Library & Technology

DULL News, March 15, 2007

March 15, 2007 – No. 130

Headline

Research Refresher

Have you already forgotten everything you learned in LARW? Before you start that summer job, join the reference librarians for a series of lunchtime research workshops. These Research Refreshers will review techniques for locating key legal resources in both print and electronic formats.

All classes will be held from 12:15-1:15 p.m. in Room 4000 (Braxton Craven seminar classroom). Desserts and drinks will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis; attendees are encouraged to bring a lunch.

Monday

3/26

Cases (Including Shepard’s/KeyCite)

Thursday

3/29

Statutes & Legislative History

Monday

4/2

Regulations & Administrative Materials

Tuesday

4/3

Practice Materials & Secondary Sources

Thursday

4/5

Free & Low-Cost Alternatives to Lexis/Westlaw

Monday

4/9

Putting It All Together: Assignment from Start to Finish
Discussion Questions (.pdf)

The remainder of this issue of D.U.L.L. News will focus on research resources, in both print and electronic formats, to keep your skills sharp for this summer and beyond.

Get to Know

Legal Research Treatises

Your LARW textbooks were just the tip of the iceberg—there are a number of great research treatises that can assist you in locating legal information. A subject keyword search of the Duke Libraries catalog (http://catalog.library.duke.edu) for legal research United States will retrieve classic research texts like Morris Cohen’s How to Find the Law (9th ed. Reserve). Although this hornbook was last published in 1989, it remains the gold standard for historical legal research techniques. It is updated, at least in part, by the Robert Berring/Elizabeth Edinger textbook Finding the Law (12th ed. Reserve), which distills many of the topics in How to Find the Law and also includes discussion on the use of more recent electronic resources.

For more in-depth treatment of advancedlegal research topics, you may wish to consult Specialized Legal Research (Law Reference Desk KF240 .S64), a looseleaf binder which is updated annually with the latest sources for researching topics like securities, maritime, environmental, and government contracts law. Most chapters contain a bibliography for even further reading. A similar source is available for researching the primary law of foreign jurisdictions, Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law: Current Sources of Codes and Basic Legislation in Jurisdictions of the World (Law Reference K38 .R49 1989). This set of binders is also available electronically to current members of the Duke Law community under the name Foreign Law Guide (see Legal Research Sources, http://www.law.duke.edu/lib/lresources.html, for more information).

If you will be working in a different jurisdiction this summer, you might also wish to browse a state-specific legal research guidebook before leaving Duke Law. The Law Library collects a number of titles like Gibson’s New York Legal Research Guide (Law Reference KFN5074 .G53 2004) and Florida Legal Research: Sources, Process, and Analysis (Law Reference KFF75 .R69 2002). You can locate additional state-specific titles in the Duke Libraries Catalog (http://catalog.library.duke.edu) with a subject keyword search for Legal research [state]; e.g., Legal research California.

Web Sites and Blogs

Online Research Help

You should already know about the Duke Law Library’s Research Guides (http://www.law.duke.edu/lib/research_guide.html), which highlight the best resources for a variety of legal topics. But what should you do when there isn’t a guide for your specific topic (besides asking the reference staff for assistance, of course)?

You might try a search in Cornell’s brand-new Legal Research Engine (http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/guides/researchengine.asp), which performs a custom search of research guides from law libraries and other agencies around the United States. Duke’s guides are included in this meta-search; other featured resources are LLRX.com (http://www.llrx.com), the Georgetown Law Library (http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/research/index.cfm), and WashLaw on the Web (http://www.washlaw.edu/). All of these reputable sites are worth checking when you need a quick overview of recommended resources for a particular topic.

The Figures

Legal Research by the Numbers

[Sources: Lexis/Westlaw pricing documentation; West’s Analysis of American Law 2006, Legal Times]

Research Tip

Keep On Researching with Lexis/Westlaw Extensions

Student access to Lexis and Westlaw will expire for the summer shortly after the end of the exam period. In certain situations, access may be extended throughout the summer for educational and non-profit purposes (e.g., law review work or research assistantships with faculty). You may request a password extension on Lexis by signing in at http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool and selecting the link labeled "Summer Access" before June 1. Westlaw will begin offering a link for extended summer access in May.

