World Constitutions

Today is the day we celebrate the signing of the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. isn't the only country with a constitution. How can you find others? Here are some resources.

First, an exciting new library from HeinOnline: World Constitutions Illustrated. It already (and will grow in the years to come). The editors explain:

This collection will contain the current constitution of every country in the world in its original language. For countries where multiple original-language versions exist, we will provide each one. Also included will be at least one English translation. Since translations depend on and reveal the preferences of their makers and their time, HeinOnline is providing you with multiple vantage points. This is something you won't find anywhere else!

We are working to identify and acquire the source documents for every historical constitution for every country. As historical documents are identified, they will be added to the constitutional timeline for each country. Documents identified but not yet acquired will be listed to provide a documentary history of the constitution's development. For every constitutional document, researchers will find the original text, amending laws, consolidated text, and important related texts. We will also link you to scholarly articles and commentary, and provide a bibliography of select constitutional books available elsewhere.

To use this collection, choose HeinOnline from the Find Legal Databases menu on our homepage. (If you're off campus, be sure to click the "Off-Campus Access" button in the upper right corner of the screen first.)





In print, check out Constitutions of the Countries of the World, K3157.A2 B58 1971 at Reference Area.



And to find constitutions available on free websites, use the Constitution Finder, maintained by the University of Richmond School of Law.

National Constitution Day

Sept. 17 is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution. (According to 36 U.S.C. § 106, it is also Citizenship Day.)

The UW's Constitution Day 2010 has a variety of resources, including commentary on the Constitution, reflections on constitutional law cases by UW students, a guide to information about the female Supreme Court justices, recommended books, links to Web resources, and more.

At noon on Friday, Oct. 8, you can join students, faculty, and staff from around the university for UW Reads the Constitution. You'll hear all of your favorite clauses and some obscure ones. It's always a moving community experience.

You know those silly Facebook quizzes where you answer a series of questions to learn what breed of dog or which Gilligan's Island character you most resemble? The National Constitution Center offers a quiz to find out which Framer of the Constitution you most resemble. No kidding!

1Ls: Sign up for Lexis & Westlaw training

1Ls: Lexis and Westlaw training sessions will be held on Thursday, 9/23/10 at various times.

To register for Lexis training:

1. Go to www.lexisnexis.com/myschool.
2. You will see the training schedule with links to register next to each class. Click on the class you wish to attend.

To register for Westlaw training:

1. Sign into http://lawschool.westlaw.com
2. Click on the Training Calendar link on the left side of the screen in the Support pane
3. Select your desired training session from the list and click on sign up

You will have other opportunities to learn more about Lexis and Westlaw this year.

Best Law Firms

US News & World Report, which publishes one of the better-known law school ranking reports each year, has teamed up with Best Lawyers (publishers of Best Lawyers in America), to rank American law firms. As their Best Law Firms website describes it, the two "have joined to rank nearly 9000 firms in 81 practice areas in 171 metropolitan areas and 7 states."

The website permits one to browse firms by practice area or to search by firm, city, state, and/or practice area. Firms are grouped, by practice area, into tiers rather than having assigned numerical rankings. Be sure to check out their methodology so you can decide for yourself how reliable you believe the rankings to be.

What CAN Money Buy?

Well, according to the Beatles' song (Paul McCartney, John Lennon), Money Can't Buy Me Love.

So, what do you think? Can money buy happiness, satisfaction? Can it prevent loneliness or worry? If the Gallup Organization surveyed you, where would you place yourself on the Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale (described in the article below as "a ladder scale in which 0 is 'the worst possible life for you' and 10 is 'the best possible life for you.'")

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton of Princeton University's Center for Health and Well-Being decided to study the effects of wealth on the emotional outlook of Americans and have published their findings in the article High Income Improves Evaluation of Life But Not Emotional Well-Being. This article is set to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), but is available now online in an "early edition." Here is the abstract of the article:

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being. [emphasis added]

Learn Trial Practice from Irving Younger

Irving Younger was a giant of trial advocacy -- professor (NYU, Cornell, Minnesota), practitioner, judge (City of New York, 1969-74). He was a masterful teacher and was famous for his lectures on evidence, discovery, and other topics.

Even though Younger died in 1988, he is still teaching, via recordings. See (and hear!) Trial Evidence Series (14 videotapes), KF8935 .Y68 1982 at Reference Area; The Ten Commandments for Cross-Examination (DVD), KF8920 T46 2000 at Reference Area.

