The Goodson Blogson

For years, members of the Duke Law community could reach the full text of stories from Bloomberg.com via their Bloomberg Law accounts, but it required a few extra steps of browsing to News & Analysis > News from Bloomberg Terminal and searching for the correct article (often with a slightly different headline from the web version). Now, the process has become much simpler: you can use your  Bloomberg Law  credentials to directly access content on Bloomberg.com ! At  Bloomberg.com , click "Sign In" and enter the email address associated with your Bloomberg Law account. You'll be taken to a sign-in screen where you should enter your Bloomberg Law credentials to proceed. Once signed in, you'll have full-text access to Bloomberg.com stories, financials, and even games. You can also sign up for newsletters and download the mobile app to keep up with the latest content. Not a Law community member? If you're part of the Duke University community, you may be el...

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its opinion in five cases . The next announcement day is Thursday, June 25, although with a dozen opinions left to issue for this October Term, additional opinion days seem likely. As noted on the New York Times opinion tracker , the remaining cases are mostly on blockbuster topics, including the president's ability to fire members of the Federal Reserve Board and other government regulators, prohibitions on transgender athletes in girls' and women's sports teams, restrictions on mail-in ballot deadlines, Hawaii's firearm concealed carry restrictions, and the fate of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. How can a researcher keep up with the latest news as the Court marches toward adjourning its October Term 2025? SCOTUSblog features a free daily liveblog of these final announcements on opinion days, as well as longer articles on the opinions' impact. The site also includes a "Statist...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this month or continuing your legal studies next year, your access to legal research services and other campus databases may change this summer. Below is a summary of policies for the major legal research databases that you might wish to access over the summer. Continuing Students Westlaw  allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw® and Practical Law, over the summer for non-commercial research ( i.e. , "to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills, but you cannot use them in situations where you are billing a client"). Examples of permissible uses for your academic Westlaw password include the following: Summer coursework Research assistant assignments Law review or journal research Moot Court research Non-Profit 501(c)(3) work Clinical work Externship sponsored by the school Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on ...

Time to start preparing for spring exams! Just a few weeks separate you from your summer, and here are some resources to make the most of your remaining study time. Additional recommended strategies and time management tips are available from Thomson Reuters' Law School Survival Guide and the Duke Academic Resource Center's Study Strategies that Work . First, fill in those outline gaps with study aids, available in print and online via the Law Library. The West Academic Study Aids Library includes Acing, Concepts and Insights, Hornbooks, Nutshells, Black Letter Outlines, Legalines, and Sum and Substance audio. The Aspen Learning Library includes Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, and Emanuel Law Outlines. Elgar Advanced Introductions to Law provides accessible yet comprehensive overviews of more than two dozen legal topics, particularly strong in comparative and international areas of law. All three study aid databases can be accessed quickly from the Law Libra...

January 1 marks the effective date for many new laws passed by legislatures in the previous calendar year. While individual statutes (or subsections of statutes) may include language indicating that they will take effect immediately upon passage or at a different specified point in time, most jurisdictions have a default time period for new laws to take effect if the text does not otherwise specify an effective date. See charts of the general dates at LegiScan and StateScape . January 1 is the general effective date for laws passed in the states of California, Oregon, and Illinois (at least for laws enacted prior to May 31). Other popular dates for new state laws to usually take effect are August 1, October 1, or 60–90 days after enactment or legislative adjournment. The North Carolina General Assembly maintains annual Effective Dates compilations on its website, with the 2025-26 document available here . New laws or portions of laws taking effect on January 1 in North Carolina i...

Long layovers, delayed flights, slow trains – be ready during your holiday travels with a good book. The Goodson Law Library staff have compiled a new list of recommendations, available in various formats across the University or from your favorite booksellers . The Payback: A Novel (2025), by Kashana Cauley. ( Request the print copy! ) "The second novel by a former lawyer turned comedy writer ( The Daily Show ; The Great North ) takes aim at student loans — literally. Retail worker Jada is fed up with running from the Debt Police, who brutalize her and her friends for being down on their luck and late on their payments. Together, they plot a heist that will take down their loan company. A funny and fast-paced commentary on capitalism and inequality." – Jennifer Behrens, Associate Director for Administration & Scholarship The Women (2024), by Kristin Hannah. ( Request the print or e-book ! ) "My book club's latest pick; historical fiction about nurses who ...

