US Courts Opinions on FDsys

FDsys, the Government Printing Office's Federal Digital System, reached one billion retrievals this spring. The one billionth document was a Federal Register notice from the SEC, and the single most downloaded document is PL 111-148 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), but one of the most interesting new and expanding collections on FDsys is USCOURTS.

USCOURTS is a collaborative effort between GPO and the Administrative Office of the US Courts to provide public access to opinions from appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts. Opinions are authenticated with digital signatures, based on the secure transfer of files to GPO. Started as a pilot program in 2011, it was opened to all federal courts in January, 2013. Opinions go back as far as 2004, but note that earlier years are incomplete.

The collection is growing nicely. In November, 2013, 64 courts participated (up from the 29 in the pilot program). As of May, 2014, 87 courts, plus the U.S. Court of International Trade, are participating and more are expected to be added this year. Although not quite half of the federal courts have voluntarily opted in, the collection is consistently one of the most used on FDsys. USCOURTS is worth trying - and definitely worth keeping an eye on - since FDsys offers free, authentic, and digitally signed PDF documents.

Looking for a court not yet available on FDsys? Need older opinions? Check out the Gallagher Law Library's Free Law Online guide to U.S. Court Opinions for more information.

U.S. Courthouse (1941), Seattle, WA.
Completed in 1940. Source: National Archives

U.S. Post Office, Court House, & Custom House (1941), Spokane, WA.
Completed in 1909. Source: National Archives

Upcoming Changes to Law Library Hours

Spring quarter is drawing to a close and that means that the Law Library will be moving to shorter hours of operation.

The last week of exams, June 9 - 13, the Reference Office will be open from 9am - 5pm. We will not be open for evening hours.

The Law Library will be closed June 14 - 17, Saturday - Tuesday.

June 18 - 20, Wednesday - Friday, the Library will be open from 8am - 5pm and the Reference Office will be open from 9am -12 noon and 1 - 5pm.

Summer quarter hours begin on June 23, Monday:

Monday - Wednesday the Library is open from 8am - 7pm and the Reference Office is open from 9am - 5pm.

Thursday and Friday the Library is open from 8am - 5pm and the Reference Office is open from 9am - 5pm.

The Library is closed on Saturdays during the Summer quarter.

On Sundays, the Library is open from 12noon - 5pm and the Reference Office is open from 1 - 4pm

Check out the Library Hours page for additional information.

Use Strikingly to Enhance Your Job Search

Have you heard of Strikingly?  Check out this post from the NW Sidebar (the WSBA's Blog) about using it to enhance your job search.

I'm not familiar with Strikingly, so I took a quick look at their website and found this in the FAQs:

 

About Strikingly

Strikingly brings beautiful mobile websites to everyone.

What's so special about a Strikingly site? Simplicity, clarity, and accessibility. The mobile age is upon us, and having a mobile-optimized website is more important than ever. Don't lose your visitors under the weight of a heavy, confusing website. The same goes for editing: don't stress out about micromanaging your page, and don't waste time wondering where to change something. Edit it all on one page, and get it done fast.
 
Do you think that having your own website helps with a job search?  Leave a comment below.

150th Anniversary of Mercer Girls' Arrival in Seattle

If you know anything about Asa S. Mercer, it is probably that he was the first President of the Territorial University of Washington.  While that is an interesting factoid, perhaps more interesting is his so-called "Mercer Girls" or "Mercer's Belles" project. 

Asa Mercer, First President of the Territorial University of Washington. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Because of the ravages of the U.S. Civil War, in the mid-1860's the East Coast was left with a gender imbalance where women outnumbered men.  And because the Pacific Northwest was still being settled primarily by loggers and fishermen during that time, there was a gender imbalance where men far outnumbered women.  Asa Mercer decided to do something about this, and undertook a project to bring eligible women to Seattle.  The men of Seattle would pay Mercer a fee, and the women of the East Coast would get a free ride through the Panama Canal and to the great Northwest (and a husband, for whatever that's worth).  Whether this was the 1860's equivalent of mail-order brides or a practically-minded attempt at population planning is still a topic for debate.

Mercer made two trips, and the first batch of "Mercer Girls" arrived in Seattle 150 years ago this month, on May 16, 1864, to a grand welcome on the grounds of the University.  Mercer even married one of the Mercer Girls himself!  You can learn more by checking out Mercer's Belles: The Journal of a Reporter from Suzzallo Library or an article entitled "The Story of the Mercer Expeditions" from the Washington Historical Quarterly.

It's World Goth Day!