Now the ABA Section of Litigation has published a book collecting a number of his speeches: The Irving Younger Collection: Wisdom & Wit from the Master of Trial Advocacy (Stephen D. Easton ed., 2010), KF213.Y68 E17 2010 at Classified Stacks. You can read his observations and tips on discovery, expert witnesses, scientific evidence, hearsay, jury selection, and cross-examination. You can also read his speeches on historic cases: Ulysses, Alger Hiss, and Erie.

The tone is casual, conveying messages through war stories, quips, and examples. Here's a passage I flipped to:

Lewis on cross-examination: "When this man jumped up on the running board, was he disguised in any way?"

"No."

"What was he wearing?"

"What I've told you -- khaki pants and a T-shirt."

"By a T-shirt, do you mean man's underwear, cut pretty short at the arms?"

"Yes."

"Did you get a good look at those arms?"

"I sure did. One of those arms was holding a gun to my head."

"Was there anything unusual about that man's arms?"

"No."

And at that point, Lewis turned to DeSisto and said,"DeSisto, stand up. Take off your jacket." He took it off. "Roll up your sleeves." He rolled up his sleeves and there was an audible gasp in the courtroom because from wrist to shoulder, both arms were tattooed like the tattooed man in the circus. The government stipulated that DeSisto had been tattooed in that fashion at the age of 20 some odd; he was now well into his forties. And Lews sat down. That's it. What more can you do on cross-examination? You have raised a serious question not as to whether there was a hijacking, not as to whether somebody didn't jump up on the running board, but as to whether Wimpy has identified the man who did it correctly.

p. 258.

If you want to be a trial lawyer or if, like me, you're just interested in trials, The Irving Younger Collection is worth checking out.

Enact Locally

Often in our mental checklists of research steps, we think about federal and state statutes, cases, and regs, but we overlook city and county ordinances. And yet this source of law can cover many important areas of life, from the building you live in to whether you pick up after your dog. Sometimes it can even have global reach, as when municipalities declare themselves nuclear-free zones.

For a discussion of local legislation and why legal researchers should keep it in mind, see Enact Locally, 102 Law Libr. J. 497 (2010), by reference librarian Mary Whisner.

Fictional Lawyers

Just think of the number of lawyers who are characters in films, literature, and on television! Which ones would you choose as the "top 25?" The ABA Journal' s panel of experts has picked its top 25 and urges you to vote for your favorite in their article "The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch)." There is even a picture gallery of the nominees in case you do not recognize the characher's name. You may also want to check out the Journal's "The 25 Greatest Legal TV Shows" and "The 25 Greatest Legal Movies."

By the way, speaking of Atticus Finch, this is the 50-year anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. The library has a copy in our Good Reads collection at PS 3562 .E353 T6 1995.

VotingforJudges.org

Washington voters have their own judicial decisions to make on August 17. As UW Law Professor William Andersen states in today's Seattle Times:

Let’s face it: Judicial elections are not comfortable for most voters. The principal reason is that the information a voter needs to compare judicial candidates is not as readily available as it is in legislative and executive elections.

One source of information recommended by Professor Andersen is the nonpartisan website VotingforJudges.org. The site does not rate or endorse – but collects candidate ratings from a variety of legal and civic groups, along with newspaper endorsements, finance reports, and media stories.

VotingforJudges.org has some great features. For each race that will be decided in the primary (in 2 weeks), rather than in the November general election, there is a prominent label. If you aren’t sure what positions are contested in your area, click on the “Show My Elections” link – then click your county on the map of Washington. And for some organizations, the candidate questionnaires are available.

The site is well-organized, easy to navigate, and full of nonpartisan information. Check it out, read the FAQ (why do we elect judges in Washington State? why are judicial elections important?), and, of course, don’t forget to vote!

Federal Register 2.0

A completely new digital version of the venerable daily newsprint publication was launched on July 26, 2010, the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Federal Register Act.

FederalRegister.gov, or FR 2.0, is intended to be more-user friendly and interactive, with a look-and-feel more like a web news site ("Federal Register: The Daily Journal of the United States Government"). The current issue is organized by general topic - Money, World, Business & Industry, Environment, Science & Technology, and Health & Public Welfare – and by type of document – Notices, Proposed Rules, Final Rules, and Presidential Documents.

