Bench and Bar: Up close and personal

From Michael J. Madison at madisonian.net:

Earlier this summer, I had the good fortune to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Federal Circuit’s newest courtroom. Two features leaped out at me immediately.

One was the proximity of the advocate’s podium to the bench. Though the courtroom as a whole is generously proportioned, “intimate” doesn’t come close to describing the relationship between lawyer and judge. I was told that the dimensioning was intentional — the bench wants to get up close and personal with the bar.

Two was the fact that there is an A/V station in the balcony, looking out over the courtroom. I was told that this is for the use of a law clerk, who will sit in on oral argument and monitor the faithfulness of each advocate’s use of the record. If citations to the record don’t match the record that the clerk has on screen, the clerk will be able to IM the bench. The judge can choose to call the lawyer on the discrepancy. In real time.

Answers to the Law Library Quiz

So, here are the answers to the OOTJ law library quiz:

They are the first letters of the early reporters for the U.S. Supreme Court.
DA Dallas (1754 - 1800)
CR Cranch (1801 - 1815)
WH Wheaton (1816 - 1827)
PE Peters (1828 - 1842)
HO Howard (1843 - 1860)
BL Black (1861 - 1862)
WA Wallace (1863 - 1874)

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to 'organize the world's information,' announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index."

New Pencil Boxes

And now for something completely different.

School will be starting again soon, in the U.S. and Canada, at least. And for me September always carries with it childhood memories of buying new school supplies -- immaculate, crisp pencils; pristine pads of wonderfully wobbly paper; see-through plastic rulers, or the wooden ones with the metal edge, neither of which seemed to get used; and pencil boxes, those delightful containers with the sliding tongue.

Not as much fun in law school perhaps. But there are some school tools that are intriguing and enjoyable to play with -- and that might meet a particular need. I want to point you to three of these today; maybe others will share others via the comments function.

First is a new one on the block called Writely. It offers a free way to create documents using a browser. Documents are stored on Writely's servers and are accessible only via a password, though you can let others view them by registering their email addresses. Indeed, they can be permitted to collaborate on the document, so this becomes a useful possiblity for groups to work together on projects. Documents created on-line are in html format, and there's a decent editor to help you use tables, images, links... the whole nine yards. In fact, it seems to me that one of the best uses of Writely for some folks might be as a wysiwyg html editor: create the document and then download it to your own machine for other uses.

You can upload documents you've created in Word or html editors or in text editors, so this can operate as a simple document sharing tool, as well as a back-up tool. Writely's worth a look.

Less polished but much more fun, in my view, is Webnote, which seems to be a proof-of-concept project of a "novice software engineer working at Google." This is a remarkable note-taking tool you use in your browser. I say remarkable because it lets you do a bunch of things that just aren't possible with your trad word processors and the like. Notes are made in resizable coloured boxes rather like Stickies; you can make as many as you like on a page, in a whole variety of colours; they overlap each other if necessary, and clicking on one brings it to the fore. But the real kicker for me is that you can move them around within the window as if they were objects on your desktop. Moreover, you can treat the colours as labels or tags and by clicking on the same-coloured button cause all of the blue notes, for example, to come to the fore. In theory you could simply stack notes upon notes in one single window, but make that supportable by using colours and the ability to filter notes according to content, seeing all the notes, for example that contain the phrase OOTJ.

Just in case this isn't enough fun, both Writely and Webnote allow you to create an RSS feed for your site.

I've made a test OOTJ site in Webnote for you to look at. But you can make your own with no fuss at all. The only downside, in my view, is that you can't password protect your site, and so anyone who has the URL can jump in a change things at will. The makes Webnote no good for sensitive stuff, but quite cool for foolling around and the occasional quick collaboration.

Finally there's PeanutButterWiki. Also a collaborative tool, as the "wiki" suggests, this one allows you to make your site private or public, and to restrict entry to a private site to those of your choice. It's free and seems pretty straightforward. Again, I've made a OOTJ test wiki (public) for you to fool around in, but creating your own is no challenge at all.

There's no telling how long these services will be around or how long they'll be free. But then the pencils that were new at the start of school eventually got ground down to stubs and chewed up, and the scribbled on pages got torn out of the binders, which also got lost along with lunch bags... so these considerations are no impediments to fun. And with services like these available there's also no impediment to anyone's blogging, collaborating, setting up RSS feeds, backing up, file sharing...

I think I hear the bell.

New Orleans, Blogs, and MSM

Kathryn Cramer has collected a number of "before and after" photos put together by various citizen journalists, using digital photography to superimpose news photos of the devastation in New Orleans on the satellite photos from Google Earth. The blogs are providing information that the mainstream media has so far failed to do. Her comment:

An Afterthought: we blog-folk are doing this by the seat of our pants and actually getting somewhere. But as Xeni Jarin asks, "media evacuates, there is no grid, damage map?" Why do you see this attempt here and not on the CNN of MSNBC site?

This isn't a disaster movie. It's real. People care about specific people in specific places. They want to understand precisely where the water is 20 ft. deep, where the water is coming in. Many, many people have very specific, individual relationships to this city. The specifics we are being given just don't cut it. If I can look this stuff up, why don't they?

