Independence for Law Library Staff

The Law Library will be closed from Friday, July 3d through Sunday, July 5th in observance of Independence Day. The Library resumes regular summer quarter hours on Monday, July 6th.

Post-Grad Privileges

Photo credit: blog.dearmissj.com

Now that the excitement of commencement has ebbed at bit, some UW Law grads may be wondering if they can still enter the Law Library with their Husky Cards when the Library is closed.

The answer is Yes!! Your Husky cards will work in the card readers until August 1st. You are welcome to use the Library as you study for the bar exam.

What about access to the big three commercial online legal research services? See the section on "Summer & Post-Graduation Use" in the guide on Access to BloombergLaw, LexisAdvance & Westlaw Next.

What other services does the Law Library offer to graduates? See our page on Library Services for Law School Alumni.

And congratulations on this tremendous achievement!

Upcoming Changes to Library Hours

With final exams ending for 1Ls, the Library moves to its interim hours.

The Library will be closed Saturday, June 13 through Tuesday, June 16.

Wednesday, June 17 through Friday, June 19 the Library will be open from 8am to 5pm and the Reference Office will be open from 9am to 12noon and from 1 to 5 pm.

The Library will be closed again the weekend of Saturday, June 20 and Sunday, June 21.

When Summer Quarter classes begin on Monday, June 22, the Library will be open 8am until 7pm Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and from 8am until 5pm Thursdays and Fridays. The Library will be closed on Saturdays and open on Sundays from 12noon until 5pm.

The interim hours for the Reference Office will be from 9am until 5pm Mondays through Fridays and from 1 until 4pm on Sundays.

In addition, the Library will be closed Friday, July 3 through Sunday, July 5 for the Independence Day holiday.

For future hours changes, consult the Law Library Hours page.

UW Law students have before- and after-hours access to the Library with their Husky cards. Please don't allow anyone you don't personally know take the elevator with you to L1 or into the Library.

Emojis and the Law - the (ㆆ‿ㆆ) and the ( ˘︹˘ )

While I am no stranger to emojis, researching this blog post opened my  to their prevalence, as well as their potential  implications.
What is an emoji? Emoji is a Japanese word meaning picture (e) + letter (moji). Just how prevalent is the use of emojis? About 500 emojis are sent out to the the twittersphere every second! For a realtime view of emoji usage on twitter go to emojitracker. Watch with delight as emoji are rapidly highlighted and their use totals continue to soar. Even the seemingly innocent emoji can have legal implications. Recently, during the Silk Road Trial, featuring the Dread Pirate Roberts, Judge Forrest instructed the jury to pay attention to an emoji that a prosecutor withheld when reading text from an internet post. Technology resource Wired highlighted several other cases in which emojis were relevant. For example, a New Yorker was charged for using emoji to make threats against police. In another case, a Pennsylvania man argued that threats made on Facebook towards his ex-wife should not be taken seriously because they concluded with an emoji smiley face sticking its tongue out. Even the Senate Floor is getting in on the action; Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, recently introduced a shruggie when discussing health care reform. If you want to brush up on your emoji knowledge, you can skim an emoji dictionary or the emojisaurus. Also, you can visit the emoji governing body, the Unicode Consortium. Will you ever need to know about emojis when conducting legal research? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

P.S. Emojis and emoticons are fun to see, but they may present obstacles for those using screen readers. In addition to the emoji in the first paragraph of this post, the title has a smiling face and a frowning face, and there is a shruggie at the end of the post.

Gun Violence Awareness Day + New ProQuest Congressional Social Media Feature

A number of organizations have declared June 2 National Gun Violence Awareness Day, encouraging supporters to wear orange to symbolize the value of human life.

Media Matters (a partner in the campaign) reports on the National Rifle Association's reaction to the campaign:

The NRA's online magazine, America's 1st Freedom, lashed out at the campaign, calling it pointless in a May 30 post. On June 2, it encouraged readers to mark the day by buying a gun, saying, "If you see any friends or neighbors wearing orange, consider the possibility that they: a) don't support your right to self-defense; and b) have a rather naïve view of what constitutes real activism."