There are browse features and search features, and each agency has its own page, but there are also pictures and social networking icons – truly a change from the past!

The redesign is also part of the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive, so the goal is to make the information more accessible and feedback easier. Email addresses are active, and links to regulations.gov are provided (along with instructions on submitting comments).

An interesting feature is plain language abstracts, which are essentially summaries written by the agencies (that are in themselves supposed to be in plain language, but can still be a little technical and dense).

FR 2.0 is currently unofficial. The content, taken from the daily XML-based edition of the Federal Register (FR), is not an official, legal edition. The PDF hosted on the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) is the authenticated official version (along with the print of course). For each document on FR 2.0, there is a link to the official, authenticated PDF. This may change in the future, though, as evidenced from this statement from the Legal Status & Disclaimer: “This prototype edition of the daily Federal Register on FederalRegister.gov will remain an unofficial informational resource until the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register (ACFR) issues a regulation granting it official legal status.”

The front page states this is an experimental beta site, and comments and suggestions are welcome.

DOJ: No Criminal Charges in U.S. Attorney Firings

The Justice Department announced that “no criminal charges are warranted” against Bush administration officials in regard to the firing of nine United States Attorneys in 2006. The decision was revealed in a letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
For news coverage, see BLT (Legal Times’ blog), the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times.
The DOJ’s 2008 Inspector General Report, An Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006, is available electronically, or in print at KF5107 .U52 2008 @Classified Stacks.

Happy Birthday USA.gov!

USA.gov, the federal government's portal website, celebrated ten years of operation with a cleaner, less cluttered design. The search engine is faster and mobile apps are featured.

Want to "friend" your government? The site offers multiple ways to connect with government, including Facebook, Twitter, RSS, YouTube, and blogs.

You can even watch tutorials to learn how to get the most out of the site and its services.

Harvesting Relevant Cases on Lexis and Westlaw

LexisNexis and Westlaw are both very powerful research systems. Their coverage has a lot of overlap -- they both have state and federal cases, statutes, and regulations, they both have lots of law reviews, and so on. And their features are generally comparable -- you can search with connectors or with natural language, you can check the status of cases with a citator (KeyCite or Shepard's), and so on.

Focusing on the the similarities and parallels, I've sometimes underplayed the differences, telling students it's largely a "Coke-Pepsi" or "Ford-Chevy" thing.

But there are some differences, and it's worth conducting a taste test or taking a look under the hood (depending on whether you favor the soda or the car metaphor). Susan Mart investigates two parallel techniques for finding cases once you know one relevant case:

• searching for more cases like a given headnote, and
  
• using a citator to find later cases discussing the point of law in a headnote.

Susan Develow Mart, The Relevance of Results Generated by Human Indexing and Computer Algorithms, 102 Law Libr. J. 221, 2010 Law Libr. J. 2010-13.

Mart's methodology required a lot of painstaking work -- more than most of us would be willing to undertake, which is why it's so helpful that she published her results. She selected 10 prominent cases, then found pairs of corresponding headnotes to use from each (e.g., LexisNexis headnote 7 and Westlaw headnote 8 from Brown v. Board of Education). She ran searches using Westlaw's Custom Digest and two methods in LexisNexis: "More Like This Headnote" and the list of topics. Having written in advance what would count as relevant, she then sifted through all the cases retrieved and scored them as relevant or not. And then she compared the sets.

The sets of cases retrieved using the West headnotes tended to have a higher percentage of relevant cases than did the sets retrieved using either of the approaches based on Lexis headnotes. Does that mean we can just drop Lexis and use only Westlaw? No -- because each time there were a number of relevant cases that were found only using the Lexis headnotes.

What of the citators? How do Shepard's and KeyCite stack up? Again, the results were more divergent than you might expect. Each system turned up lots of cases supposedly discussing a point of law that the other did not turn up, even when the headnotes were comparable.

From these samples, Mart draws the lesson that researchers who need to be thorough should use both systems and conduct multiple searches. Don't assume that following a headnote from one case in one system will yield all the relevant cases. Use many seed cases. And use more tools -- for instance, A.L.R. annotations and law review articles, not just headnote searches or citator scans.

Years ago our Lexis rep used to say in training sessions, "One search is not research." This study underscores the wisdom of that saying. No one search -- in either system -- does it all for you.