There is also this observation at Making Light:

Jim Macdonald started it. He said, in AIM:

White people find things. Black people loot things.

This was literally just as Patrick was about to post:

Yahoo News photos:

Photo number one: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store”.

Photo number two: “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store”.

Two guesses as to the relative melanin levels of “two residents” and “a young man”.

Remember, white people “find” things; black people “loot”. . . .

Here’s a photo with another great caption from the Associated Press:

As one person looks through their shopping bag, left, another jumps through a broken window, while leaving a convenience store on the I-10 service road south, in Metairie, La., Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The store is dark and deserted. The “shopper” and his buddy have entered and left it via a huge hole smashed in the store’s front window. What’s happening in this photo is more obviously looting than any of the photos I’ve seen of New Orleans citizens toting their plastic bags of food through the flood waters. Yet AP is calling this activity “shopping”—perhaps, because the young man with the plastic bag is patently white.

Why Not Law and Psychology?

In partial response to Simon’s comments, it is probably true that psychology is a disfavored discipline in law compared to economics, and even to certain other social sciences such as sociology. On the other hand, the harder question than “why not more psychology in law classes” may be “why not more social sciences in law teaching, when there is so much in legal scholarship”? Interdisciplinary legal scholarship has been growing in prominence for years, and it’s probably long past time to recognize that it has become part of the mainstream. But why don’t we see that much of it in the classroom? In other words, why do law students and the practicing bar not see law and psychology, or socio-legal studies, or legal anthropology, as “real” law, but as abstract, “academic” matters?

Part of the problem is that the social sciences are treated instrumentally by practitioners. Psychology is not a “real” discipline with real knowledge, but something you pay an expert witness for. Lawyers are forced by the nature of their professional practice to view the social sciences skeptically, and not to take them seriously.

Economics is different, of course, for several reasons. Legal anthropologists don’t get appointed to the federal judiciary; legal economists do. That in itself gives economics a weight and influence that other social sciences do not have. Also, I suspect that psychology and sociology, at least as applied in the courts, tend to come out on the plaintiff’s side, while economics tends to favor corporate interests and the heavily insured.

Katrina-related blogs

This from an email on the lawprof listserv from Pam Metzger at Tulane Law School:

“The Tulane e-mail system is off-line as is the Loyola system. So, none of us can use our customary means of communication (e-mail) to see how our loved ones are doing. (As you can imagine, we are all anxious to hear about the whereabouts and safety of our friends, family, colleagues, and clients.)

“I have set up two blog spots for folks to check in with their current whereabouts and contact information. At the Clinical Law Blog, I've set up a posting line for clinical faculty, students, staff and clients to post exchange information. That site is here.

“I've also set up a blogspot for the Tulane and Loyola law school communities. It's here. If you could share this information with the general law prof list I'd appreciate it. It's nothing fancy, but we're hoping we can at least find out whether our loved ones are safe.”

Podcasting at AU Washington College of Law

Somebody had to be the first, and it's not too surprising that it was Billie Jo Kaufman and her colleagues at American University to do it: introducing the first large-scale effort at law school podcasting:

WCL launched this service primarily for its students in Washington, D.C. and around the world. “The primary goal of WCL’s Office of Technology,” says Dean Claudio Grossman, “is to deliver information to students and faculty in many formats.” Grossman’s Welcome podcast and others can be found at: http://wcl.american.edu/podcast/index.rss2. WCL recognizes that, due to distance and time constraints, students cannot possibly attend all of the many events offered at WCL. For instance, in the past year, WCL hosted a discussion with Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Breyer, a panel on Homeland Security featuring Tom Ridge, a national security law conference and a conference on the Geneva Conventions in a Post-9-11 or Iraq World,
which featured former Legal Advisor to Secretary of State Powell Will Taft. All of these could have been downloaded to iPods from the WCL Web site and enjoyed on the bus, metro or in any other venue. To accommodate WCL students’ busy schedules, the school intends to make all audio from events available via podcast.

WCL is also sensitive to the needs of those students for whom English is not their first language. Podcast software allows the listener to slow playback of the audio, making it easier for the speaker to be understood. Also, classes will be podcast for students who are unable to attend due to illness, family emergency or other excusable absence.

See more here.

Law and Psychology

Why is it that 99% of law school courses operate blithely as though everyone in the room understands beyond debate why human beings do what they do? And why are these same courses -- or many of them, at least -- prepared to spend time head-scratching over how something called "the market" works, and how its operations obey illuminating regularities?

I won't waste time bashing econonomics. Indeed, I want to set it up as a discipline (of sorts) that incorporates somewhere near its heart -- can economics have a heart? the guts, then -- a view of what a person is that is more or less explicit. The economic person is rational and calculating:

The economic approach starts from the simple premise that, faced with limited resources and abilities, people do the best they can to further their goals and objectives. Combined with the powerful mathematical tools of optimization theory, this simple premise yields sharp predictions about how people should respond to changes in their resources and abilities. [http://www.utexas.edu/cola/economics/]

Okay, so law doesn't have "powerful mathematical tools." But why on earth doesn't it have any theory whatever about human behaviour? Law is, after all, an enterprise in which, to use Lon Fuller's simple notion, we attempt to subject human conduct to the governance of rules. How do people -- in this culture? any culture? -- behave when confronted not with a choice between guns and butter but with a rule saying no, a rule saying maybe, any rule at all? Does it matter who makes the rule? Does it matter how one comes to know of it? Does it matter whether it's polite, peremptory, wheedling...?