The ABA's Governmental Affairs office announced in this month's ABA Journal ABA joins medical organizations in advocating steps to curb gun violence. That position paper (joined by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of

NSA's Collection Activities

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R43459.pdf  

A subject much in the news recently is the National Security Agency's "bulk collection of telephony metadata for domestic and international telephone calls."

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service considers the constitutionality of the authorizing provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act.

Note the URL below the image of the cover of the report. The report is found not on the website of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) or any other federal government website. Why? Because Congress has deliberately chosen not to make CRS reports available to the public.

Want to learn more? Check out the Gallagher guide on CRS Reports.

And what's up with the way that members of Congress often create acronyms and initialisms out of titles of statutes? Did you know that the full name of the USA PATRIOT Act is United and Strengthening American by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism?

Want to learn more about this phenomenon? My colleague reference librarian Mary Whisner wrote an interesting article on the topic. What's in a Statute Name?, 97 Law Libr. J. 557 (2005).

Obsessed with Serial?

Logo courtesy of http://undisclosed-podcast.com/

If you were obsessed with the podcast Serial, and want to hear more from a lawyer's perspective, check out the podcast Undisclosed: The State v. Adnan Syed. Three attorneys, Rabia Chaudry, Colin Miller, and Susan Simpson, have been following Adnan's case and ongoing appeal. In the podcast, they explore the case from an investigatory perspective in greater detail. Importantly, they provide us, the listeners, with all of the evidence they are aware of.

Woman in Gold: New Film Focuses on Nazi Art Theft

Woman in Gold is a new film focused on the true story of the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt that was stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Adele Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria Altmann, fought the Austrian government for years to reclaim the portrait, a legal battle that eventually culminated in the United States Supreme Court case Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677 (2004). You can find Seattle show times for this film here.

Interested in learning more about Nazi art theft and current repatriation efforts? Check out these great resources online and at the library.

The Lost Art Internet Database is the official German governmental resource for information on looted art. The site also has a news section to keep track of recent case developments.

The Rape of Europa is an award-winning documentary that details the extent of Nazi art looting across Europe.

The Lost Museum : the Nazi conspiracy to steal the world's greatest works of art by Hector Feliciano (Art Library Stacks, N8795.3.F8 F4613 1997) is a book that details the systematic looting of private art collections in Europe during World War II, focusing on the private collections of five families.

The History of Loot and Stolen Art From Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay is a book about the history of stolen art, from Alexander the Great to the 21st century. This book is available online in eBook format.

Allied Looting in World War II by Kenneth Alford is a book that looks into the oft forgotten history of looting in World War II conducted by Allied forces. This book is available online in eBook format.

Photo Credit: http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-i-1907-1

RBG to get her own book and movie!

Photo courtesy of  Irin Carmon 

If you have been waiting to learn more about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you will not have to wait much longer. In October 2015, NOTORIOUS RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be published. If you have enough to read already, or want to know more, Natalie Portman will be playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex, a film following RBG's career. Production is scheduled to begin by the end of this year.

Photo courtesy of Breuel-Bild—ABB/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Evan Vucci—AP

"POTUS" and "SCOTUS"--Recent Buzzwords

President Obama is now tweeting as @POTUS. This adds to the official @WhiteHouse account, the Vice President's @VP, and the First Lady's @FLOTUS. And you can follow even more White House Twitter accounts.

We might be used to thinking of the President of the United States as POTUS and the First Lady as FLOTUS, but these terms haven't always been in common parlance. As recently as 1999, the pilot of The West Wing could make it a punchline:

Laurie: Tell your friend POTUS he's got a funny name, and he should learn how to ride a bicycle.

Sam Seaborn: I would, but he's not my friend; he's my boss. It's not his name, it's his title.

Laurie: POTUS?

Sam Seaborn: President of the United States. I'll call ya.

And what about SCOTUS, for Supreme Court of the United States? It hasn't always been a common nickname. When I was in law school, back in the last century, we said "Supreme Court" (or, impertinently, "the Supremes") and wrote "SCt" in our notes.

SCOTUSblog, founded in 2002, quickly became a go-to source for information about the Supreme Court and its cases—and its name doubtless influenced the language, along with our texting, tweeting love of textual shortcuts.