Photos from Washington Economic Development Commission and NIH Nat'l Ctr. for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Read the Big Health Care Act

Is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119 (March 23, 2010) on your summer reading list?

Here are some sources:

• plain text from Government Printing Office
• PDF (906 pages) from the Government Printing Office (certified by the Superintendent of Documents as the authentic text)
• print version from CCH, KF6276 .6201 .A22 2010 at Reference Area. Includes
• Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
• Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, Pub. L. 111-152
• Joint Committee on Taxation technical explanation of the two laws
• another print version from CCH, 2010 tax legislation, KF6276.569 .T3 2010 at Reference Area and Classified Stacks.
• Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
• Health Care Reconciliation Act
• HIRE and other recent tax acts
• CCH editorial staff explanation and analysis
• print version from RIA, KF6276.501 .R53 2010 at Reference Area and Classified Stacks. Includes
• RIA's complete analysis of the tax and benefits provisions of the 2010 Health Care Act as amended by the 2010 Health Care Reconciliation Act
• Code and ERISA sections as amended
• committee reports

Why post this now? Well, in addition to the obvious tie to summer reading, it's because the PDF of the Statutes at Large version only just became available on Friday, according to the Law Library of Congress's Twitter feed.

Today in History: Civil Rights Act of 1964

Forty-six years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, HeinOnline. In just 28 pages, the law addressed many areas of American life: Voting Rights (Title I), Public Accommodations (Title II), Public Facilities (Title III), Public Education (Title IV), Federally Assisted Programs (Title VI), and Employment (Title VII).

The next day, the front page of the Seattle Daily Times told of blacks being able to visit a number of businesses that had been whites-only the day before -- and some businesses that chose to close altogether rather than serve blacks.


Page two reported that President Johnson, asking for cooperation with the new law, found responses were "wonderful and very hopeful." But another story said that the Justice Department was preparing to meet expected opposition and was asking for 40-50 new lawyers for its Civil Rights Division.

The front page on the Fourth of July had a story about a segregation rally in Atlanta at which whites beat two blacks with metal folding chairs. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, running for President, said at the rally that the Civil Rights Act was "a fraud, a sham and a hoax," and said he would not aid in its enforcement in his state.


During most of the discussion of the legislation, the focus had been on race, but sex was added to the ban on employment discriminationk, and that created many changes in society as well.

By the way, did you know that the University Libraries just subscribed to a database with the images of Seattle Times pages back to 1900? Isn't it great?

To get to the historic Seattle Times (and some other early newspapers from the state):

• Go to the Libraries list of Electronic Newspapers and News.
• If you are off-campus, click on the off-campus access link in the upper-right corner of the screen and log in with your UW NetID.

• Choose Early American Newspapers (don't be thrown off by the caption that says coverage ends in 1900!).
• Choose the Places of Publication tab and then choose Washington.

Howard on Prosecutors' Peremptory Challenges

Professor Maureen A. Howard tackles the use of peremptory challenges in criminal cases. Taking the High Road: Why Prosecutors Should Voluntarily Waive Peremptory Challenges, 23 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 369 (2010), available on LexisNexis, Westlaw.

Using published studies and her own trial experience, Professor Howard questions the usefulness of peremptory challenges.

She moves on to explore the costs of their use: limiting the breadth of community participation and increasing the public's perception that lawyers are manipulating the system. She argues that prosecutors should voluntarily waive their right to use peremptory challenges.

Responding to potential concerns that giving up peremptory challenges would allow biased jurors to serve, Professor Howard says that the solution would be "a broader definition and application of a challenge for cause, not necessarily retention of the current peremptory challenge practice." (p. 415)

She concludes:

The use of peremptory challneges has questionable value and risks violating the constitutional rights of both defendants and prospective jurors. . . . Instead of waiting for judges and legislators to respond to the decades of criticism levied at the use of peremptory challenges and the narrow definition and application of for-cause challenges, the prosecutor should 'take the high road' and waive peremptories.

Andersen on Electing Judges

Unlike federal judges, who are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, our state judges are elected by the people. But in practice, most of them are first appointed by the governor to fill mid-term vacancies and only face election if they are opposed at the end of their terms. There is very little public scrutiny of the appointment process, and when elections roll around, many voters don't have good tools for evaluating candidates. Professor William R. Andersen turns his attention to these issues in Judicial Selection in Washington -- Taking Elections Seriously, 33 Seattle U. L. Rev. 605 (2010), available on HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw.

