The Goodson Blogson

Earlier this week, the White House announced a new 10% tariff on most imports into the United States to begin on Saturday, as well as country-specific additional duties. ( CNN breaks down the countries impacted by specific tariffs.) President Trump cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in declaring a "lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships" a national emergency warranting the unprecedented move. The Congressional Research Service provides historical background on the closest analogue, Richard Nixon’s 1971 emergency tariff, in its recent report . CRS notes that Congress has the power to terminate the national emergency through a joint resolution of disapproval, or to amend the law cited by President Trump to limit its role in imposing tariffs. The tariff announcement provoked the largest one-day decline in the stock market since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Markets have co...

Earlier this week, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer announced his intent to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of this term. The vacancy will be the first on the high court for President Biden, who has spent much of his first year in office filling vacancies in the U.S. District Courts and Circuit Courts of Appeals. (A running list of confirmed judicial nominations , as well as all judicial nominations, is available at the Senate Judiciary Committee website. Similar data can be found on the Judicial Vacancies page at the U.S. Courts.) President Biden had pledged on the campaign trail to nominate the Court's first Black female justice in the event of a vacancy during his presidency, a promise he reaffirmed at the White House yesterday following Breyer’s announcement . Washington insiders have circulated a shortlist of likely nominees , including current D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and Judge J. Michelle Chil...

This afternoon marks the start of the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, a first in U.S. history. Trump was previously impeached last year by the House but acquitted in the Senate for abuse of power and obstruction charges, in connection with the Robert Mueller investigation of Russian election interference. The 2021 articles of impeachment are focused on Trump's role in inciting the deadly events of January 6, in which supporters of the 45th President stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress formalized the 2020 election results. If convicted by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, he could then be barred from holding federal office in the future (by a simple majority). The House of Representatives voted to impeach on January 13, and delivered the article of impeachment to the Senate for trial on January 25. As NPR outlines , the first day of the trial will contain arguments on the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a former president. (F...

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, locat...

Law students who are finishing up the Legal Research Bootcamp sessions have likely already completed the module on Congress.gov and Regulations.gov . The session on Regulations.gov mentioned that the content of the "classic" site was being migrated to a new "beta" site, which would launch officially at some time in the future. Well, as is true for many of us during these times, it appears to be officially "Blursday" for Regulations.gov. Starting recently, Thursday is "Beta Day," meaning that the only version of Regulations.gov that you will be able to access every Thursday is the beta. If you try to access the classic site on Thursdays, you will automatically be redirected to the beta one. This will be true even if you click on "For the official site, visit www.regulations.gov " link at the top of the beta site. Although you can easily access the classic site on any other day of the week, if you did attempt to use it on a Thurs...

Over the next week or so, you may notice library staff members taking notes about where our users are sitting (or standing, in the case of our sit/stand desks). It's no cause for alarm – we're conducting an assessment of library space usage, in order to identify patterns (such as the most popular places, times of day, and furniture types), and to help inform future space planning projects. No individually-identifying information is being recorded or reported, just tallies of where and when library visitors are using our space at certain times of day. Consider our space assessment a warm-up, of sorts, to another important counting project taking place this spring: the 2020 Census . A decennial requirement from Article I, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution , Census data helps to determine such critical matters as congressional seats in the House of Representatives and federal funding distribution for public services. Everyone living in the United States and its territories is...

Halloween is just around the corner. Maybe you're too busy with law school to properly plan a costume. Maybe the party store has been picked clean by the time you get around to it, and now you're stuck with a risqué postal worker outfit from the bargain bin. Oh well, you can't just show up to the party dressed as a stressed-out law student, right? Except now, that gunner from your criminal law section who reads the U.S. Code for fun starts telling you how your last-resort costume is actually a federal crime. Wait, what? Is your legal career over before it even begins? Probably not (at least, not for this). 18 U.S.C. § 1730 does state that "Whoever, not being connected with the letter-carrier branch of the Postal Service, wears the uniform or badge which may be prescribed by the Postal Service to be worn by letter carriers, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both." Originally enacted in 1872 ( 17 Stat. 296 ), Congress am...

