The Goodson Blogson

January 1 is more than the start of a new year – it also marks the effective date for many new laws around the country. While all jurisdictions have different rules about when recently-enacted legislation takes effect if not specified in the law itself (see table at StateScape for an overview), January 1 is a common date for new laws to become effective. The North Carolina General Assembly maintains annual Effective Dates compilations on its website, with the 2023-24 document available here . New legislation taking effect on January 1 in North Carolina are mostly portions of larger laws that have already taken effect, including provisions of an overhaul to the state employee retirement systems, modifications to the Alcoholic Beverage Control laws, and amendments to the juvenile justice code (passed after overriding the governor's veto). Elsewhere around the country, the New York Times rounds up some key new legislation taking effect in the Empire State for the New Year. These...

On August 28, a new law took effect in the state of Missouri, which in part added Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.016 : "A secondary source, including a legal treatise, scholarly publication, textbook, or other explanatory text, does not constitute the law or public policy of this state to the extent its adoption would create, eliminate, expand, or restrict a cause of action, right, or remedy, or to the extent it is inconsistent with, or in conflict with, or otherwise not addressed by, Missouri statutory law or Missouri appellate case law precedent." Most law students learn that secondary sources do not constitute the actual law of a jurisdiction in their first semester of legal research instruction, so this code section's text may seem strangely obvious. However, it's not the only such law on the books enacted or proposed recently: even North Carolina has one specific to insurance law at N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-1-2 which took effect last year, and a nearly identical version of t...

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...

The Goodson Law Library has recently added Immigration Law & Policy in the U.S. to its collection of libraries in HeinOnline . This library includes more than 2,600 primary and secondary sources related to immigration law in America, including historical editions of the U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations , legislative history materials, administrative law decisions, U.S. Supreme Court briefs, scholarly articles, and books. Topics covered include the history of immigration law and international extradition policy. A particularly useful feature of this library is the index to BIA Precedent Decisions , which provides quick subject access to Board of Immigration Appeals decisions. The decisions themselves are available here as full-text PDF scans from 1940-present. This Hein library joins other Duke Law Library resources pertaining to immigration, such as the AILALink database and the seminal treatise by Gordon & Mailman, Immigration Law and Procedure (KF4815 .G663 ...

Yesterday's New York Times contained an article on the legal battles surrounding the labeling of plant-based food products . As meatless patties like the Impossible™ Burger and Beyond Burger™ continue their gains in popularity, lobbying groups for the beef industry have ramped up efforts to block the use of certain words in the products' labeling through legislation. A number of states already have passed laws that regulate whether vegan, vegetarian, or lab-grown meat products can use terms like "meat," "burger," or "sausage." An NPR story rounds up the existing state laws . One proposed bill , still pending in the Washington state legislature, would make the production and sale of lab-grown meat a misdemeanor if enacted. Why the concern? Lawmakers cite the potential for consumer confusion, which food labeling laws are designed to prevent. Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations contains hundreds of definitions of various food products, spe...

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...

For more than a century, the second Sunday in May has marked the Mother's Day holiday in the United States. A Congressional joint resolution passed on May 8, 1914 recognized the holiday, and requested that the President issue a proclamation to display the U.S. flag on the second Sunday in May in order to recognize "public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." This language about the purpose of Mother's Day can still be found in the current U.S. Code, at 36 U.S.C. § 117 . Woodrow Wilson issued the first presidential proclamation recognizing the national holiday one day later, on May 9, 1914; a copy of the original proclamation document can be viewed online at the National Archives. Most modern Americans likely associate Mother's Day with flowers, greeting cards, and brunch. This news would disappoint Anna Jarvis, who is widely credited as the originator of Mother's Day. A West Virginia native, Jarvis organized early local Mot...

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...

[This guest post by Reference Librarian Wickliffe Shreve highlights the new digital version of Prestatehood Legal Materials in HeinOnline .] Depending on your outlook, a request to do a legislative history or other legal historical research for a project can inspire dread, excitement – or perhaps a mixture of both. The Goodson Law Library's guide to Federal Legislative History helps get you started so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel...as long as the question is, of course, one of federal law. If you need to do research on a state statute or regulation, not only will you have to learn the state's government structure and legislative process, you may have to cobble together sources from the state law library, state courts, and local law schools to be sure that you have covered all your bases (see, for instance, Indiana University's State Legislative History Research Guides Inventory ). But what if your research requires looking to sources of law that ex...

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...

The Goodson Blogson is sorry to hear that you didn't win this weekend's $180+ million Powerball lottery drawing. (We know you didn't, because no one else did, either.) Let's face facts: you will probably never win more than a few bucks playing the lottery. For a comparison of more likely odds than hitting a multimillion-dollar jackpot, play with Discovery Education's WebMath Lottery Odds Calculator . Interestingly, their calculations for winning a Powerball-like game's jackpot are even more optimistic than Powerball's official prize odds . But both calculations make a big win far less likely than being struck by lightning (1 in 2,000,000 odds in a lifetime). Every once in a while, though, someone lucks into a large jackpot, and then must navigate the lottery laws of their jurisdiction. Consider the New Hampshire woman who beat long odds to win a $560 million Powerball jackpot in January. As reported last week by the ABA Journal , the woman (known only as ...

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...

Monday, October 2 marks the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court's new October term. The "First Monday in October" has been the Court’s official start date for more than a century, and is codified at 28 U.S.C. § 2 (2012) . As shown in the 1916 law's compiled legislative history , available to the Duke University community in the ProQuest Legislative Insight database, the change to "first Monday" (from the second Monday in October) was intended "to shorten the vacation and give the court an extra week when the weather is favorable to work." In the House debate printed in the Congressional Record , Illinois representative James Robert Mann expressed his concern that since the change "is a matter largely of the convenience of the members of the Supreme Court, may I ask […] that that change is entirely satisfactory to them?" (He was assured that the change was actually at the Justices' request.) While inclement weather was likely a great...

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...

Statutes and regulations and case law, oh my! There are so many places to find federal legal sources that it can feel overwhelming at the start of a research project. If you've been relying on Law School-only tools like Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law, you might not know where to begin when you no longer have access to your favorite research service. Fortunately, the Goodson Law Library can help with our Federal Law Links list, which provides alternative (and often free) web access to the current and historical U.S. Code , federal legislative history documents, federal court opinions, and agency/executive resources. For items published after the mid-1990s, the U.S. Government Publishing Office's govinfo , currently in beta, is a great place to start. This site will eventually replace FDsys as the federal government’s official online repository; note that both sites currently offer the same content, but govinfo does not yet include browsing capability for certain collecti...