The Goodson Blogson

Last month marked a milestone for the Caselaw Access Project (CAP) , an ambitious project from the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab to digitize centuries of U.S. federal and state case law for free public access. Launched in 2016 with the financial backing of online legal research company Ravel Law (now owned by LexisNexis ), the Caselaw Access Project involved the digitization of more than 36 million pages of printed case reporters. The original agreement contained a commercial use restriction for eight years, which has now expired. The Innovation Lab commemorated the occasion with a conference on March 8 , highlighting the history of the project and use cases for the future. For more information on the history of the project, see Adam Ziegler's guest post at Bob Ambrogi's Law Sites . The Search feature on the legacy version of the CAP website links to CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search , which has incorporated the CAP content. The beta version of the  CAP websit...

New Year's Day is a time for many to take stock of personal goals for the future. But January 1 also merits a look back to the past, as this year thousands of copyrighted works from 1926 will enter the public domain, along with hundreds of thousands of pre-1923 sound recordings. Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain outlines these exciting new additions at Public Domain Day 2022 . Books entering the U.S. public domain this year include early works by Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, and Agatha Christie. Films starring the likes of Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino will join them, along with compositions by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Irving Berlin. As noted at the Public Domain Day site, this year features the first major entry of sound recordings into the public domain, under the schedule created by Congress in the 2018 Music Modernization Act . (These older compositions were already in the public domain, but the indi...

Sunday, November 7 marks the thirteenth anniversary of a fateful meeting at the Goodson Law Library. During the Law School's Dedication Week festivities in 2008, marking the end of a fifteen-month building renovation project, a group of academic law library directors gathered in the library's conference room. That meeting was the genesis of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship , formally released in February 2009 after several months of drafting. The Durham Statement aimed to improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information through formal commitments to open access and electronic publication. In February 2021, the current directors of the signatory law libraries formed a Durham Statement Review Task Force, comprised of representatives from four drafting schools, in order to explore the current status of the Statement's adoption, examine barriers to adoption, and recommend best practices going forward, including potential revisions to the statem...

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...

Last week, Duke Today published the fall installment of its Guide to Duke Author Books Series . The roundup of recent faculty book publications features several new titles by Duke Law faculty, including: Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller: The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller ( watch video introduction ) Allen Buchanan: Institutionalizing the Just War Charles T. Clotfelter: Big-Time Sports in American Universities , 2d ed. Brandon L. Garrett, co-author: The Death Penalty Laurence R. Helfer, co-editor: International Court Authority Jack Knight, editor: Immigration, Emigration, and Migration The Goodson Law Library has print or online access to these and hundreds of other publications by Duke Law faculty. The display case at the library entrance features book publications and article offprints from roughly the last two years; additional print copies of faculty books can be found in the library stacks. To locate call numbers and avail...

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...

In honor of Open Access Week , the Goodson Blogson is highlighting another free research resource. Last week, we brought you the news that HeinOnline and the Law Library of Congress had teamed up to provide free public access to historical federal legal materials like the U.S. Code and U.S. Supreme Court cases. Today, we're featuring a new free resource for historical doctoral dissertations . Earlier this month, EBSCO announced the release of American Doctoral Dissertations 1933-1955 , a free digitized index of nearly 100,000 doctoral dissertations which were accepted by American universities during those three decades. The database, available at http://opendissertations.com/ , includes scans of a print index set, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities , which is also available in the Duke University Libraries' off-site storage facility . Searching this free database does not include the same features as other EBSCO-produced subscription databases, but...

Today marks the end of the sixth annual Open Access Week , an international effort to promote free access to scholarly research. Previous years' events and initiatives are detailed in past Blogson entries . This year, we'd like to highlight an ongoing effort at Duke Law School, which illustrates our commitment to open access: The Duke Law Scholarship Repository . Since 1998, Duke's student-edited journals have been freely accessible on the Duke Law website. The Faculty Scholarship Repositor y was launched in 2005 to provide broader access to the research of our faculty and affiliates. Today, the Repository houses both the long-running Faculty Scholarship collection as well as the complete back files of Duke Law's nine student-edited journals , which were added to the repository over the last year. Both our collection and audience continue to grow steadily; in mid-September, Duke became the first law school repository to reach 1.5 million downloads . For a glimpse ...

Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a House resolution intended to provide wider public access to reports prepared by the Congressional Research Service . CRS staff members research and draft reports on current legislative and policy concerns, which are made accessible to all members of Congress. The reports give important background information to lawmakers on such diverse topics as the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions , the political outlook in other countries , and even the procedure for naming U.S. Navy ships . Their access to the public is far more unpredictable, though – citizens may request free copies of particular reports from their elected representatives, assuming that they are able to identify a desired report title. A commercial publisher, Penny Hill Press , provides RSS feeds of newly-released reports, and sells them as PDF downloads for around $30 each. As described in the library's research guide to Federal Legislative History , the full ...