Professor Andersen suggests that some problems cannot be fixed within the framework of our election system, but some can.

Some may decry big-money campaigns for judgeships, but Supreme Court precedent limits what can be done. And if there are to be elections, then judges will have to participate in campaigning -- raising money, giving speeches, and so on. To address problems resulting from this aspect of electing judges, Professor Andersen recommends revising the rules for recusal, and he says that "serious work is going on in professional bodies to make necessary revisions." (p. 609)

To make selection of judges more informed and transparent, Andersen urges "a broad-based and intentionally diverse citizen's commission charged with evaluating judicial candidates." (p. 614)

He also suggests regular, objective performance evaluations of judges, and he reports that systems for evaluating judges are being tried around the country (p. 612), citing the National Center for State Courts page on Judicial Performance Evaluation, which links to information from 18 states, including Washington. (By the way, the NCSC link is broken for Washington State's Walsh Commission Report, The People Shall Judge: Restoring Citizen Control to Judicial Selection (1996), but this link works. Prof. Andersen was a member of the Walsh Commission.)

Stuart Scheingold, Scholar of Law and Politics

Stuart Scheingold, professor emeritus of political science and a leading scholar of law and politics, has died. Obituary: UW professor renowned for work on law, politics, Seattle Times, June 28, 2010.

"He was quite simply one of the world's leading commentators on law and politics," said Amherst College's Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science with whom Professor Scheingold directed the multivolume, internationally oriented Cause Lawyering Project.

Scheingold's works include:

• The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds. 2008), KF299.P8 C85 2008 at Classified Stacks


• Cause Lawyers and Social Movements (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds. 2006), KF299.P8 C38 2006 at Classified Stacks
  
• The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make: Structure and Agency in Legal Practice (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds. 2005), K118.P82 W67 2005 at Classified Stacks


• Something to Believe in : Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds., 2004), KF299.P8 S334 2004 at Classified Stacks
  
• Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds. 2001), K118.P82 C38 2001 at Classified Stacks


• Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities (Austin Sarat & Stuart A. Scheingold eds., 1998), K487.P65 Z92 1998 at Classified Stacks


• Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy (1984), HV6789 .S32 1984 at Classified Stacks


• Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change (1974), KF380 .S3 at Classified Stacks

For more -- including many works on European integration -- see this list on WorldCat.

Prof. Scheingold's faculty profile is here. In his honor, the Department of Political Science has the Stuart A. Scheingold Professorship of Social Justice (now held by Christopher Parker).

Photo from Seattle Times.

Dataset of Questions Asked & Answered of SCOTUS Nominees

Lori A. Ringhand (UGa) and Paul M. Collins, Jr. (U N Texas) have compiled a dataset of the questions asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee of nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court since 1939.

Their paper, May it Please the Senate: An Empirical Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009, investigates "if questioning patterns differ depending on the race or gender of the nominee" and finds that "the Bork hearing is less of an outlier in several ways than is frequently assumed, and [that] abortion has not dominated the hearings."

The authors also discover "notable disparities in the issues addressed by Democratic versus Republican senators" and "that female and minority nominees face a significantly different hearing environment than do white male nominees."

Attorney and Client Decision Making Probed

When attorneys and their clients decide whether to settle and for how much, they try to predict how things will turn out if they go to trial, hoping, of course, to do better. In a study of thousands of civil cases, researchers found that attorneys were very often wrong. Three-fifths of plaintiffs and a quarter of defendants got a result at trial that was worse than the settlement they could have had. The cost of the error was much greater for defendants: plaintiffs' average error was $43,100, but defendants' average error was $1,140,000. Randall L. Kiser, Martin A. Asher, and Blakeley B. McShane, Let’s Not Make a Deal: An Empirical Study of Decision Making in Unsuccessful Settlement Negotiations, 5 J. Empirical Legal Studies 551, 566 ((2008).