Tuesday is Constitution Day , which commemorates the signing of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. In celebration, the Library of Congress just announced a redesign of the website for The Constitution Annotated (CONAN) , an invaluable treatise on constitutional history and practice. The revised web version of the publication (full name: The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation ) allows readers to search from the main page, or to browse individual articles and amendments. Results provide a detailed overview of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence on that particular article or amendment, written by staff members of the Congressional Research Service's American Law Division. CONAN also includes helpful tables on such topics as Supreme Court Decisions Overruled by Prior Decisions and Laws Held Unconstitutional in Whole or in Part by the Supreme Court . A print edition of the most recent CONAN volume (issued in 2017...

Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports , produced by a nonpartisan office within the Library of Congress, have long been a valuable research resource. For a long time, though, their access was limited to the members of Congress who requested the research, constituents who requested copies via their congressperson, and those with access through commercial databases or publishers. CRS products include the well-known comprehensive research reports as well as shorter "In Focus" documents (providing a brief overview of a topic), "Legal Sidebars" (briefly examining legal developments), and "Insights" (analyzing current topics of interest to members of Congress). Researchers at Duke have several options for locating CRS products. By law, CRS reports are now posted to the free Congressional Research Service page on congress.gov . Users can search for a particular topic, or list all available documents by clicking the search button with no terms in the b...

At the close of business on Friday, news broke that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III had filed the results of a nearly two-year-long investigation, " Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election ," to Attorney General William P. Barr. Today, Barr submitted a letter to the House Judiciary Committee which briefly summarized the report’s conclusions. As reported in various news outlets, the report summary is divided into two parts: Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and obstruction of justice. The investigation described two elements of Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, but "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." The obstruction portion reviewed various actions by the President that had raised potential obstruction concerns. Notably, Barr's letter states...

Over the weekend, more than 8,000 people attended the 30th annual Bataan Memorial Death March in New Mexico . This 26.2-mile trek through desert terrain serves as a remembrance of the approximately 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war who were forced to march through 65 miles of jungle terrain by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Thousands of the captive soldiers did not survive the journey, succumbing to harsh conditions, starvation, disease, and torture by their captors. The memorial march's schedule of events also included a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, at which eligible Filipino veterans of World War II (or their next-of-kin) received a bronze replica of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded at the original ceremony in 2017 . The Congressional Gold Medal is one of several decorations that the United States Congress has awarded over the years (others include silver and bronze medals, as well as ceremonial swords), but is generally considered the hi...

On January 1, many U.S. works originally published in 1923 entered the public domain , making them freely available for use, copying, and modification. Duke Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain provides a sample of the newly-available titles in film, literature, and music , with a link to a fuller Excel spreadsheet. The 2019 release is notable since it marks the first major addition to the U.S. public domain in more than twenty years. With works from 1923 slated to enter the public domain in 1999 under their original 75-year copyright term, Congress enacted the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 , which added 20 years to existing copyright terms and stalled the expansion of the public domain until now. (Without that extension, notes the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, works from 1962 would be entering the public domain this year instead; the Center provides a list of those titles as well.) This development opens new avenues for res...

One week into the U.S. federal government shutdown, federal workers have begun receiving their final paychecks from the period before the December 22 lapse in appropriations. Yesterday, Congress adjourned without much progress on a new spending agreement, and will reconvene on Monday, December 31. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are either furloughed or working without pay for the duration of the shutdown, and many federal parks and other tourist attractions are closed until the shutdown ends. The Northwestern University Libraries' research guide to Government Shutdown 2.0 outlines the agencies that will continue working without pay (including the TSA and the Department of Justice's Special Counsel office), agencies that will reduce or cease operations during the shutdown (including the Internal Revenue Service and NASA). Individual federal agency websites generally display a banner for the duration of a shutdown, explaining what services continue to function a...

As reported earlier this week by the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports are now available at the new federal website crsreports.congress.gov . CRS is a nonpartisan legislative research staff office within the Library of Congress that prepares research reports for legislative committees and individual members of Congress. Researchers have long prized CRS reports for their expert analysis on a variety of topics, but for many years the reports were difficult to obtain. Appropriations legislation expressly prevented CRS from making its research public, and researchers beyond the Hill needed to obtain copies from an insider. By the 1990s, a CRS cottage industry had sprung up in the form of Penny Hill Press , a tiny family-run publisher in Maryland that obtained the reports and sold them for $20 apiece on its now-defunct website. As Penny Hill owner Walt Seager told the New York Times in 2009 , "We wear out a lot of shoe leather and get cauliflower ear...

