The Goodson Blogson

The new twenty-second edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation was published late last month. A joint project of the editors of four top law reviews (Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and Yale), the Bluebook provides guidance on citation forms for both practitioners (the Bluepages) and academics (the Whitepages). So what’s new in the 22d edition's 35 extra pages? Promising "hundreds of edits, large and small" (using the same introductory boilerplate as the 21st edition), the Preface contains a summary of noteworthy changes, with a similar explanatory list at W.S. Hein . Some of the key changes include the new introductory signal "contrast" in Rule 1.2 , expanded Special Citation Forms in Rule 15.8 (including a streamlined citation for Wright & Miller's Federal Practice and Procedure ), and a new Rule 14.4 on state administrative law materials, pushing the former rule at that number on commercial electronic databases to 14.5 . Electronic sources...

Did you write a seminar paper that made you especially proud this year? Consider reworking it for a legal writing contest this summer! The AccessLex Institute's Law School Scholarship Databank maintains a list of Writing Competitions , currently featuring close to 80 contests with prize amounts into the thousands of dollars. Many competitions also include publication opportunities in addition to cash prizes, making these a great opportunity to share your work with a wider audience.  Most listed competitions fall into the "up to $5,000" range, but some extend beyond that – such as the Judge John R. Brown Scholarship Foundation’s Brown Award for Excellence in Legal Writing , for which the first-place winner receives $15,000 (and four more finalists also receive cash prizes). That particular competition does require a faculty letter of recommendation along with the submission, so you’d have to work quickly to make it into consideration before the May 30 deadline. Other com...

Getting ready for the July bar exam? You're not alone: next month, thousands of aspiring attorneys will sit for a bar examination, just like more than 45,000 applicants did in July 2022. (The National Conference of Bar Examiners publishes annual statistics on bar exam administration in its Bar Examiner magazine and website.) The majority of jurisdictions now administer the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) , a two-day exam that allows test-takers to more easily transfer their score from one UBE jurisdiction in order to seek admission to another. UBE components include the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE) , a set of brief essays; the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) , an analytical writing simulation; and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) , a 200-question multiple-choice portion. UBE jurisdictions may also separately require a state-specific essay component. In addition, nearly every US jurisdiction (excepting Wisconsin and Puerto Rico) requires bar-takers to pass the separate M...

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 ...

Earlier this week, University of Missouri at Kansas City Law professors Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit updated their long-running guide, Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals , available as a free download on SSRN. The popular document provides links and guidance on submitting articles to the 196 flagship law journals in the U.S. One recent development for this fall's law review submission cycle is the closure of the former online submission portal ExpressO, announced last year and finalized on June 30. That leaves Scholastica's Law Review Author Submissions Center and email as the main points of contact for manuscript submission and tracking, although some individual journals have developed their own submission portals. Law review submissions are highly competitive, and if using Scholastica there is also a cost per submission involved. (Law faculty at Duke may join the Law School's group account with Scholastica by registering with their law...

The Law School community now has institutional access to PowerNotes , a research organization and outlining tool that uses a browser extension to capture, organize, and track sources from other databases and websites. Current Law School community members may sign up under an institutional account allowing unlimited projects with their Duke.edu email address. (Anyone may sign up for a free individual account that includes the creation of one project.) PowerNotes provides a helpful "Quick Start" guide to using its system. Users must install a browser extension for Chrome (also works with Microsoft Edge) or Firefox , and create an account with the system. The browser extension allows researchers to capture highlighted text on a website and add it to a project outline with notes. Outlines can be easily organized and also exported into various formats, including Microsoft Word and Excel or Google Docs and Sheets. PowerNotes can be used with free websites as well as subscrip...

In law practice (and life), sometimes you'll need to calculate a future date, especially for filing deadlines. While it may seem like a quick and simple task, any miscalculation could result in at least an embarrassing conversation, if not more severe consequences like a barred claim or even formal discipline. Some law practice management systems have this feature built in (like Thomson Reuters Firm Central Deadline Assistant), but others do not (for example, Clio's help page notes that while this feature is not yet available, users can request it). What should you do if your employer doesn't have such a tool built into its practice management system? As it turns out, there are a lot of options. On social media last week, Chicago attorney Brad Romance went viral for his "Next Level Lawyer Pro Tip" video of the future date calculation feature in Microsoft Outlook Calendar , in which users can type "today+45" (or any other number) in the date field of a...