In old law review articles in HeinOnline, you can find plenty of instances of "scotus"—but they are mostly references to the medieval philosopher, theologian, and (since 1993) saint, Duns Scotus. In fact, looking at search results in chronological order up through the 1990s, I saw hundreds of references to Duns Scotus and just a few to SCOTUS.

ABA's Silver Gavel Awards

The ABA has announced the winners (and honorable mentions) of its 2015 Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts.

Books

Nell Bernstein, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison available in print and online via UW Libraries publisher's description
Honorable mention: Laurence Tribe & Joshua Matz, Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution available in print: Gallagher Classified Stacks and Odegaard Stacks (KF4550 .T789 2014) publisher's description

Pedalers Push WA to Number 1!

Washington State ranks Number 1 in the League of American Bicyclists' 2015 report card on Bike Friendly States.

 Scores are based on rankings in five categories:

1. Policies and programs
2. Legislation and enforcement
3. Infrastructure and funding
4. Education and encouragement
5. Evaluation and planning

Keep biking!

Free Legal Research Tune-up

Is your legal research search engine a little rusty? Could you use the help of an experienced "mechanic?"

Then consider attending the free legal research tune-up session on Wednesday, May 20, from 9:30-11:30am at Seattle University School of Law's Sullivan Hall, Room 109.

Please RSVP here.

The workshop will cover state and federal legislative history, regulations, and practice materials using a problem-based approach. Students will have hands-on practice working through research scenarios.  Please bring your laptop.

This program is sponsored by the Seattle University Law Library and Lane Powell.

Fair or Foul? New Index Provides Fair Use Case Results

Recently, the United States Copyright Office created a new resource for researching fair use opinions in the federal courts. The U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index provides a list of over 170 U.S. Supreme Court, circuit courts of appeal, and federal district court opinions that have made a ruling relating to the fair use doctrine.  Although the list is not exhaustive, the index includes a broad selection of cases. “The goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use more accessible and understandable to the public by presenting a searchable database of court opinions, including by category and type of use . . .”

U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index

Stand-up Desks, Book Stands, and a Flying Disc

The Gallagher Law Library Circulation Desk provides lots of information and services: scanner and printer information, directions to bathrooms and water fountains, identifying book locations, and checking out library materials. As to materials available for loan, here a few items available at the Circulation Desk that you may not have been aware were offered for check out.

 Book stands are a popular item for students to check out. There are two kinds available: a faux wood style stand and a wire frame style. Set up is easy for both. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, proper use of a book stand or document holder "may reduce or eliminate risk factors such as awkward head and neck postures, fatigue, headaches, and eye strain."

Adjustable height laptop / reading stands are the newest addition to items available at circulation. These desks can be raised to a comfortable height allowing you to work on your feet. These stands are not as easy to set up as the book stands, but with a little patience they can be set to the desired height and incline. It is important to ensure that the stand is secure and level. Please test its stability before placing laptops or heavy items on the stands. This Youtube video demonstrates how to use adjustable stands.

Adjustable height reading stand

Circulation is not just about ergonomics! If you are in need of a break after a long period of maintaining a neutral body posture while studying, how about a game of flying disc? The Circulation Desk has a Frisbee brand flying disc available for check out. The flying disc may be the only library item that is available strictly for use outside of the library.

Flying disc

Speaking of discs, a disk drive is also available for check out from the Circulation Desk. Please note that this is a floppy disk drive, and not a flying disc drive.

Floppy disk drive

Hopefully these tools make your time in the library more productive, healthy, and enjoyable!

Data Crunching Justices' Writing Styles

If you've read Supreme Court cases from the early 19th century and the early 21st century, you probably have a sense that writing styles have changed. But can you quantify that?

Three scholars from Dartmouth and UVa (two mathematicians and a law professor) can. They find that opinions have grown longer but easier to read. Justices writing at the same time tend to have more similar styles than those separated by a hundred years. Consistency is probably aided by clerks.

You can read the whole paper on SSRN:

Keith Carlson, Michael A. Livermore, Daniel Rockmore, A Quantitative Analysis of Writing Style on the U.S. Supreme Court, 93 Wash. U. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016)

Hear also this interview with coauthor Michael Livermore, focusing on the increase in negative language.