Today marks 19 years since the shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two students killed 13 of their classmates before committing suicide. Since that tragic day, such incidents have become sadly more commonplace, with Education Week creating a statistical tracker to record school shootings in 2018 . Already this year, 22 people have lost their lives in school shootings, with the majority of these victims killed during the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Parkland shooting has since galvanized the national debate about gun control reform. Yesterday, legal research database HeinOnline announced the release of a free new online library on Gun Regulation and Legislation in America , which is now available to the Duke University community. This library compiles federal legislative histories of firearms laws, congressional committee hearings, Congressional Research Service reports, Supreme Court briefs...

Happy New Year! The beginning of a new year usually brings some new laws, as previously enacted legislation often takes effect on January 1, unless otherwise specified in the act itself or in the jurisdiction's laws on effective dates . Some of the highest-profile state law changes around the country include California's legalization of recreational marijuana sales and New York's sweeping family leave plan for businesses. Additional highlights of state law changes can be found on CNN and NPR . In North Carolina, the legislature provides a PDF of 2017 legislation , sorted by effective date, with links to the enacted laws. Twenty state session laws enacted in 2017 took effect as of January 1. Most notably , the North Carolina driver's education curriculum has been revised to include instruction on handling vehicle stops by law enforcement. The full text of this new law can be found on the legislature website at S.L. 2017-95 . Another law change which has caused conf...

Like primary law from the other two branches of government, federal legislation is a living entity, subject to frequent changes. Every legal researcher knows that sections of the U.S. Code can be later amended, repealed, invalidated by a court, or rendered indirectly obsolete by subsequent changes in the law. However, there is another potential fate for federal statutes, less dramatic but no less important: the ability of editors to pick up an existing statute section and relocate it elsewhere in the Code , as part of an editorial reclassification . Effective September 1, that's what happened inside Title 34 of the U.S. Code , which sat empty for decades after its former subject area (The Navy) was repealed in 1956. Title 34 has finally been repurposed into a new subject area, Crime Control and Law Enforcement , by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. This editorial reclassification simply moves existing Code sections in force from their previous locations in Title 18 (Crimes...

This past February marked 50 years since the ratification of Amendment XXV to the U.S. Constitution . Written to clarify the procedures for presidential and vice-presidential succession in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the amendment also allows for a U.S. President to be sidelined by either his own declaration of incapacity, or by a declaration of "the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide." Since Donald Trump's inauguration, the 25th Amendment has been discussed on social media and in op-eds, in response to concerns about erratic presidential behavior. In May, the Atlantic summarized the growing discussion . More recently, UW law professor Hugh Spitzer explored the possibilities last week in the Seattle Times . In April, freshman U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin introduced H.R. 1987 , a bill which would establish an "Oversight Committee on P...

Yesterday, a revised version of the American Health Care Act , intended to reverse a number of insurance measures enacted as part of the President Barack Obama-era Affordable Care Act, narrowly passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday afternoon, in a 217-213 vote. The bill passed despite vocal opposition from citizens concerned about a return to heightened insurance rates for patients with pre-existing conditions, as well as pushback from both health care providers and the insurance industry itself . The controversial House bill now heads to the U.S. Senate, which is expected to draft its own version of Affordable Care Act repeal-and-replace legislation. As the Washington Post noted today , though, the future of such legislation in the Senate is uncertain. One major reason? The Senate cannot take up consideration of the bill until the Congressional Budget Office completes its report: First, the Senate's parliamentarian — or rules-keeper — cannot review the legisl...

As the new 115th Congress began its work this week, one of the first orders of business was to adopt procedural rules. House Resolution 5 ( text at Congress.gov ), Adopting Rules for the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress , garnered much attention for its original controversial plan to limit the powers of the independent O ffice of Congressional Ethics , approved during a closed vote. Following thousands of constituent phone calls (and Twitter criticism from President-Elect Donald Trump regarding congressional priorities), the move was abandoned less than 24 hours later . However, a new controversy over the rules package took shape yesterday, when the media took note of another provision, the "Holman rule." Originally developed in 1876 but removed from the standing rules in 1983, the Holman Rule allows a member of Congress to propose appropriations amendments which reduce "the number and salary of the officers of the United States" or "the compensation of any p...