Remember also that currently-enrolled Duke Law students can still access many additional law-related databases, such as HeinOnline and the BNA Electronic Library, over the summer by using the Duke VPN (Virtual Private Network). Once you have installed the VPN client on your home computer, these restricted-access databases will recognize you as a Duke Law user. See the Computing Services how-to page (http://www.law.duke.edu/computing/offcampus) for more details.

Library News

Renovation Plans

As The Devil’s Advocate recently reported, the Law Library will be undergoing extensive renovations as part of the construction of the new Star Commons. Beginning this summer, the Law Library will be temporarily relocated across Towerview Road, in the former Gross Chemistry building, for approximately 15 months. The temporary library in this Law School Annex will be considerably smaller than the current Law Library. As a result, much of the existing collection must be moved off-site and will be inaccessible during the construction period. Reference librarians are currently working hard to identify the key books and other Library materials which will be housed in the Annex during renovations.

The April 15 issue of D.U.L.L. News will contain more details about the upcoming move and its anticipated impact on the Library’s collection and services. In the meantime, the Law Library encourages you to discuss any questions or concerns about the renovation with Deputy Director Melanie Dunshee (dunshee@law.duke.edu).

Research Stumper

Question: If you have a citation to a book which was originally published in a foreign language, how can you determine whether it has been translated into English?

Answer will appear in the April 15 issue.

Answer to last month’s stumper: In the last issue of D.U.L.L. News, we asked: Belva Lockwood made legal history as the first woman to graduate from a national law school (and later as the first woman to run for President). Where can you find the full text of her advice to future law students, which contained the memorable quote “you will learn daily that you need to know more”?

In recent years, Google has become the go-to source for looking up obscure quotes. Typing the desired phrase within quotation marks will force the search engine to look for the words as a single string, rather than as individual keywords which might appear anywhere on a single web page. But searching the above phrase in quotes on Google returns only the February 15 issue of D.U.L.L. News, not the source of the quotation.

Other strategies for looking up quotations might include searching the indexes of any biographies of the speaker. There are also general quotation compilations like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (Law Reference PN6081 .B27 2002) and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Law Reference PN6080 .O95 2004; also available through the Oxford Reference Online database). You can find more titles like these in the Duke University Libraries’ catalog with a subject keyword search for “Quotations, English”.

However, when you are looking for the source of a law-related quotation, you might wish to start with a quotation reference that specializes in law-related sayings. To locate these titles in the catalog, use the subject keyword searches “Law—Quotations” or “Lawyers—Quotations”.  You’ll retrieve titles like Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations (Law Reference KF8742.A35 A59 2000) and A Treasury of Legal Quotations (Law Reference KF159 .C771t 1961). Because these compilations vary in scope and content, it may be necessary to look in several titles before locating the source of an obscure quote.

The full text of Lockwood’s advice to law students, which is too lengthy to be reproduced here, is reprinted in the title Great Sayings by Great Lawyers (Law Reference KF373 .C53 1992). It was originally published as a letter to the New York Herald on March 8, 1891.

D.U.L.L. Question of the Month

Question: Where can you find text of the Congressional Record with pagination that corresponds to Bluebook Rule 13.5?

  1. The Federal Alcove
  2. Lexis and Westlaw
  3. The Microforms Room
  4. All of the above

Answer: D. If you are citing congressional debate materials, you should be aware that there are two versions of the Congressional Record, and that the page numbers for the same debate will be different in each version.

The debates of the U.S. Congress are first published as the daily edition of the Congressional Record, which is available in paper for the current year in the Federal Alcove (Level 3). This is also the version that is available online through Lexis and Westlaw (1985-present). At the end of each Congressional session, the daily editions are compiled with new pagination into the permanent (also known as “bound”) edition. This permanent edition is available in the Microforms Room on Level 1 of the Library.

The Bluebook rule requires citation to the permanent edition unless the material is too recent to appear there. So, if you are citing to items in the Congressional Record from the current congressional session, you can safely use the page numbers from the version in the Federal Alcove and Lexis/Westlaw. (The daily edition is also available from 1994-present through GPO Access, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/index.html.) If you are citing historical debate materials, check the page numbers from the permanent edition in the Microforms Room.

Comments to Jennifer L. Behrens.