There are admittedly courses labelled Law and Psychology; but I'd guess you'll find pretty much all of them dealing with the psychology of juries or judges or witnesses or the problems of mens rea and insanity. All well and good, but not your everyday basic down-to-earth fundamental what-kind-of-being-are-we- talking-to-when-we-make-a-law stuff. No, law schools pretend that there are no psychology departments (easy enough, I guess, because they also pretend there are no education departments, anthropology departments, and with some exceptions, history departments either), so the nature of humanity, taken either singly or en masse, is unproblematic and unexamined.

The "reasonable person" you say. Not really. It is a heuristic notion and probably a good basis for framing some of our laws in an attempt to elicit the very behaviour it presumes. But reason? what reason? whose reason? what about the heart's reasons, of which the head knows nothing? Or, god forbid, those of the genitals, of which none of us is willing to profess knowledge? All too messy, too...

Psychology as a discipline is not as firm a science as, say, organic chemistry. Granted. But would anyone want to defend econcomics for more than five minutes on the firmness ground? And when it comes right down to it, we're not talking about a one-to-one mapping of reality when we construct a social science; we're really developing a worthwhile thoughtful informed conversation about issues important to human life. And it's hard to imagine a conversation more fundamental to any operational discipline than that inquiring into the nature of me, and you... and all of us. Yet on and on we go in law school with courses on law and economics, such that it's hard to find a graduate spared the knowledge of Pareto optimality and even harder to find one aware of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Enough to make you wonder about the sanity of...

Situational Tags

I was going to post only once a day, but I'm afraid I had an idea. Sorry about that. It likely won't happen again.

I'm putting together a bunch of digital documents, a dossier, if you like, on the Charkaoui case. (Charkaoui is one of five people, all citzens of Arab countries, who have been held in Canada under a Security Certificate without charge [see the CBC "backgrounder"] The Supreme Court of Canada recently agreed to hear his appeal as to whether the issuance of the Certificate against him meets the requirements of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.) I thought that it might be of interest to some lawyers and students, and so I plan to put it in a resources section of Slaw, and to encourage others on Slaw to compile similar packages of documents in areas that interest them. I got the inspiration, in part, from my friend and fellow Slawyer, Louise Tsang, who's a reference librarian at the Georgetown University Law Library, and who assembled a wonderful guide to the U.S. Supreme Court nomination process.

This means I have to assemble all of the many court judgments and as many of the filed documents as are available to me, along with the relevant legislation, academic articles and precedents here and elsewhere. I'll likely order them by date and by issue, perhaps cross referencing according to various criteria -- I haven't got that far yet. But this is typical lawyer work, building and maintaining an intelligible file.

It occurs to me that the pattern for my dossier and that for almost any dossier on a complex case would be pretty much alike. Wouldn't it be interesting if each piece of relevant material (in digital format at least) were tagged with metadata that allowed it to find its "proper" place in a case file schema? LegalXML¹ or the like could do the job. After all, law is very much a system in which each event occurs at a "level" and each level knows its place. It wouldn't be too much to ask/require those generating documents to meta-tag them routinely. (It might even be possible to reverse engineer current data, so to speak, to come up with useful "situtational" or "relational" tags.)

All one would have to do then is search for data by the case name and run it through a parser of some sort to structure the bits into a recognizable pattern. There could be competing patterns, of course. There's no good reason to restrict organization to one particular format. It'd certainly make my work easier.

---

1. A small irony here: on looking up the OASIS site that deals with LegalXML I see that the current headline is: "OASIS Members to Create Framework for Global Sharing of Criminal and Terrorist Evidence / XML Specification Will Deliver Reliable Authentication and Auditing to Safeguard Privacy and Increase Effectiveness of Lawful Intercepts"

Too Much Information

Greetings, OOTJers. My name's Simon (Fodden), and I'll be your guest blogger for the week. I'll be serving up strange concoctions such as unbaked notions, parenthetical ideas (three kinds of brackets are hardly enough for me), and idées fixes that I am quite prepared to pass off as distillations of wisdom because I've been around for a very long time. Would you like a beverage with that? Me too, but that'll have to wait until you come up (or down: I'm looking at you, Minnesota, Maine, Montana, Michigan, Massachusets... ) to Toronto.

...Which is where I taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School for a little more than 30 years -- family law and property law, principally. I also did turns as Associate Dean, academic director of the community clinic, mediator between the IT folks and the faculty ("inter-geek"), bad teacher, good teacher, proponent of strange ideas, et ejusdem generis.

So here's the proposition du jour: information overload (a.k.a. "infoglut") is a crock.

