The Goodson Blogson

The Goodson Law Library research guide to Court Records & Briefs has recently been updated. In addition to corrected web links and updated guidance to free and premium resources like PACER and Bloomberg Law dockets searching, the guide includes a number of new records and briefs compilations that were added since the last update. Some highlights include: The Making of Modern Law: Landmark Records and Briefs of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 1891-1980 features selected records and briefs from the U.S. Courts of Appeals dating from the 1890s to 1980. Drawn from a number of source libraries (including the National Archives, the New York City Bar Library, and the University of Iowa), featured cases cover a wide range of subject matter. The database is searchable by case name, citation, and keyword, and a "Topic Finder" feature is also available. LLMC Digital has expanded its records and briefs offerings since the last guide update. Its Records and Briefs search tab (avai...

Last week, Bloomberg Law announced a change to its academic subscription docket usage caps. Effective July 2022, the system will reset educational account users' docket "billing" for the year on July 1, rather than January 1, to more closely track the academic calendar. As many Law School community members already know, Bloomberg Law provides subscribers with robust access to federal and state court dockets and filings. Individual users can request the full text of documents that are available for electronic retrieval, and track/update pending case dockets as well. Although this service comes at a cost to commercial subscribers, Bloomberg subsidizes these costs for academic users: up to $1,500 per person each year or up to an institutional cap (equivalent to 30% of the annual subscription cost paid by the institution, which varies depending on size). ( Note: Academic subscribers are not eligible to request items that require courier service to retrieve.) More informa...

Today marked the inauguration of 46th President of the United States Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. The new administration is already taking action on several campaign promises, including the signing of seventeen Executive Orders on a diverse array of topics. Some, such as the United States rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and reversing course on the Keystone XL pipeline project, are direct reversals of executive actions from the previous administration. Others are aimed at tackling the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The first 100 days of a new administration are considered to be a critical benchmark in measuring a new president’s productivity. How can you keep up with the latest developments from the executive branch? We’re glad you asked! The White House Briefing Room will link to key speeches and statements, as well as presidential actions. Executive orders are published in the daily Federal Register , which has a page just for orders ...

How many email addresses do you have? More importantly, how many email addresses have you forgotten about? In June, Lifehacker posted a helpful guide, How to Find and Delete Your Old Email Addresses . Echoing concerns raised recently by Consumer Reports , the posts noted that dormant email accounts present a serious security vulnerability – especially if you used them as password recovery addresses for linked services or other, more valuable email accounts. Both posts detail some steps to locate and delete unwanted, dormant email addresses. A few key tips to identify past addresses to potentially shutter: Conduct a web search for your known usernames and email addresses. View the connected email accounts on your social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) by accessing your Settings. Check the secondary "password recovery" accounts listed on your primary email account and other online services. Review any saved logins in your web browsers or passw...

Today, Lexis Advance launched its new Context product for legal analytics, currently featuring analysis for judges and expert witnesses. Lexis users at Duke Law can access this new tool from the grid in the top left corner of any Lexis Advance screen. (Be sure to choose "Context" and not "Litigation Profile Suite" – although the latter tool also includes profiles of judges and expert witnesses, these are separate products and do not appear to cross-link.) [ Update: currently, Context access is available only to Law School faculty; student accounts will see the new product on January 2.] If the Context report interface looks a bit familiar, you may have seen a similar version for judges on Ravel Law , the legal research start-up which Lexis acquired last year . Profiles for Judges include biographical information as well as "Analysis" data about motion outcomes, most-cited opinions and judges, and even the specific passages upon which the judge relies...

In this guest post, Reference Librarian and Senior Lecturing Fellow Marguerite Most explores a new option for researching judges' working papers, and discusses the legal issues surrounding personal archives. Judicial working papers are materials written as a case is decided and may include internal draft memos, conference notes and correspondence, and vote sheets. The official record in a case could include briefs, motions, transcripts of hearings, and the final opinion in a case. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 shifted presidential records from private to public ownership. However, chamber papers and other records of federal judges are considered the personal property of the judge who created them, and have never been subject to a defined policy of collection and preservation, unlike official court records. In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter announced his intent to law professor Alexander M. Bickel that "all my private papers pertaining to my w...

When Grammy and Academy Award-winning musician Prince (née Prince Rogers Nelson) passed away last week at age 57, his fans around the world were shocked at the sudden loss. This week, it was alleged in court filings that the famed entertainer died without preparing a will – this time, sending a shock through the legal community. Prince's estate is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions , including his lucrative songwriting catalog (which Prince controlled after decades of legal wrangling with record labels). Prince was unmarried and had no living parents or children (his only son, with ex-wife Mayte Garcia, died shortly after his 1996 birth). Tyka Nelson, Prince's sister, has petitioned a Minnesota court for control of the entertainer's estate. (Prince also has five half-siblings, which the ABA Journal notes are treated as full siblings under Minnesota probate law.) While it's surprising that Prince would die intestate after a career marked by legal battles over ...