The Goodson Blogson has been compiling light-hearted holiday gift guides for lawyers and law students since 2009 , but this year's roundup has proven particularly challenging. Fluctuating tariffs on goods purchased from overseas, and the elimination of a former de minimis exemption on tariffs for items below $800, have resulted in higher costs, shipping delays, and even the destruction of some packages already in transit . Industry experts have also predicted shortages on holiday staples like toys, games, and decorations due to tariff-related disruptions to manufacturing processes and supply chains. In addition, some of our most reliable domestic sources in the past for quirky law-related gifts, like the National Archives Store , may have their turnaround and shipping times impacted by the ongoing federal government shutdown. (And that's before we even get to increasing economic anxiety for the many households impacted by the federal government shutdown, rising unemployment, ...

On Monday, October 6, the U.S. Supreme Court will open its annual October Term, with its first oral argument scheduled for 10 am. The "First Monday in October" has marked the start of the Supreme Court's new year of work since 1916. The first case of the new Term, Villarreal v. Texas , concerns a criminal defendant's right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment; a live-stream of oral argument audio will be provided on the Court's website . Other petitions already granted for the Term address a number of hot-button topics, such as state prohibitions on transgender athletes on girls' sports teams ; LGBTQ "conversion therapy" bans ; the death penalty for inmates with intellectual disabilities ; campaign finance spending limits ; and potential liability by internet service providers for piracy of digital music by users . To learn more about individual cases on the Court's docket this year, SCOTUSblog offers quick access to case information and filin...

Wednesday, September 17 is Constitution Day , commemorating the 1787 signing of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia. The National Archives and Records Administration, which houses the original document, maintains a page for America's Founding Documents: The Constitution of the United States with a transcription and historical background about the document and its signing. The full text of the U.S. Constitution, along with extensive commentary, can also be found in the government publication Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (CONAN) , which is linked from Congress.gov. This version of the Constitution made headlines in early August, when eagle-eyed readers noticed the omission of several key sections in both the document text and the accompanying annotations , which included discussion of habeas corpus, emoluments, and tariffs. The Library of Congress quickly restored the missing sections, blaming a website coding error. As the P...

You probably already know that current state constitutions are reprinted in state code publications, and are generally freely available on state legislature websites (like North Carolina's ). But what if you want to search across all fifty states? A new free resource from the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, 50Constitutions.org , allows researchers to explore the text of current state constitutions individually or across the country. Fourteen states, including North Carolina , also include constitutional histories , detailing amendments over time and providing access to historical texts. The site’s editors note that “additional features will be added for other states on a rolling basis.” 50Constitutions.org has been added to the Law Library's Legal Databases & Links page. Other sources for state constitutional research available at Duke include Oxford Constitutions of the World , which provides U.S. state materials in its Juri...

The Duke Law community now has access to Lex Machina , a litigation analytics tool containing data on courts, judges, law firms, attorneys, and parties. Access Lex Machina by logging into Lexis+ and choosing it from the product switcher grid in the top left corner of any research screen.   Duke's Lex Machina pilot access from Lexis is expected to last for the 2025-2026 academic year. It includes federal court and specialty venue modules, with limited read-only access to state court materials. Sections beyond the pilot program's access are clearly labeled as out of scope, and may include a brief preview or overview of the data contained within that section. The "Quick Tools" section includes the ability to compare and explore litigation history for parties, courts and judges, and law firms as well as expert witnesses; Analyzers for the case history of attorney teams and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on courts’ workload; and a case assessment tool. Lex Machina a...