Alternative Legal Research Databases

When you think of online legal research, LexisAdvance, WestlawNext, or BloombergLaw probably spring to mind. With summer fast approaching, it may be worthwhile to explore some alternative legal research databases. As a general rule, no other service provides the depth and breadth of coverage of primary law as the three big names. Additionally, editorial enhancements, like case headnotes or statute annotations, are limited on other services. Similarly, these alternative services have minimal coverage of secondary sources (that means sources like American Jurisprudence 2d or Washington Practice are not available). Nevertheless, you may find that  these services provide sufficient access to primary sources of law in a cost-effective manner. At the very least, it does not hurt to occasionally survey the competition to the industry leaders.

A good starting point in exploring alternative legal research services is the Gallagher Guide to Low-Cost Legal Research Services on the Web. That guide focuses on Casemaker and VersusLaw.

CaseMaker logo

Casemaker partners with bar associations across the country to provide access to their members. The Washington State Bar Association allows students to register for a free account for academic use and the WSBA provides Casemaker to its members for free. Among the services that Casemaker provides is CaseCheck+, a limited citator service, akin to Shepard's or KeyCite, that indicates when case law has received negative treatment. Casemaker also offers a subscription to secondary materials published by the WSBA, which includes a variety of deskbooks on topics like appellate practice, civil procedure, and real property, to new attorneys for $1,200 a year. WSBA deskbooks are available online to students and other library users when accessed through the library's network (a link is provided on the library's website). Students who wish to access the deskbooks remotely should contact a reference librarian for login information.

VersusLaw, which is free to law students for academic use, provides access to state, federal, and tribal court decisions. Additionally, access to state and federal statutes and accompanying regulations is available under various subscription plans.

While Casemaker and VersusLaw are prototypical legal databases with functionality that should be familiar to users of BloombergLaw, LexisNexis, or Westlaw, the following services try to deliver legal research in innovative ways.

Casetext logo

Casetext is a free service that provides access to a large variety state and federal decisions; its coverage starts in 1925. Casetext users are encouraged to provide annotations to judicial decisions in order to identify or explain key points in the decision. Another notable feature is ReCite. ReCite examines how other courts have summarized or explained a judicial decision and compiles those descriptions for easy review in a pane alongside the decision. This may be a helpful way to gain a quick sense of a how principles from specific cases have been practically employed.

Mootus is another legal research product that is trying to build its knowledge database through user participation. Unlike the services previously discussed, Mootus does not provide access to case law and other primary law sources. Rather, Mootus allows users to post questions about legal issues, such as whether the First Amendment protects a person from criminal prosecution based on threats made via Twitter, and other users answer the question by providing quotations, citations, and annotations that support their stance. While not offering the resources of a typical legal research database, Mootus allows you to explore novel or unresolved legal issues, either as someone asking questions or providing answers. Gallagher Blogs covered Casetext and Mootus in April 2014.

Ravel Law visualization screenshot

Finally, Ravel Law is a legal research database that uses visualization to present search results in unique ways. Ravel Law tries to show the connections among cases and areas of the law in a way that is appealing and comprehensible. Ravel Law is free for law students, and subscriptions are available for attorneys. Ravel Law's visualization features provide an interesting way to see the impact of a judicial decision over time. See this previous Gallagher Blogs post for an in-depth discussion of Ravel Law.

Oral Arguments in the Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Cases

SCOTUS heard arguments today and you can listen to the recordings on Question 1 and Question 2.

Oral Arguments in Same-Sex Marriage Cases

On Tuesday April 28th, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in four cases challenging state bans on same-sex marriages and state bans on recognition of existing same-sex marriages. When decided the consolidated cases will have the title Obergefell v. Hodges.

If you would like to preview the arguments the Court will be presented with, the Court's website has posted briefs from the parties and amici. If reading over 1,000 pages of legal briefs doesn't fit into your weekend plans, SCOTUSblog has a four part series analyzing the briefs filed by the couples seeking to over turn the bans, the states defending the bans, the amici supporting the couples-including the federal government, and the amici supporting the states.

Robinson on Race and Criminal Justice

Remember Jeffery Robinson's presentation on Ferguson in December? You might be interested in this 9-minute interview with him on KUOW: Seattle Defense Attorney To Lead ACLU's Center For Justice (April 20, 2015). (The Center for Justice includes the National Prison Project, the Criminal Law Reform Project and the Capital Punishment Project.)

