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Notes to a Research Assistant

Pace Law School professor Bridget Crawford has posted a good list of 15 Tips for Faculty Research Assistants on the Feminist Law Professors blog.

Plenty of good tips here, culled from Professor Crawford’s discussions with her colleagues. Well worth taking a look at whether you are currently a faculty research assistant or going to interview for the position.

Some of our favorites include keeping an ‘assignment log,’ confirming the question presented, setting expectations on time and responsibilities, getting to know your professor, and of course the all important tip number 14.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

American Law Reports (ALR) will no longer be available on LexisNexis beginning January, 2008. Why? Well, by some crazy coincidence Thomson Westlaw got together with Thomson West and made an agreement for exclusive Westlaw access to ALR.

Already bereft of the latest annotations in the 6th Series, LexisNexis plans to fill the gap left by the removal of ALR with its Cases in Brief (pdf) – “detailed analysis of high-profile, emerging law” – along with a coming remake of Search Advisor.

Read the announcement. Much more background and commentary available at this article from Information Today.

Source: Oregon Legal Research

Transcripts of Federal Court Proceedings Nationwide To Be Available Online

Transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings will soon be made available on PACER, the U.S. federal judiciary’s online docket, filing and case information service. Per this Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts news release:

The Judicial Conference of the United States today voted to make transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings available online through the Judiciary’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system.
Related Items

Under the new policy, transcripts created by court reporters or transcribers will be available for inspection and copying in a clerk of court’s office and for download from PACER 90 days after they are delivered to the clerk. Individuals will be able to view, download, or print a copy of a transcript from PACER for eight cents per page.

During the initial 90-day period, transcripts will be available at the clerk’s office for inspection only, or may be purchased from the court reporter or transcriber.

Implementation of the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system over the past decade has allowed remote electronic access to most federal case files. The only type of court document not yet publicly available online nationwide has been the transcript of court proceedings.

Of course, don’t forget the costs involved.

In related PACER news, the Department of Justice has asked that plea agreements, and in fact any notation of plea agreements in criminal case files and dockets, be removed:

The Executive Office, in its letter, said that as a result of twin developments — an increased number of violent crime prosecutions in which cooperating defendants and witnesses are needed to assist law enforcement, and increased Internet access to court records — “We are witnessing the rise of a new cottage industry engaged in republishing court filings about cooperators on Web sites such as www.whosarat.com or the clear purpose of witness intimidation, retaliation and harassment.”

. . .

Sealing plea agreements is not sufficient, said the letter, signed by then Executive Office Director Michael Battle, because “for anyone with Internet access, a PACER account and a basic familiarity with the criminal docketing system, the notation of a sealed plea agreement or docket entry in connection with a particular defendant is often a red flag that the defendant is cooperating with the government.”

Read more about Federal Prosecutors Want to Shutter Public Access to Plea Agreements (National Law Journal, 9/17/2007).

Source: TVC Alert Research News here and here.

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site
:: A Letter to Readers About TimesSelect

The New York Times today has announced that it will no longer charge for access to parts of its Web site.

Effective at midnight Tuesday night, readers will no longer have to pay or have a print subscription in order to access TimesSelect. TimesSelect has been the NY Times’ gated community (of sorts) of commentary – Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof and Roger Cohen – and of various columns.

Additionally, the Times is making available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, along with those from 1851 to 1922. The 1923 to 1986 archives will be a mix of free and fee.

The Lewis & Clark College and Law School libraries, as well as many other academic and public libraries, provide full, searchable access to the images of every page of the Times from 1851 to 2004 via Proquest’s Historical New York Times.

Law Talk: Gordon Smith and Contracts as Organizations

Always loyal, even to those who left us behind for cheesier pastures, the very many editors of BoleyBlogs! are pleased to hear former Lewis & Clark Law School professor Gordon Smith discuss “Contracts as Organizations” on the Law Talk podcast series.

Professor Smith, who recently moved to BYU Law School from the University of Wisconsin, discusses his paper Contracts as Organizations (SSRN),

Essentially, Gordon is proposing an empirical research agenda for the study of contracts. By “contracts,” Gordon really does mean “contracts,” not contract law or contract dispute resolution. His argument is that we can use ideas from sociology and organization theory to think about contracts as a species of organization, a move that he claims opens up new possibilities in terms not only of how we answer questions about the process of contracting but also what questions we ask.

