The Goodson Blogson

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...

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...

Since the presidential inauguration on January 20, a flurry of executive orders from the Office of the President has generated dozens of legal challenges. The President is on track to break the previous record for executive orders issued in the first 100 days, currently held by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On February 25, Law360 launched Trump's Legal Battles , a free public database tracking the status of current challenges to executive activity, as part of its dedicated coverage of Trump's First 100 Days . While links to news and analysis about each case will require additional access to  Law360 (including some docket features that are beyond even Duke Law's subscription), the dashboard itself is free to review, sort, and browse. Convenient links to specific executive orders are also provided to the White House website, and docket numbers provide sufficient information to locate additional case information on the free CourtListener Advanced RECAP Search or in Bloomberg...

Tired of newspaper website paywalls? At Duke, you have access to more popular news sources than you may think! The Goodson Law Library offers current members of the Law School community access to group subscriptions for several outlets, including The New York Times , Financial Times , and the Washington Post ; additional titles are available through your NetID or other credentials, such as the Law School Lexis login. Details for major titles are available at the Legal Databases & Links page and highlights are below. The Law community can set up an individual account with The New York Times by visiting https://nytimesineducation.com/access-nyt/ while connected to the VPN (be sure to choose "Library Resources" option rather than the "Default" when logging in). Once connected, type "Duke" under "Find School" and select "Duke University School of Law." Student accounts last until December of the graduation year; faculty and staff a...

It's been three years since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston that the NCAA's rules on player compensation violated federal antitrust law. Since then, Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals have proliferated for college athletes, and universities and fans alike are grappling with the changes and their impact on the recruitment and retention of top prospects. You can read more about the history and future of these developments in College Sports Law in a Nutshell , a newly published title now available in the West Academic Study Aids Library . Attorney Dan Lust and Ole Miss sports law professor William W. Berry III cover such topics as NIL, the transfer portal, and the impact of conference realignment. West Academic Study Aids Library also includes Walter T. Champion, Jr.'s Sports Law in a Nutshell , 5th ed. 2017, which includes some content about collegiate athletics. Other general sports law treatises can be fo...

A new 12th edition of Black's Law Dictionary was published in June. Once the library's hard copies arrive and are processed, you will find a print copy at the Reserve Desk and on the dictionary stand in the library Reading Room. Online, the Black's Law Dictionary database on Westlaw has already incorporated the 12th edition changes. (To access it on Westlaw Precision, type BLACKS into the main search bar and select the source from the drop-down suggestions, or retrieve it from the Secondary Sources content menu.) What's new in the 2024 edition? As with the 2019 update, the publisher promises a revision to every single page . More than 2,500 new terms (such as ghost gun and shadow docket ) have been added, bringing the total number of definitions higher than 70,000. Last month, longtime editor Bryan A. Garner joined David Lat's Original Jurisdiction podcast to discuss the new edition and his editorial process for revising the much-cited source. Of course, w...

A common question at the Law Library reference desk involves how to find contact information for various people: potential academic collaborators, government employees like court clerks or agency officials, or attorneys who participated in a particular case. A basic web search on your favorite search engine may reveal contact information for academics and other public figures. (Go beyond the usual suspects with PC Mag’s " Best Alternative Search Engines .") If contact information is omitted or behind a login wall, though, some additional free options are available: SSRN contains author contact information, although researchers are restricted to accessing the email addresses of 3 contacts per day (click the author's name to access their profile, then the down arrow next to "Contact," then the link to "Email"). This can be a good method to locate contact information for academic authors whose emails are not provided on their institutional website. S...

Hard to believe that summer is almost here! 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 in the next few months. Continuing Students Westlaw allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw Precision 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 summe...

The Goodson Law Library has just subscribed to MuniPro MuniCode Library , a database with nearly 4,000 municipal codes. While many municipal and local ordinances are freely readable and searchable online (such as Durham, NC ), MuniPro allows researchers to search across multiple codes and jurisdictions, as well as create saved searches and alerts for topics of interest. For more details, visit the vendor help page .    Municode is available to current members of the Duke University community and is linked from the Legal Databases & Links and campus libraries Databases A-Z list . If using off-campus, connect via the Library Resources Only group of the Duke VPN . At the Municode home page, select "Sign in" in the header area and then click "Log in with site-wide subscription." Additional resources for researching municipal codes include: Fastcase (University) includes city codes for Durham, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem in its North Carolina Statut...

Sooner or later, we all hit a paywall while trying to read the news online. Sometimes a cleared cache or incognito browser window might provide limited access to one story, but many news outlets restrict even that practice. Understandably, newsrooms need to pay their bills in the face of declining subscriptions and increasing online competition. Some outlets face outright hostility for their work, such as the small-town Kansas newspaper whose editors' offices and homes were raided by law enforcement last week after the paper received a tip about a local restaurateur's criminal record. How can you ethically access so many different news sources without breaking the bank? Good news: current members of the Duke Law and Duke University community have many options for accessing the full text of popular news sources. Some require the setup of an individual account, while others need only a NetID login from a link on a Duke website. The Goodson Law Library offers current members of...

