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Guest post author: The Law Library Outreach Team Studying for the bar exam in late July? Six weeks out, you're likely immersed in topics like issue preclusion, hearsay exceptions, and equitable servitudes. When you need a study break, though, check out the Goodson Law Library’s collection of print and online materials designed to help you do your very best. This summer, you will find a selection of current bar study books in the blue self-service LibCabinets in the Reading Room on level 3. We have works covering test-taking strategies, managing bar prep material, and most importantly, staying healthy during this stressful time. Some examples include The Bar Exam in a Nutshell (also available online ), The Ultimate Guide to the UBE , and The Zen of Passing the Bar Exam . You can access additional works online with your NetID and password via the West Academic Study Aids Library . Look for Bar Exam Success: A Comprehensive Guide or Acing the Bar Exam: A Checklist Approach to ...

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...