On Thursday, three nonprofit groups filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The complaint , which is available free from the Alliance for Justice website and the Internet Archive , alleges that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts charges excessive fees to access federal court filings on its PACER service (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). The Wall Street Journal Law Blog and ABA Journal have helpful write-ups of the case background. As legal researchers know, PACER.gov is the official source for federal court filings, and is currently used in all federal jurisdictions except the U.S. Supreme Court (which announced in its 2014 Year-End Report of the Chief Justice that it is developing its own electronic alternative for filings). PACER requires individuals to register an account, along with a credit card for payment of any fees incurred above $15 in a quarterly billing period. Fees in PACER (for both searching and vi...

March 16-22, 2014 is Sunshine Week , an annual event to promote the importance of government transparency. Sunshine Week highlights such issues as increased access to public records, the importance of Freedom of Information Acts at the state and federal levels, and other government accountability concerns. One new participant this year is the Coalition for Court Transparency , which calls upon the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the video broadcast of oral arguments. The Coalition's website includes a petition to Chief Justice John Roberts, and an advertisement calling for "a more open judiciary". (Supreme Court justices have long resisted efforts to allow televised oral arguments. Last month, a political activist posted hidden camera footage taken during oral argument in McCutcheon v. FEC , a pending high-profile case from this term which has been dubbed " Citizens United II".) Freedom of information and enhanced access to public records are both frequent s...

After several years of vacation at the University's off-site storage facility, the Goodson Law Library's print collection of records and briefs from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has returned to Level 1 of the library. The print collection includes briefs and other filings from federal cases which were appealed to the Fourth Circuit during the years 1891 to 1976. (Similar materials from 1983 to 1998 are available in the Microforms Room on Level 1; filings from 1998 to present can be found online via PACER , available to the Duke Law community through Bloomberg Law .) The Fourth Circuit hears appeals from federal cases which originated in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. Records and briefs include the papers which were submitted to or generated by a court in a particular case, from the complaint (in a civil case) or the indictment (in a criminal case) to pleadings, motions, orders, transcripts of the trial, jury verdicts, and assoc...

The Duke University Libraries now have access to Ancestry Library Edition , the institutional subscription level for Ancestry.com . All members of the University community can now access the popular genealogy database via campus computers, or from off-campus with a NetID and password. This news comes right on the heels of a Library of Congress blog post encouraging readers to use the holiday season as an opportunity to begin tracing family histories. But if family trees don't interest you, there may still be hidden treasures in the Ancestry database. Genealogists have long known the value of legal research materials; for example, see Kurt X. Metzmeier's 2006 bar newsletter article History in the Law Library: Using Legal Materials to Explore the Past and Find Lawyers, Felons and Other Scoundrels in Your Family Tree , available on SSRN . With this campus-wide access to Ancestry, perhaps legal researchers will discover the value of genealogical materials in turn. Ancestry’s ...

Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper released a number of newly-declassified documents related to the operations of the National Security Agency . The NSA has occupied the headlines all summer, since former contract employee Edward Snowden released materials to the media which exposed details of large-scale government surveillance programs. But this week's releases were actually prompted by a ruling in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed several years earlier by the watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation (see news release & searchable collection of documents ). The documents include a number of redacted opinions and orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) . The operations of this mysterious federal court, which was established in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), have long been a source of interest for scholars and privacy advocates. Federal law provides that "The Foreign Intelligen...

[In this guest post, Reference Librarian and Senior Lecturing Fellow Marguerite Most explores the history of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, just as a new collection of previously-unreleased opinions has been published.] "Criminal Liability for Newspaper Publication of Naval Secrets"…"Use of Marshals, Troops, and Other Federal Personnel for Law Enforcement in Mississippi"…"The President and the War Power: South Vietnam and the Cambodian Sanctuaries". The Table of Contents reads like above-the-fold headlines in our nation's most respected newspapers. These are actually titles in the new series of supplemental opinions from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel , most of which address the legality of executive orders. These are opinions which "with the passage of time have become publishable." Last week, the Office of Legal Counsel released volume one of its new series: Supplemental Opinions of t...

It may not be obvious from their name, but non-profit (often interchangeably called tax-exempt ) organizations may actually deal with vast sums of money. In exchange for special tax treatment, exempt organizations in the United States are required to file special reports with the Internal Revenue Service. These annual Form 990s provide detailed descriptions of the organization's operations, including governance structure and compensation of employees. Form 990 can be a useful tool for evaluating how donations to a charitable organization will likely end up being distributed. The subscription service GuideStar (available to the Duke University community with a current NetID and password) and free websites like Charity Navigator (selected features available without free registration) use this data to assess the financial health of a nonprofit organization, and sometimes even provide a rating system for consumers. (For example, Duke University receives 3 stars out of a possible...