As the ABA Journal and other news outlets reported this week, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a new notice on " Preferred Typefaces for Briefs ." The notice indicated that the court was revising its Handbook of Procedures and Internal Practices "to encourage the use of typefaces that are easier to read and to discourage use of Garamond." Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32(a)(5) doesn't encourage or discourage the use of specific fonts in briefs, but does outline general rules for font spacing and size. The D.C. Circuit's new handbook language fleshes out the FRAP requirements with additional guidance: "Certain typefaces can be easier to read, such as Century and Times New Roman. The Court encourages the use of these typefaces. Briefs that use Garamond as the typeface can be more difficult to read and the use of this typeface is discouraged." The announcement quickly sparked chatter on social media , with some attorneys reading the ...

The compressed fall semester schedule means that finals are just around the corner! Law school exams are stressful even in the best of times, so law school exams in 2020 may require some additional support. Fortunately, the Goodson Law Library provides access to some resources that can help ensure your success. Online study aids can be invaluable ways to clarify difficult concepts from class or fill in gaps in your outlining. Current Duke Law students have online access to both the West Academic Study Aids Library and the Wolters Kluwer Study Aid Library . While both services offer online reading/searching and offline download, different study aid and outline series are available in each database. West includes the series Concepts and Insights, Hornbooks, Nutshells, Black Letter Outlines, Legalines, Sum and Substance, Law Stories, and many more. Wolters Kluwer provides access to the series Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, Emanuel Law Outlines, and more. If law school ex...

Sure, grades are a good enough reason to put in the hours of research and writing on a seminar class paper. But what if all that hard work could earn you even more than a top grade? You might consider reworking past or current research projects for a law student writing competition . Many organizations sponsor writing contests for current law students, and most offer cash prizes as well as potential publication opportunities. How can you identify potential writing competitions for your project? The T.C. Williams Legal Essay Contest Catalog , maintained by the University of Richmond Law School, is the most comprehensive listing of law student writing competitions. The website features several useful searching and sorting options, including the ability to sort by subject matter, deadline, and even prize amount. The American Bar Association also maintains a list of Writing Competitions , which includes some contests not currently featured on the Richmond list. (This is likely because ...

The new 11th edition of Black's Law Dictionary has arrived at the library and online. Once our hard copies are processed, you can 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 11th edition changes. What's new in the 2019 edition? The publisher's description promises "new material on every page." More than 3,500 new terms have been added, bringing the total number of definitions higher than 55,000. Definitions now include information about the earliest known usage in the English language, a unique feature among law dictionaries. In addition, definitions for 900 Latin maxims have also been added to a new, separate section. Historical editions of Black's Law Dictionary are available on Reserve. The first (1891) and second (1910) editions are also available online. For help with locating Black's Law Dictionary ...

Live on the air during a BBC radio interview late last week, best-selling author Naomi Wolf received some unwelcome news about her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love . While discussing the history of same-sex relations in Victorian England, the program host disputed the author's claims that "several dozen executions" for the crime of homosexuality were recorded at the Old Bailey (London's Central Criminal Court). Wolf based this claim on the use of the phrase "death recorded" for defendants, such as 14-year-old Thomas Silver, whose guilty plea and death sentence for sodomy were recorded in 1859 . During the exchange, which can be heard around the 20:00 – 25:00 minute mark of the recording , host Matthew Sweet refuted Wolf's assertion that death sentences had been carried out for Silver and others convicted of sodomy or homosexuality. Sweet, whose 2001 book Inventing the Victorians debunked a number of common misconcep...

Around this halfway point of the semester, many law students are thinking about potential topics for their seminar papers, law journal notes, and/or other scholarly writing projects. In the first year at Duke Law, professors determine the topic of LARW writing assignments – after that, students are largely on their own. This can be a difficult adjustment for many, since topic selection is a critical stage of the academic writing process. Authors must find a potential topic that is both interesting and novel, and examine it from an angle that has not previously been explored in great depth by prior publications. The associated process of preemption checking can seem frustrating and overwhelming, as it often results in false starts and discarded potential topics. Fortunately, the Goodson Law Library has resources to help students navigate the maze. Some guidebooks on academic legal writing are available in the Reserve collection, and may be borrowed for four hours at a time: Volok...

Spring appellate brief writing assignments mean that dictionaries are in high demand around the library. But what dictionaries are the best to cite in a legal writing project? Which dictionaries are the most commonly consulted by courts? And what are your options for locating the full text in the library or online? Specialized Legal Dictionaries If you need the definition of a legal term, you'll want to begin with a law dictionary , rather than a basic English dictionary. There are three well-known U.S. legal dictionaries, and the current edition of each is electronically available on one of the major legal research services. Black's Law Dictionary is the most-cited legal dictionary in U.S. case law, by a wide margin. Currently in its tenth edition (2014), the latest version of Black's can be consulted in the Reference and Reserve collection on Level 3 of the library; as well as online in Westlaw . Previous editions of Black's can be found in the Superseded R...

