The Goodson Blogson

If you feel guilty about not calling Mom and Dad enough, be glad you don’t live in China-- where the Civil Affairs Ministry has proposed a new law which would allow lonely parents to sue their adult children if they fail to visit regularly. Today’s New York Times has the full story on the proposal , which is intended to promote closer families and also prevent elder neglect and abuse. (Some provinces in China already have similar local ordinances; the article describes one mother who sued her adult daughters for neglect and received a judgment of monthly “parental support” from each woman.) Chinese academics and officials who were interviewed by the Times express doubt that this measure will actually be adopted at the next annual session of the National People’s Congress in March. But the proposal has raised public awareness of a growing social concern about China’s elderly-- within the next 40 years, a full 25% of the country’s population will be over the age of 65. The expanding e...

Not a Bluebook fan? You’re in distinguished company. As Above the Law reported earlier today , Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has just published a humorous “review” of the new 19th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation . “ The Bluebook Blues ” is available on the Yale Law Journal website, and appears in the new Winter 2010 issue (which will arrive in print at the library soon). Posner’s disdain for the Bluebook has been well-documented since at least 1986, when he published an even more scathing critique in the Chicago Law Review , featuring a list of the nineteen most obnoxious “ anti-lessons ” in writing which Posner believed the Bluebook rules reinforced (#1: overuse of passive voice; #10: “Always be stuffy, boring”). Noting that the Bluebook has more than doubled in page length since his last review, Posner now describes it as a “monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of...

The Examples & Explanations (E&E) book series are popular law school study aids, and it’s easy to see why: written by law professors, these books give a narrative overview of the key concepts and rules for a particular legal subject, followed by “examples” (hypothetical questions) and “explanations” of the answers. The Goodson Law Library purchases every title in this series ( full list ), and previously kept them on Level 2, organized by call number. Although normally items in the stacks loan out for 4 weeks at a time, borrowers of E&E books frequently found their due dates cut short by recall/hold requests from other eager readers, making access to the titles a frustrating experience for everybody. To ensure access to as many readers as possible, the Goodson Law Library has now placed the most current edition of every Examples & Explanations title on Reserve , where they can be borrowed for 4 hours at a time (or overnight if borrowed with less than four hours befo...

If it’s true that, as the saying goes, “All politics is local,” it may be equally true that “All law is global.” These days, multinational corporations are keeping abreast of business law developments in every country they call home. American law professors are asked to provide feedback to the drafters of a proposed constitution in Kenya . And more than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has famously looked to court decisions from other countries when considering its domestic jurisprudence on the death penalty and other topics (download a history of such citations from 1789-2005 for free at SSRN). At this rate, even a lawyer who never leaves the USA in his or her lifetime will need to research foreign and/or comparative law at some point. Fortunately (and unsurprisingly), the use and study of foreign legal materials grew increasingly more popular at the same time that the Internet began to make them easier to locate. While there are still major challenges to accessing foreign law—not ev...

If you use the Goodson Law Library’s homepage “Catalog Search” box , you may soon notice a slight difference in the look and feel of your search results. Starting January 5, the Goodson Law Library will change its default catalog search from the “Classic” to the “Basic” view. Links will be updated on the library homepage, as well as in all research guides and other instructional materials. The new catalog interface contains the same inventory (the collections of all the Duke University Libraries), but with a few changes to the search methodology. Results are displayed by relevance , rather than the traditional reverse-chronological order (making it much easier to search for periodical items, like magazines and newspapers, where the “date” listed in the catalog record is the first year of publication; the reverse-chronological display often pushes these items very low on a search result list). Faceted browsing allows you to further narrow your search results based on certain limits,...