Library & Technology

DULL News — No. 124

August 15, 2006

Headline

Welcome! As Head of Reference Services I am writing to welcome new students and faculty and welcome back everyone who has returned from summer adventures. The library is part of Duke Law School Information Services (DLSIS), a team which includes Computing Services and Education Technologies as well as the Law Library. Duke University Law Library (DULL) has lots to offer you to assist in your courses and scholarship over the next year. As a student or faculty-member here, you have 24/7 access to the library using your Duke ID card.

Many of our resources are also available to you on or off campus 24/7 through wireless or remote connection. The Computing Services group can set you up with the VPN client, which allows you to remotely access databases and other resources available only to the law community. If you have any questions about setting up wireless networking, remote access or other computing technology, contact our computing help desk here in the library in room 2068, at 613-7072 or at computing@law.duke.edu.

Computers and technology are great, but when you need to talk to a person for research or other assistance, stop by the reference desk or the reference librarians’ offices (behind and to the left and right of the reference desk). Your reference librarians are invaluable resources for you. Each librarian is experienced and highly qualified, with each holding both a J.D. degree and a master’s degree in library science. Electronic connections will also help you contact your librarians directly to gain the benefit of our expertise. We are available to you by phone at 613-7121 and via email at ref@law.duke.edu from 8am to 9pm Monday through Thursday and Friday 8am to 5pm during Fall and Spring semesters. Our latest exciting news is that we have just launched our reference Instant Messaging service. You may now IM your reference librarian at DukeLawReference using AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger during our reference desk hours. Don’t hesitate to contact us. We look forward to working with you.

Have a great Fall semester!

Get to Know

HeinOnline: It’s not just for law journals anymore!

HeinOnline is one of the many great electronic resources the library provides to the Duke community. Old hands at legal research probably know and love HeinOnline for its great retrospective collection of scholarly law journals. It has full-text PDF copies, with original pagination, for the major American law journals. Coverage spans from each journal’s first issue and page right up to the present (with about a 1 year delay in providing the most current issues of a journal). This is a resource that law journal editors should know and love. The collection is searchable, and its once clunky search engine has been improved ten-fold. It is great for retrieving law review articles for which you already have a citation and for searching for articles for which you only have partial information.

But there is much more to HeinOnline. It has added other collections that make this a database with which you should become acquainted. HeinOnline now includes a large international law journal collection that includes law journals from a number of different countries. In addition, HeinOnine has added twenty-one American Bar Association journals.

The big news, however, is that HeinOnline has added the complete collection of the Federal Register from its inception in 1936 to the present (with a four month delay) and a comprehensive database of U.S. treaties. All of the Federal Register issues and the treaties are available full-text in PDF copies of the original pages.

HeinOnline provides the following information about its treaty collection:

“The world’s most-comprehensive online collection of image-based U.S. treaties and other international agreements can be found in HeinOnline’s Treaties and Agreements Library. This database contains more than 18,000 records of treaties and agreements to which the United States has been a party, and also offers a very powerful indexing tool that is unsurpassed by any other online U.S. treaty database.”

On the treaties page there is also a link to the U.S. Department of State’s “treaty actions” website to get the latest information on U.S. treaties.

The portfolio of collections HeinOnline has doesn’t stop there. Here below is a list of some of the other collections they have:

No matter your area of legal research, one of the collections in HeinOnline is likely to be a helpful resource. You can access HeinOnline from any university computer or from your own computer using the Duke VPN software.

Websites and Blogs

Legal Information Institute

Legal Information Institute is a project of Cornell Law School and is an excellent site to get to a wealth of federal and state statutes and case law. In addition, it provides short encyclopedia-like articles on specific legal topics.

A recent addition to the site is the “Introduction to Basic Legal Citation” page, a helpful resource with lots of examples on proper citation format for various types of material. Skip past the introductory “What & Why” section which is more wordy and in-depth than you will need unless you have a passion for the subject. The “How to Cite” section is also a little wordy but provides useful examples. The next section, “Examples” and the “Abbreviations and Omissions” sections are more straight-forward and provide quick examples. The abbreviations tables are particularly helpful.

This resource is best used along with the The Bluebook, not as a substitute for it. But, it is helpful in figuring out whether you are on track for good citation form. Check it out along with the rest of the LII site.

Taxonomy of Legal Blogs

Dying to learn what law professors, lawyers and other legal professionals are thinking? This easy to use site neatly organizes links to legal blogs into various categories, making it an easy way to locate and access legal blogs (blawgs) in any area. Blawgs are sites that present the musings of one or more law professionals, usually on law topics, but they may also comment on other things including the latest news events. The Taxonomy site tries to provide a comprehensive assembly of blawgs, and is a great place to find blawgs on topics that interest you or by lawyers or professors who practice or teach in your area. This is one way to keep abreast of hot topics and new resources in law.