Guest post author: The Law Library Outreach Team Studying for the bar exam in late July? Six weeks out, you're likely immersed in topics like issue preclusion, hearsay exceptions, and equitable servitudes. When you need a study break, though, check out the Goodson Law Library’s collection of print and online materials designed to help you do your very best. This summer, you will find a selection of current bar study books in the blue self-service LibCabinets in the Reading Room on level 3. We have works covering test-taking strategies, managing bar prep material, and most importantly, staying healthy during this stressful time. Some examples include The Bar Exam in a Nutshell (also available online ), The Ultimate Guide to the UBE , and The Zen of Passing the Bar Exam . You can access additional works online with your NetID and password via the West Academic Study Aids Library . Look for Bar Exam Success: A Comprehensive Guide or Acing the Bar Exam: A Checklist Approach to ...

The new twenty-second edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation was published late last month. A joint project of the editors of four top law reviews (Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and Yale), the Bluebook provides guidance on citation forms for both practitioners (the Bluepages) and academics (the Whitepages). So what’s new in the 22d edition's 35 extra pages? Promising "hundreds of edits, large and small" (using the same introductory boilerplate as the 21st edition), the Preface contains a summary of noteworthy changes, with a similar explanatory list at W.S. Hein . Some of the key changes include the new introductory signal "contrast" in Rule 1.2 , expanded Special Citation Forms in Rule 15.8 (including a streamlined citation for Wright & Miller's Federal Practice and Procedure ), and a new Rule 14.4 on state administrative law materials, pushing the former rule at that number on commercial electronic databases to 14.5 . Electronic sources...

Did you write a seminar paper that made you especially proud this year? Consider reworking it for a legal writing contest this summer! The AccessLex Institute's Law School Scholarship Databank maintains a list of Writing Competitions , currently featuring close to 80 contests with prize amounts into the thousands of dollars. Many competitions also include publication opportunities in addition to cash prizes, making these a great opportunity to share your work with a wider audience.  Most listed competitions fall into the "up to $5,000" range, but some extend beyond that – such as the Judge John R. Brown Scholarship Foundation’s Brown Award for Excellence in Legal Writing , for which the first-place winner receives $15,000 (and four more finalists also receive cash prizes). That particular competition does require a faculty letter of recommendation along with the submission, so you’d have to work quickly to make it into consideration before the May 30 deadline. Other com...

It’s that time of year again! The Goodson Law Library staff are happy to provide another round of summer reading recommendations, both fiction and nonfiction. You can see some of these titles in person at the service desk display this month, along with fun stickers and bookmarks to take with you. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism , by Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025). (Request a print copy or e-book !). “The Silicon Valley motto of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ sounds powerful when we're thinking about work on the cutting edge of technology. But what if one of those ‘things’ ends up being democracy? Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir explores how what they describe as a toxic work culture can spill out, quickly and profoundly, into the culture at large.” –Wickliffe Shreve, Head of Scholarly Services Orbital: A Novel , by Samantha Harvey (2023) . (Request a print copy or e-book !) “Sneaking in at under 150 pages, this elegiac space pastoral beat out 3...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this month or continuing your legal studies next year, your access to legal research services and other campus databases may change this summer. Below is a summary of policies for the major legal research databases that you might wish to access over the summer. Continuing Students Westlaw allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw® and Practical Law, over the summer for non-commercial research (i.e., "to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills, but you cannot use them in situations where you are billing a client"). Examples of permissible uses for your academic Westlaw password include the following: Summer coursework Research assistant assignments Law review or journal research Moot Court research Non-Profit work Clinical work Externship sponsored by the school Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on your part. Lexis : A...

Time to get ready for spring exams! Just a few more weeks separate you from your summer, and here are some resources to make the most of your remaining study time. Additional recommended productivity apps and time management tips are available from Bowdoin's Wicked Smart Learning Strategies , Central Michigan University's Study and Success Strategies , and the Duke Academic Resource Center's Study Strategies that Work . First, fill in those outline gaps with study aids , available in print and online via the Law Library. The West Academic Study Aids Library includes Acing, Concepts and Insights, Hornbooks, Nutshells, Black Letter Outlines, Legalines, and Sum and Substance audio. The Aspen Learning Library includes Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, and Emanuel Law Outlines. Elgar Advanced Introductions to Law provides accessible yet comprehensive overviews of more than two dozen legal topics, particularly strong in comparative and international areas of law...