The Goodson Blogson

Over the holiday weekend, a CNN affiliate investigated growing consumer complaints about At The Beach, Inc., an area tanning salon chain with some pretty stringent member agreements. Customers claim that they were duped into signing virtually-unbreakable two-year contracts, and then burned by the fine print when attempting to cancel their accounts. Although most—including the news station’s undercover reporter—were assured by friendly employees that the contracts could be canceled “at any time,” consumers say they were not informed of the requirement to either “buy out” 50% of the remaining time on their contracts, or to prove that they had moved at least 25 miles away from the closest location in order to stop the automatic monthly billing. Is your inner lawyer feeling a distinct lack of sympathy for those who signed without reading? As the news video (5:49) shows, even seasoned attorneys can get caught in a contract trap: interview subject Kevin Lanoha is corporate counsel at Qwest...

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama will grant a “ pardon ” to two otherwise-doomed Thanksgiving turkeys, Courage and Carolina ( official video preview ). These Princeton, NC natives ( story at WRAL ) will be honored in a ceremony on the White House lawn before boarding a plane to California, where Courage will serve as honorary grand marshal for Disney’s Thanksgiving Parade. (Carolina, as the Alternate National Turkey, will be ready to step in should Courage be unable to perform his duties.) Following the parade, the pair will settle into a stuffing-free life at Disneyland’s Frontierland theme park. The WRAL article and many other news sources credit the annual Thanksgiving tradition as originating with President Harry Truman in 1947. However, the popular myth-busting website Snopes.com provides a detailed analysis of the annual turkey pardon , tracing the tradition back only to President George H.W. Bush in 1989. (Anecdotal stories involving Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan do not pass...

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...

Cite-checkers, rejoice: HeinOnline has added an online archive of more than 50 state and regional bar association journals. The library receives many of these titles in print, but maintains the archive in microfiche rather than print (meaning that generally only the current year is available in the Periodicals collection, and researchers must access older issues in the Microforms Room). To access the bar journals, choose “ Bar Journal Library ” from the HeinOnline start page (a link to HeinOnline will also be included in the library’s catalog and e-journal records for an individual journal title). All bar journals date back to volume 1, and are available in PDF. The title list includes ABA Journal as well as state bar association publications ( Alaska Bar Rag , New York State Bar Association Journal ), city bar journals ( Boston Bar Journal , Los Angeles Lawyer ), and even international publications ( International Bar Journal ). Also of interest is the addition of the Duke Bar Ass...

Political cartoons do more than amuse (and occasionally confuse)—they can express, as well as shape, public opinion. Most American high school students learn of the medium’s historical influence through the story of William "Boss" Tweed , a 19th-century New York City politician who was assailed for corruption in a series of Harper’s Weekly cartoons (in addition to a number of articles). Furious over the cartoons’ persuasive power, Tweed reportedly said, “I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don't know how to read. But they can't help seeing them damned pictures!” There are a variety of reasons why you might search for a particular political cartoon—from as complex as exploring the development of public opinion on a particular topic over time, to as simple as jazzing up a presentation. But where do you go when search engines fail? The Goodson Blogson has some ideas. Published collections of cartoons from a particular time period or ...