At least as it's commonly understood. And for that we might turn to The Free Dictionary:

A symptom of the high-tech age, which is too much information for one human being to absorb in an expanding world of people and technology. It comes from all sources including TV, newspapers, magazines and the Internet as well as wanted and unwanted mail, e-mail and faxes. It also includes the excessively intricate and mostly indecipherable manuals that must be read to operate everything from a handheld device to a software application. It boils down to this: the volume of information that crossed our brains in one week at the end of the 20th century is more than a person received in a lifetime at the beginning of it.

It's that last summing sentence in particular that just doesn't seem right to me. In fact it seems so wrong that I've stood on it to attain the novel heights of Fodden's Law, which, today, is simply this: the amount of information seeking our attention always and everywhere [don't you just love the Derrida global modifier?] remains constant at infinity.

Look out of your window, if you're lucky enough to have one (and if you're not, consider changing your job). There's more data in a single glance than we can credit. Listen, and unless you're in a room papered in egg cartons, the sound bites are numerous enough to nourish your neocortex until the 12th of never. Repeat for touch, taste, smell. It's always been this way. The world is impossibly rich, no?

So what's the problem. Why is it that we now imagine that we're overeating what the world gives ("data," which is the plural past participle of the Latin for "give")? I mean, it is really rather silly to imagine that a Victorian in chaotic downtown London (I like steam engines), if it's the civilized forms that persuade you, was somehow spared the rush of information that we poor modern souls must endure. Seems to me it's got to be something other than the fact of the incoming that gives us grief.

What's your favourite candidate? Talk to me.

Confessions of a Librarian-Pirate

Now that we've gone semi-legitimate, being archived by the Library of Congress, I am having a crisis of conscience. Actually, it's brought on by my 15 year old daughter (what else are teenagers good for besides making you feel like a heel? Well, I guess, they are very good at telling you when you are dressed like an idiot, but that's another story). She's got a very good point.

I have been blithely decorating our blog with stolen pictures. Sorry, Jim! Don't blame him-- He didn't know he was inviting a pirate. The pictures look great, but I have not been giving any credits about where I have been taking them from. I will be going back and trying to figure this out and giving these good folks the credit they deserve.

I'm not really as bad as it might look. It was a short step to internet picture piracy. I started taking pictures to decorate my computer, just for myself. That seemed harmless enough, and I think it's probably okay. And when we started doing the blog, to tell you the truth, I thought of it as a sort of electronic newsletter of temporary interest, even though I know a blog archives itself. It was frankly hard to imagine very many people coming to read it. I watched the statistics page over the summer's end, and that seemed to be true. Up until this week. Ooops. I guess people came back from vacation, school is back in session. I guess it's more real than I thought. So I had better get right with the copyright gods.

Just one more pirate picture, though? I'll give a credit....This picture came from www.district19.us/conferences/2004fall.

Welcome, Simon Fodden

We at OOTJ are happy to welcome our first guest blogger, Simon Fodden. Simon is Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Toronto, and a blogger at Slaw.ca (the excellent group blog about Canadian legal information) and Xanada, Simon's own blog about Toronto, Canada and the world. Simon will be joining us this week to share some of his thoughts on legal information and legal education from a non-US perspective. Welcome, Simon!

Slaw on| Outsourcing legal work

Simon Chester at Slaw notes a recent article in Legal Affairs on outsourcing legal support work to India.

The market for outsourced legal work is expected to reach $163 billion by next year, and India is positioned to seize the largest share. The time difference between India and the United States allows for work to be done overnight, and many people in India's enormous workforce are college-educated and English-speaking. Intellevate recently placed a want ad for a patent researcher in the Times of India, the leading English-language daily. The company received 1,700 résumés. "There are 200 million English-speaking, college-educated Indians and there are not 200 million jobs," Steinberg said. Such a disparity in supply and demand allows his company to hire credentialed, capable labor, cheaply. "We're not selling shoes," Steinberg likes to say. "We're selling cobblers." . . .

At Lexadigm, attorneys' salaries range from $6,000 to $36,000. The employees, whose résumés lead off with LLMs from top U.S. law schools and are studded with internships at the World Trade Organization in Geneva and apprenticeships at the Indian Supreme Court, would earn six-figure salaries at elite U.S. law firms. But the education visas most of these young attorneys used to study in the United States allow for only one year of work after graduation, so most have to return to India to find jobs.

The disparity in salaries makes this seem like a more heroic sacrifice than it is. The lifestyle a Lexadigm or Intellevate salary buys is in many ways more lavish than an American attorney's. (And more than an Indian attorney's—Intellevate employees make 40 percent more than new associates at corporate law firms in India; many left such jobs to come to Intellevate.) . . .

While the plight of underpaid legal researchers is unlikely to be the next cause célébre for the anti-sweatshop movement, legal outsourcing, whispered about now, is likely to become a hotly debated topic in American law soon. For now, third-party outsourcers like Intellevate and Lexadigm remain popular mostly with corporate legal departments, which use outsourcing to keep costs down. Large law firms have been slower to send work to overseas outsourcers.

