Thursday, August 24, 2017

Announcing: West Academic Study Aids Online

At the end of a law student's quarter of law school, she might not know how to approach their exams. Students can't possibly expect to write everything that they learned in a three hour exam, so how do they pare their outlines down to the information that they need to know? How can a student figure out which of the cases that he has forgotten he needs to relearn? Of course, some students might have been too busy to do all of the reading for Contracts. How can they hope to catch up?

Any student would benefit from using a study aid to prepare for their exam for a number of reasons. Study aids are some of the most valuable tools that law libraries provide for law students. Experienced law students can tell you that they are so valuable that they can often be difficult to find around exam time. While many law libraries (including Gallagher Law Library) do what they can to keep paper copies of these resources available to students, they often go missing or are regularly checked out up until the moment the exam ends.

Gallagher Law Library has responded to this recurring issue by subscribing to West Academic Study Aids Online, which is now available to any University of Washington law student. You can reach the database through the library's home page, as shown to the right, or by searching for "study aids" in the Gallagher Catalog. The service provides students with online access to hundreds of the most popular study aids. These aids address a variety of different needs and are suited to a variety of learning styles. There's no one "right" way to learn the law, and exploring the variety of study aids available through this database is a great way to refine your own education process and make sure that you are getting the most out of your legal education.

While West Academic Study Aids Online contains many of the most popular study aids for law students, it does not contain all of the study guides that aspiring students might be interested in. Those wishing to test their knowledge might want to check out resources like Examples & Explanations or Questions & Answers from the library, or making use of the school's subscription to CALI Lessons. If you ever have trouble logging in to the resources at your disposal, need help finding a study aid or figuring out which one is right for you, you can always feel free to contact your reference librarian. The reference team looks forward to helping students find and use these tools in the upcoming year!

Thursday, August 17, 2017

The Path to Lawyer Well-Being

The National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being has just released its report, The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change (Aug. 2017). It's important for all sectors of the legal community, so it includes recommendations for judges, regulators, employers, law schools, bar associations, and others. The recommendations for law schools (pp. 35-40) include a mention UW Law's peer support program. For more on wellness and local resources, see UW Law's wellness page.

For a tragic story of a successful lawyer who left "the path to lawyer well-being" and died an addict, see The Lawyer, the Addict, a long article by the lawyer's ex-wife, Eilene Zimmerman (New York Times Magazine, July 15).
Human beings are physically and emotionally complex, so there is no simple answer as to why Peter began abusing drugs. But as a picture of his struggle took shape before my eyes, so did another one: The further I probed, the more apparent it became that drug abuse among America’s lawyers is on the rise and deeply hidden.

Confederate Monuments and the Law

Civil War monuments have been in the news lately, so I thought I'd do some research.

One great (and free) starting point is SSRN, a site where scholars can post their papers and researchers can search them. I typed in civil war monument and found North Carolina's Heritage Protection Act: Cementing Confederate Monuments in North Carolina's Landscape, by Kasi Wahlers, posted Nov. 3, 2015. Here's the abstract:

Monday, August 14, 2017

The History and Law of Special Counsel


Robert Mueller
You may have heard about special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating any potential connection between President Donald Trump's election campaign and the Russian government. The public relationship between President Trump and Mueller has been strained, with President Trump
allegedly considering terminating Mueller as counsel. Meanwhile, Mueller has expanded the scope of the investigation beyond its initial parameters. With all of this news, one could be forgiven for not actually knowing what the special counsel does or what its relationship is with the President. This post will try to provide a bit of background on the position.