Professor Smith is also the co-founder and regular contributor to Conglomerate, the blog on ‘Business, Law, Economics and Society.’

Law Talk is a new series of podcast interviews with various legal scholars. You can subscribe to “Law Talk” using iTunes or Feedburner.

Index of Presidential Signing Statements 2001-2007

The Law Librarian Blog points us to a fantastic new resource:

The American Constitution Society is making available online Kinkopf’s Index of Presidential Signing Statements: 2001-2007 (pdf). The compiler, Neil Kinkopf, associate professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law and former special assistant in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, provides a comprehensive list of every provision of a law objected to by the White House in a signing statement, the reason for the objection, and a link to the relevant signing statement.

The Index is a companion piece to an issue brief written by Professor Kinkopf, Signing Statements and the President’s Authority to Refuse to Enforce the Law, that analyzes whether and when the President may refuse to enforce a law that the President regards as unconstitutional.

Need a bit more background? Read Charlie Savage’s groundbreaking article, Bush challenges hundreds of laws; President cites powers of his office (Boston Globe, April 30, 2006). Savage won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of articles revealing President Bush’s use of signing statements to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

The latest issue of Lewis & Clark Law School’s Environmental Law Review is now out.

Here are the articles published in Volume 37, Number 3 of Environmental Law Review, complete with links to the abstracts and full-text articles:

Articles

• Emerging Commons and Tragic Institutions by Brigham Daniels
• Missing the link: The Importance of Keeping Ecosystems Intact and What the Endangered Species Act Suggests We Do About It by Kalyani Robbins

Essay

• Energy Independence and Global Warming by Richard J. Pierce, Jr.

Comments

• Israeli-Palestinian Water Literature’s Misplaced Dependence Upon Customary International Law by Ian J. Silverbrand
• Defenders of Appalachia: The Campaign to Eliminate Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining and the Role of Public Justice by Mark Ballmer & Leor Joseph Pantilat

2006 Ninth Circuit Environmental Review

• The Quick and the Dead: Earth Island v. Forest Service and the Risk of Forest Service Financial Bias in Post-Fire Logging Adjudications by Austin Saylor
• Questionable Authority: A Recent CEQ Guidance Memorandum by John Grothaus

New L&C Law Scholarship is a regular feature of BoleyBlogs! Here we announce new content from the Law Reviews of Lewis & Clark Law School, along with the latest publishing ventures of our own faculty, students and staff.

Brigham Daniels, Emerging Commons and Tragic Institutions, 37 Environmental Law Review 515 (2007)

If there is a central fable to environmental law, it most surely is Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. And if one starts to look, we find commons in all sorts of places-fisheries, grazing lands, aquifers, etc. As Hardin pointed out, and Carol Rose and Elinor Ostrom have famously explained, commons need not be tragic. We can create rules and institutions that govern the commons. Specifically designed to be stubborn and long-lasting, these very rules and institutions can result in their own tragedy, particularly in light of society’s changing values. Whereas The Tragedy of the Commons is the tragedy of competing users, this Article explores the tragedy of competing uses.

(abstract from Environmental Law Review)

Kalyani Robbins, Missing the link: The Importance of Keeping Ecosystems Intact and What the Endangered Species Act Suggests We Do About It, 37 Environmental Law Review 573 (2007)

The Endangered Species Act allows for the protection of a struggling population of a species that is healthy elsewhere. In determining which of these “distinct population segments” to protect, we naturally take into account their significance. This Article discusses what makes a population significant, reviews the relevant understandings of conservation biology, and reaches the conclusion that we must consider a population’s significance to the ecosystem in which it lives.

(abstract from Environmental Law Review)

Richard J. Pierce, Jr., Energy Independence and Global Warming, 37 Environmental Law Review 595 (2007)

This essay explores why we should stop talking about the unattainable and nonsensical idea of energy independence and instead seriously discuss how to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. Proposing that only a globally coordinated cap and trade system or a globally coordinated carbon tax have any realistic chance of mitigating global warming’s effects, this essay concludes that there is little reason to be optimistic that either approach will be adopted.

(abstract from Environmental Law Review)