But what if they were to come around? Thomas Morgan, the professional responsibility expert, says bar association ethics rules require law firms to pass on to clients cost savings from outsourcing. In theory, at least, it would take only one big firm looking for a competitive advantage to start a bidding war that could change the cost of buying legal advice in the U.S.

I wonder if LexisNexis and Westlaw charge the same rates in India that they do in North America.

Cell Phone Blues

About once a year, I am contacted by a student distraught enough about cell phone use in our library to work up through the layers to reach me. We have signs posted strictly forbidding cell phone use in the library. And the library users routinely flout the rule. We used to try to restrict the use to certain areas. That worked so badly that the librarians voted for total restriction in the hopes that then users might restrict themselves to the limited areas. Hah!

If the conversations seemed to be about emergency issues, I would not feel so badly about the use of cell phones. But I rarely hear parents checking on ill children, or even clerks calling in for clarification about the research assignment. The cell phone conversations in the library are the same inane, sometimes too-private conversations that are carried on everywhere else. So the most recent cell phone conversation with a student actually ended with a pleasant surprise for me when I explained there was no way I could jam the signals, just keep complaining and we'd keep asking them to leave. The student and I joked about perhaps there was a laser pointer you could use to silence cell phones and the users would be none the wiser.

I was so curious that I looked on the Internet. A short search turns up this fascinating information. While jamming cell phones is certainly against the law, the FCC has never received a complaint, because cell phone users assume it's something else interfering with their phone. The manufacturers of jammers actually sell a lot of jammers in the U.S. Sadly, the ones discussed here could not possibly blanket a whole library. But they might cover a reading room.... HMMMM. href="http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/story1a092200.html">

Law School in Two Years?

While going to law school, many of us wondered about the purpose of the third year. The University of Dayton Law School is compressing the three years of law school into two for the class that started this week. It will be interesting to see if this has any ripple effects on legal education. American Public Media aired a program on Dayton's initiative last night.

Lexis Dumb Down?

Shortly after reading the posting yesterday about LexisNexis’s plan to strip Shepard’s of references to West headnotes, I learned about the new Easy Search feature that LexisNexis has introduced. According to LexisNexis, Easy Search is what researchers should use when they are “unsure of whether Terms and Connectors or Natural Language is the best search strategy.” With Easy Search, you can “let LexisNexis identify the best search engine based on the terms you’ve entered. Easy Search is optimized for 2-3 search terms and will recognize phrases in quotes as well as legal citations.”
These two discoveries got me thinking: Is LexisNexis purposely dumbing down its product? In the case of Shepard’s, LexisNexis says that only “15% of users restrict by headnote number.” Isn’t this a training issue? Wouldn’t it make more sense to instruct the other 85% of users in the benefits to be gained (i.e., greater precision, less recall) from restricting by headnote in Shepard’s instead of removing the headnotes altogether? I understand that LexisNexis is working hard to build up its own headnote system, but the fact remains that the West headnotes are the standard, quirks and all, and researchers are accustomed to using them. I agree that this move is likely to make Shepard’s less useful and drive users to KeyCite. I know I will share this news with my Advanced Legal Research students this fall and tell them that in my opinion it reduces the value of Shepard’s.
In the case of Easy Search, why should I let LexisNexis identify the best search engine for me? Is LexisNexis trying to emulate Google? Again, this strikes me as a training issue—students can be taught to use Terms and Connectors effectively. Most people agree that Terms and Connectors gives the researcher much more control over search results than Natural Language or Easy Search and yields more precise results. Why pander to the lowest common denominator?

PrawfsBlawg: Prawfs in Jeans?

Ethan Leib at PrawfsBlawg has asked a surprisingly hot question: "I'm sick of wearing sportcoats to look professorial on the days I teach. Anyone think it's totally inappropriate to wear jeans?" Some of the comments:

"Well, I guess it's relevant to consult what other profs are wearing. At my school, I haven't seen anyone wear jeans, although I too wish I could, along with a comfortable pair of sneakers. At UCLA Law, there was a prof who wore (and--last time I saw him during the summer--still wears) sandals, and there was an associate dean who always wore jeans and hightops. So I guess it depends on what your school's culture deems suitable...."

"Isn't it most professorial to wear a sportcoat and jeans? Who else would do that?"

"I hate to be unduly precise, and mean this with love, but I don't think you've earned that "ergo" yet. Syllogistically, I think you took a wrong turn somwhere and ended up at "All men are Socrates." True, lawyers (if they are wise) wear suits to court -- but not all lawyers go to court, and even many trial lawyers go to court only occasionally. Many people (if they are wise, and have the means) wear suits to court. Robert Blake did; so did Scott Peterson. Ergo, it is at least possible you are training your students to be criminal defendants.
Ethan, I wear a jacket on my first class without fail and reasonably often thereafter, but typically rock the jacketless business casuals or pseudo-quasi-hip-but-dressy outfits. And I look great."

"I think the answer to this question depends to a large extent on gender. I don't think that many femprofs would wear jeans in class on a regular basis, if at all."