Thanks to John Richards over at KEXP, this morning I learned that today is World Goth Day!  Time to cue up some Siouxsie and the Banshees (fun fact: Cities in the Dust was the first song I purchased from iTunes many moons ago). 

Although we don’t seem to have any goth-related materials in the law library, now’s your chance to hone your catalog searching skills and find out what’s available on the subject in other libraries on campus.  A quick search for “goth” turns up these interesting titles:

Goth : identity, style, and subculture by Paul Hodkinson

 

Goth culture : gender, sexuality and style by Dunja Brill

 

Goths : a guide to an American subculture by Micah L Issitt

 

You could also pick up a gothic novel and spend some time with the undead and possibly a fainting heroine.  Are you confused by this blog post because it has nothing to do with the law library and you don’t know what a gothic novel is?  In that case, consider consulting the Guardian’s handy infographic about how to tell if you’re reading a gothic novel (hat tip to Mary Whisner for spotting this).   

And although it’s an amazing coincidence, three of your friendly reference librarians are wearing black today.  We’ll be back to smiling tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advice for Summer Associates (and Externs Too)

Elizabeth (Betsy) Munnell, a lawyer who provides "business development coaching" for law firms and lawyers has distilled a lot of advice for summer associates into three charts, each addressing the three important areas of Assignments, Citizenship, and Professionalism

• basic tips
• examples of typical mess-ups
• ways to stand out

Her blog post: Best Practices for Summer Associates: In Three Simple Charts, The Uncommon Sensei, May 21, 2014.

She writes about summer associates in law firms, but almost all the advice is equally applicable to summer jobs or externships with government agencies, judicial chambers, and public interest groups—even working as a research assistant for a professor. All employers appreciate law students who meet deadlines, turn in excellent work, and show courtesy.

Writing on to a Journal

Yesterday the four journals at UW Law and Prof. Kaltsounis offered an information session about the Melissa S. Landers 1L Write-on Competition. Whether or not you made it there, you might have some lingering questions about writing on. How can you figure out the material and write a good comment in a week? What's the best way to attack the problem? Is there anything you can do to prepare before the competition starts? What's a comment supposed to look like anyway?

Here to help you is Patrick Eoghan Murray, a 2013 UCLA Law grad who has posted Write on! A Guide to Getting on Law Review on SSRN.

Many law reviews select their members using a competition known as a "write on". Every year, many first year law students who have little to no experience with legal academic writing struggle to make sense of the basic principles necessary to do well in this endeavor. This Comment guides these students by presenting a strategy to succeed in this competition. By understanding some key information, a prospective applicant can increase her chances of getting on law review and improve her writing and editing abilities. It is my hope that this Comment will not only provide a benefit for individual applicants to law reviews, but will also have the downstream effect of boosting the quality of legal scholarship published by student-run law journals.

Graphic: image from "Bouquinistes et Bouquineurs. Physiologie des Quais de Paris du Pont Royal au Pont Sully ... Illustrations d'E. Mas," available in the British Library's photostream on Flickr

400,000 Public Domain Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met recently announced that 400,000 images of art and objects in its collections may be used for scholarly and noncommercial use. These images may be downloaded and used without requesting permission or paying a fee.

Images labeled as OASC - Open Access for Scholarly Content - are included in this initiative. Examples:

After the Earthquake, San Francisco
Photograph by Arnold Genthe, 1906

Cuneiform tablet, record of a judicial decision
Neo-Babylonian, clay

Peonies Blown in the Wind

John La Farge, ca 1880

Leaded opalescent glass

Allegory of Government: Wisdom Defeating Discord
Jacob de Witt (1695-1754)
Oil on canvas

Perceptions of Justice in Washington State

The Washington State Minority and Justice Commission presents a half-day program, Perceptions of Justice, reviewing a report on Washingtonians' perceptions of how they are treated by the police and the courts.

June 9, 2014, 8:45 a.m.-noon
OB2 Auditorium DSHS, 115 Washington Street SE, Olympia
Registration is free and lunch is provided.
Email cynthia.delostrinos[at]courts.wa.gov with "Perceptions of Justice" in the subject line.
3 CLE credits

Speakers are:

• Don Stemen, from Measures for Justice, a national organization working on ways to measure how well or poorly justice systems are performing basic legal services and then advocating to use the data to improve systems. Stemen is also on the faculty of the Dept. of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola Chicago. His profile includes a list of recent publications.


• Mark Peffley, Jon Hurwitz, and Jeffery Mondak, researchers for Justice in Washington report, which was commissioned by the Minority and Justice Commission.