In his upcoming book Reflections on Judging (due out this fall), U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner urges his peers on the bench to embrace extracurricular web-surfing in order to better understand the cases before them. According to the Wall Street Journal 's Law Blog (subscription required), which obtained a review copy of the work, Posner complains that judges' technophobia creates a vicious cycle of under-informed case records: "Judicial timidity about conducting Internet research has a negative feedback. Appellate lawyers naturally focus their briefs and oral arguments on what the judges have the easiest access to. […]The Web is an incredible compendium of data and a potentially invaluable resource for lawyers and judges that is underutilized by them." For his part, Posner has used web searching to find common definitions of the word "harboring" (as many rising 2Ls will remember from this spring's LARW appellate brief), and also...

On Friday, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) posted a new interactive tutorial about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) . The CALI lesson provides an overview of the federal statute, which details the basic right of the American public to obtain access to federal agency records (subject to certain disclosure exemptions). Author Phillip Sparkes of Northern Kentucky University's Chase College of Law outlines the various requirements and exclusions within the current version of the statute, which has been amended several times since its original enactment in 1966. The new CALI lesson is particularly timely, as controversy continues to swirl around the release last Monday of a U.S. Department of Justice white paper ( PDF ) which described the legal justification for ordering deadly "drone strikes" against American citizens who hold senior positions within the global terrorist organization al-Qaeda. NBC News obtained a copy of the undated sixteen...

This week, the blogosphere was buzzing with gossip about a foul-mouthed deposition given by pop star Lady Gaga. Although the entertainer ' s former personal assistant filed the labor lawsuit in question way back in December 2011, excerpts of the August 2012 deposition didn't surface until last week. The NY Post was the first to publish highlights of the six-hour interview, in which Lady Gaga blasted her ex-employee as an incompetent freeloader, cursed repeatedly at plaintiff's counsel, and insisted on preserving all of her uncensored thoughts for the record: "[I]f you're going to ask me questions for the next five hours, I am going to tell you exactly what [expletive] happened, so that the judge can read on this transcript exactly what's going on." The ABA Journal and Above the Law spread the salacious story further. But as is common practice within the media, other news outlets quoted the explosive Post excerpts without providing much additional info...

Earlier this week, the U.S. Government Printing Office announced the release of the 2012 United States Policy and Supporting Positions , better known by its nickname: " the Plum Book ." Published every four years following the presidential election, the Plum Book provides a listing of more than 8,000 presidentially-appointed federal government positions, along with information about the current employees (where applicable). The volume is divided into the three branches of government, then by department, agency or office (see Table of Contents ). The Plum Book also includes a breakdown of positions subject to non-competitive appointment , as well as federal salary schedules . For those who aspire to a career in federal politics, the Plum Book is an essential resource; for others, it's an interesting view of the inner workings of Washington, D.C. Although the Goodson Law Library no longer receives the Plum Book in print format, it is available free in PDF and text f...

As the trial of John Edwards drags into its ninth day of jury deliberations, you might wonder what is taking so long. The former U.S. Senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate was indicted in 2011 for violating federal campaign finance laws in order to conceal his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, during his 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yesterday, the News & Observer reported that the members of the jury "have been behind closed doors for twice as long as it took the defense to present its side of the case." A note from one juror prompted several closed-door sessions between U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles and the attorneys on each side of the case. In addition, the four alternate jurors (who have not participated in the deliberations thus far) were allowed to return to their daily lives rather than spend more time waiting at the courthouse, although they remain “on call” if any of the twelve regular jurors are dismissed, and are st...

While Sunday’s season premiere of Mad Men spawned countless 1960s-themed viewing parties, next week the National Archives and Records Administration is “taking you back to the 1940s” . On Monday, April 2, at 9:00 a.m., the individual records from the 1940 U.S. Census will be released online, to the delight of genealogists, historians, and other researchers. Why the delay? As NARA explains on its website, “[t]he 1940 and later censuses are not available for public use because of a statutory 72-year restriction on access for privacy reasons . (92 Stat. 915; Public Law 95-416; October 5, 1978).” (Seasoned legal researchers know that they can find this law via the U.S. Statutes at Large in our Federal Alcove, or in HeinOnline .) Although the 72-year privacy window will have closed, limitations on the database will present additional hurdles: upon initial release, Census researchers will be able to browse only by address (though an army of dedicated volunteers will begin to create a na...