A Halloween Time Warp

"As extra precaution against too much confidence as a result of improvement in the situation, the board in its daily statement issued last night urges the people of the city not to celebrate Hallowe'en night in the usual manner (by congregating) owing to danger from crowding in rooms and on the sidewalks." While this statement could just as easily be written today, it comes from a 1918 influenza briefing by the Durham City and County Board of Health, published in the October 31 issue of the Durham Morning Herald (available to the Duke community via Newspapers.com).

Durham was no outlier -- officials around the country restricted public gatherings and Halloween festivities during the influenza epidemic of 1918, as CNN and History.com have both explored recently. The discouragement wasn't entirely successful -- only days later, the Nov. 3 society page of the Herald highlighted the "very bright and attractive Hallowe’en party […] given by the nurses of the Watts hospital Training School," where one can only hope that the appropriate health precautions were taken.

You can find these articles and other fascinating artifacts in newspaper databases, which preserve local history for the enterprising researcher. The Duke University Libraries has compiled an A-Z database list for Newspapers, which range from backfiles of a single paper title to compilations of thousands of different newspaper titles. Coverage dates will vary widely by title, but here are some recommended sources for historical newspaper research:

• America's Historical Newspapers: more than 6,000 titles of American newspapers published between 1690-1922
• Newspapers.com: more than 3,000 titles from around the world, with varying dates of coverage between 1700-2000.
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers: full-text PDF coverage of nearly two dozen newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune.

For help with researching current or historical newspapers, be sure to Ask a Librarian. Have a safe and happy Halloween!

50-State Voting Resources Guide

Most people associate voting with early November, specifically the first-Tuesday holiday known since 1845 as Election Day. However, the current pandemic as well as expectations of record voter turnout has brought renewed focus onto other methods of voting, including mail-in voting and early in-person voting. In North Carolina, for example, one-stop early in-person voting begins today, October 15th, and will last until October 31st.

Issues surrounding voting this year, especially related to COVID-19, have made finding accurate information about the voting process all the more urgent. In response, the Goodson Law Library's Faculty and Scholarly Services Librarian Wickliffe Shreve has worked with the Government Relations Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) to create a Voting Resources page as part of AALL's Advocacy Toolkit.

The Voting Resources page has information and links to nonpartisan resources on information about state primaries, locating state and local election websites, locating polling places, voter ID requirements, election dates, registering to vote and confirming your registration, sample ballots, absentee and mail-in ballot requests (including those for military and overseas voters), early voting, potential voting hurdles, and information specific to COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Although targeted at the library community, the Advocacy Toolkit contains resources on legislative advocacy that is useful to the entire legal community.

The Voting Resources page's contents will be updated regularly, and will exist as a permanent resource beyond the 2020 election. For more information about resources listed on this guide, or other materials on election law, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

NCLC Digital Library Now Available

The Goodson Law Library has recently subscribed to the National Consumer Law Center's NCLC Digital Library. This campus-wide database includes full-text access to 22 e-book titles on consumer law topics, including: debtor rights, mortgages & foreclosures, credit & banking, deception & warranties, and consumer litigation. A how-to guide for consumers on Surviving Debt is also included in this subscription.

The Quick Start Guide contains tips and tricks for searching and browsing the digital library. Recent updates to online editions as well as significant law changes in the last six months are marked with blue or red flags, respectively. As the guide cautions, the database's search features differ from research services like Lexis and Westlaw, but it is possible to develop proximity searches and exclude unwanted words using the NCLC search syntax. A separate "Advanced Pleadings Search" link is available to limit results only to sample documents included with publications.

For more information about the history of the NCLC, check out the Our Story section of their website. For assistance with using the new NCLC Digital Library database or with locating other consumer law resources, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

The Bar Exam v. Diploma Privilege

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a reckoning nationwide about the administration of bar examinations, usually offered two times a year in each jurisdiction. While about two dozen states did hold a late-July, socially-distanced bar exam in person, other states postponed to a planned September administration, which some jurisdictions postponed again in favor of a remotely-administered online exam to be held on October 5 and 6 (see chart at the National Conference of Bar Examiners). Concerns have grown over the possibility of technical issues with the upcoming online bar exam, with a number of test-takers reporting problems with practice exams and difficulty in obtaining remote support. Michigan's online bar exam, held in late July, experienced widespread technical issues which the State Board of Law Examiners later blamed on a hacking attempt.

Whether or not next week's online examination faces similar technical issues, it seems certain that conversations about alternative paths to law practice will continue for the duration of the pandemic. Last week, the District of Columbia became the fifth jurisdiction to provide for emergency licensure of recent law graduates during the pandemic. Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Louisiana have also provided that recent law school graduates may bypass a bar examination and begin supervised law practice under certain conditions. Some readers might be surprised by the idea of a lawyer skipping the bar exam, but "diploma privilege" is hardly a new concept. (Ask law students in Wisconsin, the only state that still regularly permits graduates of its two ABA-accredited law schools to practice law in the state without taking a bar exam, if they meet certain requirements.) As a bit of library research shows, emergency bar exam waivers have revived a practice that was once incredibly common in American law practice. 

The "Bar Examinations" section of Kermit Hall's Oxford Companion to American Law (available online to the Duke community) outlines the history and development of the bar examination in the United States. Up until the 1870s, a bar examinee would be questioned orally by a judge or lawyer, following the end of an apprenticeship period. In the 1870s, a movement grew to develop more consistent standards for examinations; around the same time, "diploma privilege" became more commonplace, as states and law schools sought to entice would-be lawyers to attend their programs. Lawrence Friedman's A History of American Law (4th ed. 2019 available online) notes the growth in diploma privilege practices: "Between 1855 and 1870, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, New York, Tennessee, Michigan, and Wisconsin gave the privilege to graduates of home-state law schools. In 1870, Oregon, which had no law school of its own, went so far as to give the privilege to graduates of any school that had the diploma privilege in its home state" (p. 604). By 1890, as the Oxford Companion noted, 16 states provided diploma privilege for graduates from 26 law schools. The decline of the diploma privilege coincided with the establishment of the National Conference of Bar Examiners in 1931 - by the end of the decade, standardized written bar examinations had overtaken the diploma privilege. By 1974, when a history of diploma privilege was published in the Tulsa Law Journal, only four states still honored the privilege; once West Virginia abolished the option in 1988, Wisconsin stood alone in regularly offering its state's graduates diploma privilege.

As the pandemic continues into the indefinite future, thousands of recent law school graduates have struggled to prepare for ever-changing bar exam dates and formats. Commentators have raised questions about the safe and accessible administration of bar exams under emergency conditions, and even the necessity of the bar examination at all. Critics have highlighted the bar examination's history as a gatekeeping mechanism that was designed in part to restrict access to the bar for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and questioned the relevance of the test's content to the skills needed for successful law practice. Whatever happens with next week's online bar examination (and best of luck to our Duke Law alumni and other examinees), these debates are likely to continue for the duration of the pandemic, and beyond.