"I think age/race/gender (particularly age) can play a part in the dress code question as well. A number of the older professors at my school seem to eschew suits or suit jackets, regardless of their race or gender. Perhaps with the gray hair they no longer have to worry about establishing their authority in the classroom. Being young-looking and not stereotypically professorial looking, i.e,. a white male, I have been advised to wear a suit to class regardless of any dress code standards at the school."

"If the goal is to train students to wear suits, perhaps the students should be required to wear suits, and the professor should be dressed ridiculously, to train the students to deal with juries and witnesses."

I think the gender issue weighs heavily in law librarian dress, particularly when teaching in the classroom. I once worked at a law school with a "casual Friday" policy, meaning that everyone was expected to wear a suit, or at least a coat and tie, the rest of the week. I still wore a suit for a while when I started at UB, but then decided--partly for my own comfort, partly to set the sort of tone I wanted at the Law Library--to dress more casually. But then Buffalo is a pretty blue-collar town anyway.

A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette: Reminders, Giving your coworkers friendly

From A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette: Reminders, Giving your coworkers friendly:

Help your coworkers do their jobs by reminding them to check their email, check their voicemail, or to check their mailbox after sending them something you deem important.

If you work with people who really DO need to be reminded of these everyday things, you should also remind them to breathe (so they don't suffocate), eat (so they don't starve), and blink (so their eyes don't get too dry).

When I was young

When I was a very new law librarian, I wanted to do research to find out what employers really want from their library directors. I thought this was a very clever idea, and would help me think about how to work on my career. It never really came to much, but now I can tell you from my own experience, what I think employers really want:

1. Deans want you to guard their back. They want to know that they don’t have to worry about the library and that you’re looking to make them look good in all ways library.

2. Faculty want you to make them look good by having the materials they need for class and research, by having research assistance (if possible), by putting things on reserve, by getting things on interlibrary loan, and by featuring their latest publication prominently. Oh, and if you are a director, they want you to be a fellow-faculty member, collegial, taking part in the life of the school (unless they don’t want you to be on equal footing at all).

3. Students want you to make life easy for them by having convenient hours, easy food and drink policies, convenient policies about everything else, and having the books, computers, databases, licenses, movies, reserve items and significant others they desire easily available, preferably on call for them from home in their jammies.

4. Your library colleagues want you to be a great colleague, and participate in AALL or regional events, be on committees, work on programs, write for newsletters (or better yet, edit them or be a webmaster or blogger!), or to write scholarly articles for journals. They want you to come to meetings and stick your hand out, give them a business card, introduce yourself. If you will do this, you’ll have friends all over the map. It’s one of the great pleasures of librarianship!

Active Liberty

From today's Wall Street Journal:

WSJ.com - Justice Breyer Takes 'Originalists' to Task In a New Book: "When he was nominated to fill the Supreme Court's last vacancy, Stephen Breyer said he would strive to make the 'law work for people.' Eleven years later -- with a new opening on the court and controversy raging over the judiciary's role -- Justice Breyer wants to tell a broader audience how that should be done.

In a book slated for release next month, Justice Breyer -- among the more liberal members of the court -- gives a detailed insight into his philosophy of deciding cases, namely that the Constitution should be viewed in light of its overarching goal, which he sees as creating a participatory, democratic society. In the process, he offers a rejoinder to a longtime intellectual opponent, Justice Antonin Scalia, who advocates 'originalism,' or a more literal interpretation of the Constitution's meaning at the time of its writing.
[Stephen Breyer]

'Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution' explains Justice Breyer's approach and applies it to some of the most divisive topics that come before the court. These include everything from freedom of speech and privacy rights to affirmative action and last June's Ten Commandments cases, which addressed the constitutionality of religious symbols on government property."

The Library Mouse

We have a library mouse. I wish we had a nicer mascot. But it's a mouse. Or maybe mice. Probably plural. We have too many events involving food in the library, and there are all the students who evade the food policy. And the staff break room. And folks who eat at their desks. And the student workers who eat at their stations. Oh my! Maybe we need a library cat. But then, who would change the library litterbox? To a Mouse on Turning up Her Nest, by Robt. Burns. http://www.robertburns.org/works/75.shtml

West headnote numbers removed from Shepard's

Richard Ducey, Director of the Law Library at the University of Tulsa, today reported on the lawlibdir list about a disturbing change in the functionality of Shepard's Citations. Citator geeks take note:

I believe LEXIS/Shepard's is making a change to Shepard's with little fanfare with the expectation that it will fly below the radar at most libraries and offices. I thought I would alert you to this change in case you have not yet learned about it. Before AALL, I was working on an assignment for my class that included Shepardizing a Maryland Court of Appeals case. Upon Shepardizing (on LEXIS), I was unable to restrict by the West (Atlantic Reporter) headnotes as I have done many times in the past. Our LEXIS representative who was visiting that day also could not figure out why there was absolutely no display option allowing me to limit by West headnotes under the "Focus / Restrict by" feature. The West headnote option reappeared when I checked a couple days later. So, I was wondering what was going on.