Now the lead author of that study -- a consultant and former litigator -- has written a book aimed at lawyers and law students to help them see the problem of bad decision making and learn ways to improve it. Randall Kiser, Beyond Right and Wrong: The Power of Effective Decision Making for Attorneys and Clients, K126.K57 2010 at Classified Stacks. The book presents research studies to support its recommendations. As the author puts it:

This book differs from other books and articles on settlement negotiations in that it places greater weight on scientific evidence than the war stories of attorneys, mediators and judges; it assumes that empirical studies are more instructive than anecdotes and statistics are more dependable than surmise.

p. 5. But Kiser goes easy on his audience by presenting the social science without "probability theory, regression analysis, game theory," and so on "for a simple reason: attorneys generally don't like them, don't understand them and won't use them." So the book is a practical, how-to work backed by scholarship (but not weighed down by it).

It should be of interest for professional responsibility as well as trial practice and alternative dispute resolution.

Law Professor Slams Law Reviews for Impracticality

Professor and former dean Gerald Uelmen laments that law reviews have become less useful to practicing lawyers and judges, contrasting the time several decades ago when judges often turned to law reviews for guidance with today. But he predicts that law reviews won't go away anytime soon, since employers still value law review experience, which does indeed help students' writing skills. Gerald F. Uelmen, The Wit, Wisdom, and Worthlessness of Law Reviews, Cal. Law., June 2010.

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Congratulations to the editors of the Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts, which made its debut yesterday.

It begins its life at volume 6, number 1, because it replaces the Shidler Journal of Law, Commerce + Technology as part of a merger with the Law, Technology & Arts Group (LTA) a new interdisciplinary research unit at the law school. LTA was formed in 2009 to take a comprehensive approach to legal issues involved in artistic and technological innovation. LTA consolidates a J.D. concentration, an LL.M. program, the former Shidler Center for Law, Commerce + Technology, and the Center for Advanced Research in Intellectual Property (CASRIP) into a single research team.

The Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts publishes concise legal analysis aimed at practicing attorneys. The Journal will publish on a quarterly basis. Check out the new issue, which has articles on:

* Cloud Computing
* Arbitration Clauses in Wireless Telephone Service Contracts
* Cell Phone Text-Message Spam
* Liability for Posting Hyperlinks in Financial Disclosures
* Modifying Contract Through E-Mail
* Attorney-Client Ethical Issues Raised by Gmail

Do you have something to say about law, technology, and the arts? The Journal accepts outside submissions from students, law professors, and practicing attorneys.

Looking for Government Data?

Quantitative social scientific information plays an increasingly important role in both litigation and legal scholarship. As a result, it is often necessary to be able to cite to statistics and datasets as part of your legal research but identifying sources of such data can be tricky, especially when it relates to foreign or international statistics.

In response to the growing interest in and need for statistical information in many fields, the Guardian newspaper has created a blog and online directory to the all data sources that they use in producing statistics for their news stories.

The database can be searched using keywords or browsed by country or topic. There is also a page devoted to US data, including information related to health insurance, war and the environment.

International Criminal Court Review

Established eight years ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to try perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community.

The Rome Statute -- the treaty that set up the court -- was adopted by 120 countries in 1998. At that time, 7 countries voted against the Statute: China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen. Human Rights Watch page. The Rome Statute entered into force July 1, 2002, after it was ratified by 60 countries.

Now, eight years later, the number of states parties has nearly doubled, to 111 countries. They are holding a review conference in Kampala, Uganda, to take stock. The conference began on May 31 and continues until June 11. For more, see the American Society of International Law's ICC Review Conference Resources.

The U.S. objections to the ICC are summarized in U.S. Policy Regarding the International Criminal Court, a Congressional Research Service Report (updated Aug. 29, 2006). For very current US comments, see the Statement at the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court by Harold Hongju Koh, Dept. of State Legal Adviser, June 4, 2010.

Library Hours Change after Friday, June 11

When Law School exams end this Friday, June 11, the Law Library moves to its interim schedule:

Sat - Tue, June 12 - 15: Closed
Wed - Fri, June 16 - 18: 8am - 5pm
Sat & Sun, June 19 & 20: Closed

The Reference Office is open Wed - Fri from 9am - noon and 1 - 5pm

When Law School summer classes begin on June 21, the Law Library moves to its summer schedule:

Mon - Wed: 8am - 7pm
Thu & Fri: 8am - 5pm
Sat: Closed
Sun: 12pm - 5pm (typo corrected 6/18/10)

The Reference Office is open Mon - Fri from 9am - 5pm and Sunday from 1 - 4pm.

The Library will also be closed on Sunday & Monday, July 4 & 5, in observance of the Independence Day holiday.