Late last week, a former member of the Apex Town Council sued North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore for "alienation of affection" and "criminal conversation," domestic torts claims that are currently recognized in only a handful of states. Scott Lassiter, now an assistant principal in Wake County, alleges that Moore engaged in a years-long extramarital affair with the plaintiff's wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter, from whom he is now separated. The complaint also includes causes of action for conspiracy, trespass, conversion, and invasion of privacy against an unknown "Defendant John Doe" for allegedly entering Lassiter's property to install a motion-activated surveillance camera. The suit seeks more than $25,000 in damages. House Speaker Moore and Lassiter's wife both criticized the lawsuit to the media this weekend, with Moore calling the claims "baseless" and Liles Lassiter describing the filing as an "outrageous and defamatory su...

In 2019, engineer Phillip Wang launched a website called "This Person Does Not Exist," which harnessed the StyleGAN AI system to generate realistic-looking photographs of nonexistent people. Although Wang's original website is now defunct, scores of similar sites do exist, including a variation of This Person Does Not Exist and a variety of generators designed for such diverse uses as helping programmers look busy at work , creating a geography guessing game out of Google Street View , and introducing made-up dictionary definitions into the lexicon . Just a few years later, large language model (LLM) chatbots are the hottest trend in generative AI technology, with OpenAI's ChatGPT , Microsoft's Bing Chat (powered by ChatGPT), and Google's Bard the best-known of their kind. It's easy to see their appeal – type a quick prompt and almost instantly generate a wall of convincing-sounding text, complete with citations. Sound too good to be true? Alas, it ...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this May 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 summer coursework, Research Assistant assignments, research for journal/law review or moot court, non-profit/clinic work, or an externship sponsored by the school. Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on your part. Lexis : All returning students have auto...

"This content is available only to subscribers." "You have used your allotment of free articles this month." "Buy a day pass or subscribe to access this content." If you usually give up after you receive pop-ups like these on a news website, you might be missing out on alternative paths to accessing the full text of the stories you want through Duke's many subscription databases . While some sources do require pre-registration or a few additional steps to reach the same article, the access to the stories you want to read is often worth the extra effort. First, be aware of the complimentary direct access that the Duke Law and Duke University community enjoys to several major news outlets:  New York Times : Current members of the Duke Law community may join the Law School group account to receive complimentary access to NYTimes.com content on the web and selected smartphone apps. Student accounts will last until December of their graduation year; facult...

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...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this May 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. Graduating Students Westlaw : You may opt in to Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw and Practical Law, for six months after graduation for non-commercial use . This "Grad Elite" access allows 60 hours of usage on these products per month to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills. While you cannot use it in situations where you are billing a client, Thomson Reuters encourages you to use these tools to build your knowledge of the law and prepare for your bar exam. In order to activate Grad Elite access: 1) Log in at lawschool.tr.com ; use the drop-down menu by your name to access Grad Elite Status 2) Or click on this link: https://lawschool.westl...

On Monday, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees expects more than 60,000 of its members to begin a labor strike. The move would shut down film and television production across the country, unless and until an agreement is reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. They'll join several other labor union strikes that have made headlines in recent weeks, inspiring the hashtag #Striketober on social media. Currently, more than 10,000 workers at John Deere plants are on strike , following an overwhelming rejection of a new contract proposal. Another 1,400 employees of Kellogg cereal plants are also in their second week of a strike over labor negotiations. With unemployment rates continuing to trend toward pre-pandemic levels , and a record number of employees quitting jobs in what is now termed " The Great Resignation ", labor conditions and labor markets will likely be hot topics of conversation for the indefinite future. If ...

Legal matters seem to generate an avalanche of headlines every day, in both mainstream and specialized publications. How can a reader possibly keep up with the latest news? A few well-chosen RSS feeds and/or browser bookmarks may help, such as from the recommended legal news resources below. The ABA Journal website provides recent news stories from the American Bar Association, as well as articles and issues of its monthly print and digital magazine. (Back issues and articles can also be found in a number of third-party databases .) State and local bar association journals are another good source to keep up with legal developments in a particular jurisdiction. Many titles are available online, though often only to association members; the Duke community can access many titles through HeinOnline's Bar Journal Library . Law.com and Law360.com are two popular legal news sources. The full text of articles on their websites can be accessed directly from within the Law School...

Last week, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado sanctioned two attorneys for their filing in an election dispute lawsuit, citing "a woeful lack of investigation into the law" and "patently frivolous arguments." The judge's order directed the attorneys to pay opposing counsels' fees for filing motions in the suit. Other attorneys who filed challenges to the 2020 election results have experienced similar professional consequences: Rudolph Giuliani currently faces a D.C. bar ethics investigation , following the June suspension of his law license in New York, and earlier this summer former Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood weathered a high-profile hearing over potential sanctions in Michigan. These cases have been a very public reminder of the importance of attorneys keeping up to date with their ethical duties and obligations. Every day, lawyers across the country face sanctions or other disciplinary action for failures to uphold the rules of thei...