At AALL, I made a point of asking about this, only to to be told that LEXIS decided to discontinue both on LEXIS and in print any references to headnotes in West reporters. Restrictions would be available for official headnotes (if any) and LEXIS headnotes. They said they might go back and remove the West headnote references already available. I'm afraid I probably delayed some librarians from getting their LEXIS gift cards stamped (sorry if you were in my group!) because I persisted with my questions as to why such a big change was occurring. Jane (I think was her name) said their survey showed that only 15% of users restrict by headnote number. Also, it was too expensive to continue. I commiserated with Jane on the low headnote statistic, but told her I emphasized this option to my students. I warned her that some researchers might now switch to KeyCite because it would be the only citator for limiting by a West headnote.

With this change, print Shepard's will diminish even more in utility and value. Of course, KeyCite has always only allowed headnote restrictions using West headnotes. Westlaw and LEXIS have become even more self-contained. [Emphasis added.]

It's probably true that the ability to limit by West headnotes is one of the more obscure of Shepard's many obscure features, but it was a valuable tool for those who used it. Alas, no more. The reasoning is understandable; Lexis wants to dissolve the linkage into West's publications and thereby make West's headnotes less valuable. Still, I'm saddened by the thought of a tool like Shepard's being intentionally crippled.

Legal writing blog

Tip o' the hat to E-LawLibrary Weblog for pointing out Legalwriting.net, a blog by Wayne Schiess of the University of Texas School of Law. Unfortunately, there's no RSS feed, so you'll have to bookmark it to check it regularly. (How many of our readers out there are using RSS readers to follow OOTJ?)

LexisNexis unveils anti-plagiarism tool

From LexisNexis Media Relations - August 22, 2005 News Release:

DAYTON, OH, August 22, 2005 - LexisNexis U.S, a leading provider of news, business and legal information services, today announced the launch of the revolutionary new LexisNexis® CopyGuard™ solution to help detect plagiarism and copyright infringement and protect intellectual property. The LexisNexis CopyGuard product was co-developed with iParadigms, a leader in developing new technologies for intellectual property theft detection and for vetting intellectual property originality.

This innovative solution (www.lexisnexis.com/copyguard) enables users to verify content originality quickly and easily. Within minutes users can search efficiently across billions of documents. There are more than 6.1 billion searchable documents that are continuously updated through the LexisNexis® service, including deep archives, and four to five years of archived Web pages from iParadigms, which together create a vast collection of content in one place.

A number of universities have been using commercial anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin to combate undergrad plagiarism. Some law schools have looked at these tools, but they didn't cover law reviews and other sorts of materials that law students might plagiarize from. CopyGuard seems to be intended for companies investigating infringement of their intellectual property. I don't know whether it will be made available to law schools.

Power Corrupts - Powerpoint corrupts absolutely?

This CNN report, title, "Does Powerpoint Make Us Stupid?" is a fun read. It reports on a coffeetable book by rock star David Byrne using Powerpoint to create whimsical images. There are also entertaining quotes like the one in the title to this Blog entry, really from Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet. And the guy who used Powerpoint to draw up the Gettysburg Address, with to-do list such as "new birth of freedom" and "government not perish," Peter Norvig. Norvig is the guy who makes probably the best analogy. He says Powerpoint doesn't kill meetings, people kill meetings (does this sound familiar?), but having Powerpoint at your meeting is like having a loaded assault weapon on the table. Geez.

Well, I thought about this, not just getting ready for my class, where I do (gasp, blush) use a few Powerpoint presentations through the semester. But I also thought about it in terms of whether it changes the way people think, period, to use a technology. Does it change us to use Blackboard to post the assignments and handouts? Does it change the students to use an OPAC rather than the old oak catalog drawers? (In case they use the OPAC). I suspect we are changing the way our brains work, store and retrieve information. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but I think we ought to be aware of it, and I think law schools need to get with the program and start gearing the education they offer to adjust for it.

But we'll always read novels in print, won't we?

I would have thought so; I've argued elsewhere that book-length items like scholarly monographs, novels and so one would survive in a traditional print format for some time after reference materials have gone wholly digital. But here is "77 year old novelist Warren Adler," asserting that "print publishing has had a great 500 year run. He is publishing his 28th novel electronically and emailing it for free to anyone who asks. (Via if:book.)

Library Super Heroes!

The Association of Boston Law Libraries is one of the organizations urging its members to nominate folks for the Mass. Lawyers Weekly "Unsung Heroes" award. These are legal professionals in five categories, including librarians -- Yay! -- to be honored for their contributions to legal practice.

ABLL is largely firm librarians, though there are a lot of school and court librarians that belong, too -- they have the occasional terrific luncheon and speaker, and wine at the annual business meeting -- can't miss that! It was one of the truly great orientation things that happened when I moved to Boston. I got involved with ABLL. Thank you, guys!

They are one of the few law library organizations that is not affiliated with AALL, either, so that's another interesting thing. They do their own local salary survey each year, and created their own terrific logo. It takes a lot for a group of firm librarians to keep an organization like this so active.

Ministry of Reshelving

Check out the Ministry of Reshelving project to move copies of George Orwell's novel 1984 from fiction to Current Events.