In the spirit of Open Access Week , (see more about Open Access at Duke ), Reference Librarian Kelly Leong highlights the collaborative efforts of the U.S. Government Printing Office and Administrative Office of the United States Courts in piloting a program to offer free electronic access to federal court opinions. FDsys , the GPO’s collection of electronic materials, currently offers a plethora of free authenticated content, including the U.S. Code , Federal Register , and numerous congressional documents. As announced earlier this month , FDsys now also offers the United States Courts Opinions – Beta collection , providing free electronic access to federal court opinions. The current Beta version offers the authenticated opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, U.S. Bankruptcy Court - Southern District of New York and U.S. Bankruptcy Court - Southern District of Florida. The collection is set to expand to twelve courts...

During the Goodson Law Library’s Dedication Week in November 2008, a meeting of prominent law library directors resulted in the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship , which urges law schools to cease print publication of law reviews in favor of free, permanent, online publication archives. On Friday, October 22, an all-day event at the Law School will discuss best practices for implementing this policy. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Goodson Law Library , Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain , and the Harvard Law School Library . Panels will address the traditional versus open access business model for law journals, how a move to open access affects copyright and author agreements, and technological concerns such as publishing platforms and archiving processes. The agenda, registration form, and housing information can be found at http://bit.ly/durhamOA . Duke Law and our co-sponsors at Harvard Law have long been leaders in the Open Access movement fo...

A highlight of our first Research Madness workshop yesterday was the discussion of free sources for legal articles. While law review and journal articles can be a time-saving crash course on an unfamiliar legal topic, racking up search charges for background-gathering on Lexis and Westlaw can be counterproductive. Fortunately, a number of law reviews and journals have embraced open-access publishing, making it easier to find helpful secondary sources on a search of the free web. The American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center has assembled a custom search engine which scours more than 300 open-access law reviews and legal journals . The engine includes all Duke Law journals (which have been provided free on the web since 1997), as well as many other major U.S. law reviews, several bar journals, and a variety of international and foreign law publications. It also searches SSRN and BePress , major sources for pre-publication articles and working papers. The LTRC engine...

On Wednesday, a Georgia judge ordered the state Bureau of Investigation to prevent public dissemination of gruesome crime scene photographs from a high-profile murder case . A journalist from Hustler magazine had sought the release of police photographs of 24-year-old victim Meredith Emerson, whose body was found nude and decapitated along a Georgia hiking trail in 2008 who disappeared from a Georgia hiking trail in 2008 and was later found nude and decapitated [corrected after comments below]. Emerson’s family requested and received a temporary restraining order which would block the photographs from public release. (Similar restrictions were already in place for autopsy photographs under the state’s open records law, but the status of crime scene photographs in Georgia is murkier.) The court order came as members of the Georgia state legislature simultaneously worked to pass the Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act , which would require permission of the victim’s next of kin for t...

The blogosphere was abuzz this morning about Google Scholar ’s quiet addition of federal case law, state case law, and legal journal articles to its already-large full-text index of academic journal literature. Official details remain sketchy, but it appears that the legal content includes Supreme Court case law back to volume 1 of the U.S. Reports , federal appellate cases back to the 1920s, and state cases back to the 1950s. Law journal literature is also included. So you think Lexis and Westlaw are now yesterday’s news? Well, not so fast. Gone is the precision searching of Terms & Connectors-- search results are closer to Natural Language, and in some cases maybe not even that sophisticated. There also seems little opportunity to refine search results which are too broad, making Google Scholar perhaps better suited to retrieving known citations than attempting to retrieve a useful list of all the relevant cases on a particular topic. Like much of the social science literature i...

Last year, the Goodson Law Library celebrated Open Access Day , the first-ever international celebration of the Open Access (OA) movement, which encourages the use of the Internet to freely distribute scholarship which is normally locked behind online subscription databases or published in costly print resources. Although the Open Access movement is rooted in the hard sciences, as a reaction to publicly-funded scientific research results being published in prohibitively expensive journals, the principles of Open Access have spread to other disciplines, including the social sciences. This year, the success of 2008’s Open Access Day has resulted in 2009’s Open Access Week (October 19-23) . Duke University will celebrate with several events, including a panel on Friday, October 23 about open access to health information around the world. For a complete listing of Duke events, see Open Access Week at Duke . For a fuller listing of events beyond Duke, check out http://www.openaccessweek.org...

Earlier this month, the White House announced that for the first time in history, its visitor log will be made available to the public on a rolling 90-day delay. The automatic publication will begin with visits after September 15, which will be published by December 31, 2009; records of visits dating from the Obama inauguration to September 15 may now be requested on a case-by-case basis at http://www.whitehouse.gov/RequestVisitorRecords/ . The reversal comes after several lawsuits from advocacy groups, which sought information on visits by a number of health care industry executives. The Obama administration agreed to the “voluntary” disclosure policy in order to settle the lawsuits, but maintains the historical White House position that release of the visitor logs is not actually required under the Freedom of Information Act. (Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also resisted the release of visitor records during their time in office, and both relented only after legal pressu...

During Building Dedication Week in November 2008, a group of law library directors (including representatives from University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, New York University, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, the University of Texas, and Yale) held a meeting at the Duke Law School. Hosted by Senior Associate Dean for Information Services Richard A. Danner , the group drafted the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship , which is now posted at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/durhamstatement . The goal of the statement is to "urge every U.S. law school" to publish "definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print." Several additional law schools have already been added as signatories to the statement, and individuals will be able to sign on via the website later this week. The Duk...