Environmental Law for Earth Day

Mark Earth Day with a quick look at some of the environmental law scholarship that's been produced at UW Law in the last several years:

• The Washington Journal of Environmental Law & Policy is now in its fourth year, publishing pieces by students and by outside authors.
• Other journals also can publish work on environmental topics. See, e.g., Robert W. Adler, The Decline and (Possible) Renewal of Aspiration in the Clean Water Act, 88 Wash. L. Rev. 759 (2013); Eri Osaka, Corporate Liability, Government Liability, and the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, 21 Pac. Rim L. & Pol'y J. 433 (2012) (The Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal is now the Washington International Law Journal.) 
• For a sampling of recent faculty publications, see the SSRN pages for:
• Greg Hicks
• Sanne Knudsen
• Bill Rodgers 
• Thinking North? Check out the website of the Arctic Law & Policy Institute.

Legal Milestones in Choral Music

Two upcoming choral concerts honor historic legal events.

1297 copy of Magna Carta on display
in the National Archives
(and the NationalArchives
Featured Documents web exhibit)

UW Collegium Musicum presents a musical setting of a medieval poem about the events leading to the Magna Carta in 1215. Magna Carta 800: Music of the British Isles, Sat. April 18, 2015, 7:30 PM, Mary Gates Hall, $10.

Orchestra Seattle and Seattle Chamber Singers present 1954 in America , Sunday, May 17, 3:00 PM, First Free Methodist Church (in West Seattle). One of the works is Breathe, by Stacey Phillips:

Breathe, a work for chorus and orchestra selected as the winning entry in the 2014–2015 OSSCS Composer Competition, features lyrics drawn from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Paul Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.” Written during the months following protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Breathe “raises the continuing question of how this country, founded on the principles of equality, continues to struggle with questions of social justice.”

Thanks to Patty Roberts.

National County Government Month #NCGM

"April is the cruellest month," wrote T. S. Eliot. If you're a fan of Eliot, you might be celebrating April as National Poetry Month.

But April is also National County Government Month (declared by the National Association of Counties (NACo)), and as lawyers you're more likely to deal with county government or even be a part of it than you are to be a professional poet, so let's take a minute to think about county government.

This year's theme is "Counties Moving America Forward: The Keys are Transportation and Infrastructure."

Washington County Profiles (from the Municipal Research and Services Center) offers quick access to county websites, codes, and comprehensive plans.

Working at the IRS; Pew on Taxes

Bloomberg News has a long story looking at life inside the IRS: Devin Leonard & Richard Rubin, IRS Workers Are Miserable and Overwhelmed, April 8, 2015. The headline conveys the gist of it, but read the article to learn more about budget cuts, hiring freezes, reorganizations, and other constraints that make the lives of these public servants challenging. 

Think of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA, or the Department of Defense: that agency can't do its work unless the folks at the IRS do their work. 

I listed those three agencies because they get very high approval ratings (65-70% favorable) while the IRS got more unfavorable (48%) than favorable (45%) responses. That's from the Bloomberg News article, crediting Pew Research Center. For more on that survey of attitudes toward agencies, see Most View the CDC Favorably: VA's Image Slips, Pew Research Center, Jan. 22, 2015. The complete report is here.

Speaking of reports from Pew, see 

• High-Income Americans Pay Most Income Taxes, But Enough to Be "Fair"? (March 24, 2015)
• 5 Facts on How Americans View Taxes (April 10, 2015)
• The Biggest U.S. Tax Breaks (April 13, 2015)
• Among Developed Nations, Americans' Tax Bills Are Below Average (March 30, 2015)
• Federal Tax System Seen in Need of Overhaul (March 19, 2015)

Growth of Incarceration

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014), packed with research and analysis from social scientists and policy experts, is available as a free PDF from the National Academies Press.

This animated video summarizes the findings:

And this video summarizes it without the graphics:

 

Other National Academies publications in Law and Justice address topics such as:

• eyewitness identification
• the illicit tobacco market
• juvenile justice reform
• sex trafficking
• forensic evidence