos and a few reports in the past, I guess. I don’t know how my dean would feel about this as an explanation, though. Perhaps I need to apply for a grant:

“Development of Invasive Species of Paper in Desktop Ecologies and Their Destructive Impact on Native Tabletop Species.”

Law Librarian Heroes!

Way back in August, I think, I mentioned that the Assn. of Boston Law Libraries, together with the Mass. Lawyers Weekly , were taking nominations to recognize various Heroes among the professions that assist lawyers, including Law Library Heroes. YAY!

They finally came through a few weeks ago, though it took a while for me to hear. Brian Harkins, of the Social Law Library is the Law Library Hero of 2005. This is particularly appropriate. Brian is the guy that law librarians in the Boston area fall back on when they are stumped. That's right! He is the reference librarians' reference librarian. I am very proud to say he is also a Suffolk JD! and comes regularly to speak at my Advanced Legal Research class on Legal Research in the Real World. He's a good friend, and I am so glad he is getting some recognition. Yay, Brian, Congratulations! Below is a link where you can see a digital photo of Brian from an LLNE online newsletter (Brian is the one holding the blue-wrapped basket in the second photo). Being in an LLNE newsletter probably means it was taken by his colleague at Social Law, John Pedini, also known as Fiche Man (Pedini actually appeared in the Exhibit Hall at AALL in a costume covered in microfiche). John is very outgoing. ;} Nice picture, John! http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/llne/LLNENews/v22n2/picturesv22n2.htm

Technology Enables Us...

Sometimes! I worked for more than a week to get that silly Pod casters entry up. It was just a silly thing to post, and I guess it was not worth the amount of effort I put into solving all the problems that I had to solve into getting that cursed thing up. It's a librarian thing, isn't it, not to give up? First the photo-poster wasn't working -- that was why Jim's adorable cats didn't show up in his Friday cat blogging post. So I put off publishing the entry. Then the photo-technology starting working - sort of. The problem then became operator error, I guess. So, Technology Enables Us, except when it does not work or when we are just learning to make it work and don't understand what we are doing. And it's really a librarian sort of thing to sort of keep at it when we have invested way more candle than the game is worth! Darn.

Launch of Leiter's Law School Rankings

I am delighted announce the launch of Leiter’s Law School Rankings, by Brian Leiter, Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, in association with our Law Professor Web Services LLC.

Leiter’s Law School Rankings (1) contains two brand new law school quality rankings, and (2) expands, reorganizes, and redesigns the rankings material formerly maintained on the University of Texas School of Law website.

1. The new 2005 rankings are:

* Faculty Quality Rankings: Scholarly Impact (Citations)
* Student Quality Rankings

2. Leiter’s Law School Rankings presents law school rankings material in seven categories:

* Newest Rankings contains the latest 2005 rankings (Faculty Quality Rankings: Scholarly Impact (Citations) and Student Quality Rankings)
* Faculty Rankings contains rankings of scholarly quality (as measured by reputation, productivity, and impact) and teaching quality, as well as a listing of faculty moves
* Student Rankings contains rankings of student quality (as measured by LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs)
* Job Placement contains rankings of placement of students at elite law firms, a well as listings of where faculty went to law school and Supreme Court clerkships
* U.S. News Rankings contains discussions of the U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings and how the rankings on this site differ from U.S. News
* Archives contains Educational Quality Rankings of U.S. Law Schools from earlier years
* Links contains links to law review articles on law school rankings (the links are to the articles on SSRN, Hein-on-Line, and Westlaw, in that order of priority)

Our goal is to make Leiter’s Law School Rankings the premier Internet site of law school rankings for prospective, current, and former law students; law school faculty and administrators; and practicing lawyers in law firms, government, and public interest organizations. Please email us comments or suggestions for improvement.

Law Professor Web Services LLC

Paul L. Caron, Charles Hartsock Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law
Joseph A. Hodnicki, Associate Director for Library Operations, University of Cincinnati College of Law