• An advance copy of the report is available on the Washington Defender Association's website: Part 1 (General Descriptive Report on the "Justice in Washington State Survey, 2012") (Oct. 1, 2012), Part 2 (Justice in Washington State Survey, 2012: Analysis of Results, 2nd Report) (rev. March 24, 2014)



• Peffley & Hurwitz wrote Justice in America: The Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites (2010) (UW Libraries catalog record) (publisher's page)


• Jon Hurwitz & Mark Peffley, Explaining the Great Racial Divide: Perceptions of Fairness in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, 67 J. Politics 762-83 (2005)

Library Hours for Memorial Day

The University of Washington observes Memorial Day, May 26.

The Law Library will be open from 8am - 5pm and the Reference Office will be open from 1 - 4pm.

Regular hours resume on Tuesday, May 27.

Visit the US Department of Veterans Affairs' website for more information on Memorial Day.

Seattle Pipeline links to Memorial Day and weekend events.

[Image credit: Square-Cafe.com.]

Using SSRN for Research

SSRN (the Social Science Research Network) can be very useful for legal researchers. Even better: you can use most of it free!

SSRN is a huge repository for scholarly papers. Law, economics, and business dominate, but other disciplines, from Anthropology to Sustainability, are also represented. You can search it free. And you can download hundreds of thousands of papers free. (Did I mention? Much of SSRN is free!)

Check out UW Law's page on SSRN to see some of the recent (and not so recent) papers by our faculty, staff, and students.

To help you get started, we've posted a guide explaining some of the ways you can use SSRN.

60 Years Since Brown v. Board

Saturday marked the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), Google Scholar link.
After six decades, many students of color are in schools with few white students. In the Northeast, over half (51.4%) of black students are in schools whose student bodies are 90-100% minority. See

• Niraj Chokshi, The Most Segregated Schools May Not Be in the States You'd Expect, Wash. Post, May 15, 2014
• Emily Badger, Housing Segregation Is Holding Back the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education, Wash. Post, May 15, 2014

For lots more statistics and analysis, see:

• Gary Orfield et al., Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future (UCLA Civil Rights Project, May 15, 2014). A press release about this report is here.

Segregation by race is not the only issue. Communities are increasingly segregated by income too:

• Kendra Bischoff & Sean F. Reardon, Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009 (2013) (Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis)

For historical materials, see

• Library of Congres, Brown v. Board at Fifty: "With an Even Hand" (2004)
• Seattle University Law Library, Brown v. Board of Education: A 50th Anniversary Exhibit (2004)
• Separate But Equal?: The Road to Brown (part of UMKC Law School's Exploring Constitutional Conflicts web project).

And to look at the issues locally, see Segregated Seattle, a collection of materials from the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project at the UW.

Playing Your Way Through Bar Prep

With bar exam prep on the horizon many students are probably wondering what is in store for them as they prepare for the July bar. As you might remember, a few months ago, I wrote a post advocating the use of video games in legal education.  It seems that some bar prep companies also see the usefulness of gaming. 

If you enjoy educational video games, you might find it comforting to know that games will be a part of your bar prep, especially if you take a prep class from Barbri. As a student in one of Barbri’s first classes to use Barbri AMP, I had the opportunity to see game theory put into action. Barbri AMP is a platform that uses game theory in order to keep students motivated while preparing for the bar exam. Barbri’s advertising material states that “Barbri AMP applies software techniques used by video game developers to help keep [students] motivated, engaged and focused.”

Check out the Barbri Amp Interface:

One of the most interesting features of Barbri AMP is the ability to mine data about how people are working through the game. Then, Barbri can analyze that data both in regards to the group as a whole but also in regards to individual students. This data-mining allows for targeted updates and adjustments to the game both for the group as a whole as well as for individual students struggling in certain areas. In AMP, questions that a player got incorrect would come up more frequently as the game moved forward so that the student would be exposed to it more often and eventually get it correct.  My classmates seemed to have mixed reviews when it came to AMP, noting that it was time consuming working through the modules.  Personally, I found it to be a very useful tool for when I was tired and needed the additional motivation of "keeping score" to push through to the end of a unit.

Barbri is not the only company using game theory to prepare students for the bar. Filament Games created Simulawyer a game aimed at helping law students to achieve their academic goals and prepare for the bar exam. By placing the player in a semi-clinical setting the game seeks to instill “[d]octrinal knowledge and comprehension, [l]egal skills application and analysis, [and i]ntegration of legal ethics and professionalism.” It was acquired by InfiLaw, a consortium of independent law schools, in August of 2012. Unfortunately, Simulawyer is not available for download or play at this time. But take a look at what a game like this might be like: 

While bar prep will undoubtedly prove challenging, you might find it helpful to try introducing a little play into your schedule.