Yes, yes, we know. FOMO, or "fear of missing out," is a term more frequently applied to social gatherings than to scholarship. But when you are researching a seminar paper, conducting a preemption check for your journal note, or even simply looking for something good to read, you don’t want to miss the latest or greatest resources. Fortunately, you have easy ways to keep up with the latest developments in the Goodson Law Library and on your research topics. New Library Acquisitions : The Advanced Search of the Duke Libraries Catalog includes a tab to Browse New Titles . You can view recently-added items in the Law Library or other campus libraries within the last week, month, or three months. If you really want to preview the latest, you can also choose to view titles that are currently "On Order" for a particular library. (Note that in catalog search results, you can also change the default sorting option from "Relevance" to "Pub date (newest)...

Legal forms can be a time-saving template for any attorney, providing suggested language for the drafting of a contract or legal pleading. In some areas of practice, the use of certain forms may be required. The Goodson Law Library has just updated its research guide to Legal Forms , which provides information about locating forms in print and electronic formats. The Goodson Law Library maintains a collection of many major form book sets in print, including American Jurisprudence Legal Forms (a companion to the AmJur encyclopedia), West's Legal Forms , and Douglas' Forms (specific to North Carolina practice). Most of the general form sets can be found in the Practice & Procedure collection on Level 3; Douglas' Forms is located in the North Carolina Alcove on Level 2. Krusty's Legal Forms , which is sadly not a real publication. Credit: The Simpsons: The Last Temptation of Krust (FOX television broadcast Feb. 22, 1998). As the guide notes, members of th...

[This is a guest post by Reference Librarian and Senior Lecturing Fellow Marguerite Most .] Whether you're returning to Duke after a summer away, or you're new to Duke Law School and just beginning your legal career, you'll soon learn that a new 20th edition of The Bluebook has arrived. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the legal citation manual followed by journals at Duke Law School, taught in the LARW course required of all 1L students, and used at most law schools nationwide. Print copies of the 20th edition are available on reserve at the Circulation/Reserve desk and the new electronic (subscription) version is available for purchase online . For a practical introduction to the 2015 edition of The Bluebook , see the Goodson Blogson post of June 5 which announced this new 20th edition, highlighted several significant rule changes and linked to a list of differences between the 19th and 20th editions. A change that will surely please law review editors...

Last week, the long-awaited 20th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation hit bookshelves. While the Goodson Law Library's copies have yet to arrive, the 20th edition will replace its 2010 predecessor on Reserve after arrival and processing. Bluebook users with subscription access to the electronic version at LegalBluebook.com can already view the new edition online. (Purchasers of the print edition will also receive a code for a 30-day free trial of the online version; or the book can be purchased as a bundle with online access for up to 3 years.) In the meantime, legal researchers have already begun noting the latest rule changes. Law librarian Janelle Beitz compiled a list of differences between the 19th and 20th editions on Google Drive. The new edition clarifies rules regarding quotations within a quotation, adds sources and terms to various tables, and includes some new material in Rule 18, which governs the citation of electronic resources. Although the B...

Black's Law Dictionary , the leading dictionary for American legal researchers, has recently been released in its new 10th edition . Its publisher has created an announcement page highlighting the history of the dictionary, which first appeared in 1891. The publisher page, as well as a recent ABA Journal article by longtime dictionary editor Bryan A. Garner , gives a look behind the scenes of the new edition's development. More than 7,500 new entries have been added, and thousands of other entries have been revised and updated. The dictionary has also expanded its coverage of Latin maxims, with assistance from expert classicists and a former Oxford University professor of Roman law. The Goodson Law Library will soon add the 10th edition of Black's to its collection, where it will replace the 2009 9th edition in Reference and on Reserve . There is no word yet on when the new terms and definitions will be added to the BLACKS database on Westlaw , which currently contain...

Short titles, or " popular names ," are an easy way for politicians to make their proposed bills more memorable. These legislative nicknames can influence public perception of the law's purpose or effect. They can also make complicated legislation more easily digestible in media sound bites – and might even help strong-arm others into approving the proposed bill. For instance, what hapless lawmaker would dare vote against something called the "Abandoned Infants Assistance Act" in an election year? (Actually, we can't tell – the Congressional Record reported only a voice vote, rather than an individual roll call vote.) And would the law enforcement surveillance powers which were expanded after 9/11 have been debated more hotly before passage, had they not been draped in the red-white-and-blue moniker "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act"? (More short titles...