Librarians, blogs, RSS, and more

From Library Stuff: Why Bother?:

"We've heard it time and again. Why should librarians care about blogs, RSS, podcasts, wikis, Flickr, Typepad, whatever? An article from ClickZ helps out with the answer:

'Though the temptation may be to jump onto the latest bandwagon, the fact remains most users spend their time on the Web doing pretty mundane stuff. A recent Forrester study finds only 2 percent of U.S. adults use RSS, a number that seems to fly in the face of the buzz associated with the medium. Podcasts are definitely growing in popularity (especially after the advent of podcasts on iTunes), and blogs have begun to catch the eye of media buyers (particularly after the publication of the Feedster 500 list). But these media forms are still in their infancy.'

'Does this mean you shouldn't consider these new media? Not at all; the demographics of all the latest, greatest stuff skew sharply toward younger, savvier users. If these are the folks you're trying to reach, you'd better be on the cutting edge. Even if you're not, you'd better understand what's up-and-coming. The today's young podcast listeners will be tomorrow's adult big spenders.'

'What do you do? These studies seem to point to a strategy that should comfort you overwhelmed marketers out there. Get your house in order first, concentrate on the basics, and experiment with new stuff until you understand it. If you can't get the basics down -- measurement and technical excellence -- all the fancy ways of getting people's attention are moot.'

Libraries need market research now more than ever to help us gain an edge over our competition and know what people want in library services. It's always better to be ahead of the curve (in terms of knowledge) than behind it. Libraries shouldn't always be playing catch-up.

Law Librarians Role in KM

We at OOTJ usually limit ourselves to covering the law school library beat, but here's an important paper noted by UK blog excited utterances:

In Libraries and Librarians: a Link Between Legal Information Services and Firm Productivity?, Margaret Aby Carroll, Library Sites Manager, Microsoft Corporation and Yvonne J. Chandler, Associate Professor, at University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science, seek to answer the following questions:

"Can an analysis of the characteristics of libraries or information centers and librarians in highly productive law firms yield operational models and standards which contribute to their . . . [firm's] productivity?”

"Is it possible to determine which variables make the greatest (perceived or real) contribution to the firm’s productivity?"

Important implications for study findings include:

(a) generation of staffing guidelines, e.g., appropriate credentials, optimum ratio of professionals to paraprofessionals, optimum ratio of staff to customers

(b) development of a criteria for resource allocation decisions

(c) identification and ranking of library and librarian services providing greatest contribution to productivity

(d) identification of measures to successfully demonstrate return-on-investment (ROI) on information services investment

Guest bloggers

I am very pleased to announce that we have an excellent group of distinguished guest bloggers who will be joining us over the next few months.  We will be starting off with three guests in a row:

• August 29-September 2: Simon Fodden (Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University; co-founder of Slaw.ca blog)


• September 5-9: Diane Murley (Reference/Web Services Librarian and Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois U. Law Library; Law Dawg Blawg)


• September 12-16: Bonnie Shucha (Reference & Electronic Services Librarian, U. of Wisconsin; WisBlawg).

Become a Copyright Royalty Judge

From Stanford Center for Internet and Society:

The Library of Congress is seeking applicants for the three appointments as Copyright Royalty Judges. Copyright Royalty Judges will preside over proceedings to determine rates and terms of the copyright law’s statutory licenses and to determine the distribution of royalties received by the Copyright Office under those statutory licenses. The Library will appoint (1) a Chief Copyright Royalty Judge, (2) a Copyright Royalty Judge with significant knowledge of copyright law, and (3) a Copyright Royalty Judge with significant knowledge of economics. The deadline for applications is September 6, 2005.

This Just In -- Christianity is not a Minority Religion in this country!

Well, from the various bills that you see being filed here and there in legislatures, you would think that Christianity was just hanging on by its finger nails, would you not? There are all kinds of little bills to help Christian prayer in schools or keep God in the Pledge of Allegiance, keep those little manger scenes out on the courthouse lawn at Christmas time. If you were an alien and just dropped in from Mars, you would imagine that Christianity was some dying breed of religion that had hardly any adherents left. I was very taken by a letter to the editor in the Boston Globe today proposing a little equity in supporting religion. Let's be more even-handed. If we are going to have those stone Ten Commandments in the Courthouses and crosses in the schoolhouse, I think we ought to consider having some Hindu goddesses and Buddha figures represented. Anybody like to nominate some other gods or religious figures?

Law Reports - the future

Here is an interesting post from our friend up north, Nick Pengelley at Slaw.ca, on Law Reports - the future:

As I pack up my office at Queens, shred all the evidence, and prepare to move to Osgoode Hall, I pose a question for SLAW readers. By the year 2010, does anyone think any law library will still be subscribing to print law reporters? Myself, I think not - a view I know (and hope) will provoke a few.
I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Few law libraries in Canada now subscribe to foreign print reporters - relying on a combination of free and pay online services. Canadian reporters are the last bastion. In my view it is only a matter of time before that bastion crumbles. Our students - the lawyers, academics and judges of the future - increasingly prefer to access (and read) reports on