Taxonomy of Legal Blogs

The Figures

Duke Law by the numbers:

Research Tip

Get the hookup: VPN Client

To take full advantage of the wealth of Duke online research resources, you have to “get the hookup,” the Duke VPN client (VPN). VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and is a way for you to connect electronically to Duke databases and have your laptop or other computer be recognized as a Duke computer. Why would you need that? Only Duke computers can access many of the databases Duke libraries have provided for you. The VPN software and instructions for downloading and set up are available on the Computing Services website.

Once you have the software on your computer, open the software and hit “Connect” in the upper left of the screen. Once you are connected, just start your research with the library’s links to databases, and you should have access to Duke-wide databases.

Library News

New Faces

Over the summer we have added three new faces to the Duke Law School Information Services (DLSIS) team. Our newest reference librarian is Jennifer Behrens. Jennifer recently completed a joint degree program at the University of Buffalo earning both her J.D. and a master’s degree in library science (M.L.S.). Jennifer is also fresh from the grueling process of studying for and taking the New York Bar Exam. She is a music enthusiast who is a contributing writer to an independent Buffalo newspaper similar to Durham’s Independent Weekly. Jennifer has experience working in various types of libraries including an academic law library. You should see her around beginning August 21st. Jennifer will be filling the position that Laura Scott occupied. Laura is continuing to work with us part-time teaching legal research and helping Ken Hirsh (Computing Services) and Wayne Miller (Education Technology) to develop a course focusing on technology tools for legal practice.

The library also brought Yvonne Arwood on board to join the Technical Services department. Yvonne comes to us from Gainesville, Florida, where she graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. While a student there, she worked at the University of Florida Legal Information Center. Her current title is Library Assistant and she will be working on serials (journal & magazine) check-in and preparation for binding. You won’t see Yvonne much, because the technical services people do their magic (buying, cataloging and making available print and electronic resources) behind the scenes. But their and her work is crucial to our services.

DLSIS is also please to welcome Miguel Bordo, the law school’s newest videographer. Miguel joined Educational Technologies as Video Services Specialist. A graduate of UNC-Wilmington, Miguel has worked as an art director/producer for ad firms and most recently with UNC-TV. Miguel’s addition is an expansion of the media staff to accommodate the great demand for video services at the law school. Faculty, students and staff have availed themselves of the videographers’ services for such projects as Distinctive Aspects of American Law, and the Mr. DULL series. Haven’t checked out Mr. DULL yet? Visit the law school’s “Library and Technology” page to see him in action.

Research Stumper

Question: What is a “Presidential Signing Statement” and where would one find one in an official U.S. government print publication? Where would one find it online?

Answer to last issue’s stumper

Question: In the last issue, we asked, “When you want to know the definitions of a legal term, a legal dictionary is the right tool for the job. The One-L Dictionary is a quick online reference for very basic legal terms. Two more authoritative sources are Black's Law Dictionary, 8th ed. (Ref. KF 156 .B53 2004) and A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, 2d ed. (Ref. KF 156 .G367 1995). Why would it be helpful to look up your term in both of these print dictionaries, instead of choosing just one of them?”

Answer: Black’s and Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage can help legal readers in different ways. Take a moment to look up the same term in each dictionary to get a sense of how they operate and their various strengths.

You will see that Black’s, a classic in the field, provides comprehensive definitions of thousands of legal terms. It often includes scholarly and historical perspectives on the terms defined. It can also be useful to you as a research tool because its definitions include citations to cases and statutes as well as cross-references to relevant West Key Numbers and to Corpus Juris Secundum, a legal encyclopedia. Tables of legal abbreviations and Latin legal maxims and the text of the U.S. Constitution are appended. As its title suggests, Modern Legal Usage focuses on how terms are actually used and should be used today and therefore is particularly useful in legal writing. In addition, longer essay entries provide helpful advice on writing topics such as style, grammar and usage, and legal writing conventions. Be sure to consult Modern Legal Usage during your Legal Analysis, Research & Writing course this fall.

DULL Question of the Week

What did the U.S. Supreme Court recently do to settle a debate in the federal courts about citation to “unpublished” opinions?

  1. Require “publication” of all future cases
  2. Abolish the “unpublished” designation from all cases
  3. Allow lawyers to cite all unpublished cases
  4. Allow lawyers to cite them, with some reservations

Answer: D. The U.S. Supreme Court voted to adopt a new rule allowing lawyers to cite to unpublished opinions in federal courts, while giving judges discretion to give different weight to those opinions. The term “unpublished opinions” refers to opinions the deciding judge or court has designated as ones that can not be cited as precedent. The terms used to describe such decisions, “unpublished” or “unreported,” are misleading since commercial publishers like Thomson West and Lexis making them widely available both in print and electronic form, despite their absence from standard reporters.

To complicate matters, the new rule, which takes affect in December 1st, 2006 (if Congress does not countermand it before then) only covers unpublished decisions made after January 1, 2007. So, lawyers still may be subject to local federal court rules concerning citation of cases decided before that date. Also, it is important to remember this rule only applies to federal courts. State courts have their own rules and are not bound by this new federal one.