The Goodson Blogson

As final exams draw to a close, it's time to start thinking about summer. Beginning in May, many commonly-used legal research resources will restrict student access over the summer , to help avoid the use of nonprofit educational passwords at paid summer employment. However, each service treats summer access a little bit differently, and there may be further variations for continuing vs. graduating students. Here’s your guide to summer legal research access. Bloomberg Law accounts are valid between school terms and for 6 months after you graduate. Your Law School Bloomberg account may be used for both academic and employment-related purposes, including full access to federal court filings from PACER (see our research guide ). If you do not already have a Bloomberg Law account, you may Request A Law School Account with your Duke email address. LexisNexis will provide unlimited access this summer to Lexis Advance, its next-generation research interface. Beginning in May, Lexis ...

After several years of operating alongside "next-generation" platform WestlawNext, Westlaw Classic will no longer be visible to all Law School password-holders , beginning on July 1. You will likely see announcements about this change when logging in to Westlaw . After July 1, WestlawNext will be the only option at the Law School for accessing Westlaw legal research content. For databases where WestlawNext users are currently "bridged" into Classic (illustrated by an arrow pointing to the upper right, such as selected public records), WestlawNext will continue to link to the Classic interface after July 1. Law firms, courts and governments will also continue to have access to Classic for a while longer – meaning your LARW training on the Classic interface could still prove useful for the time being! If you are unable to locate particular sources, or notice other features from Classic which are missing in WestlawNext, you are encouraged to report them directly b...

One of the most popular postings in Goodson Blogson history was our 2009 exploration of Hollywood's "Hays Code," which governed immoral or indecent conduct in American films during the early part of the twentieth century. (In hindsight, the attraction might have been the salacious title lifted directly from the Code's text, " Complete Nudity Is Never Permitted ".) The 2009 post outlined the history of Hollywood’s self-censorship from the 1920s to the 1960s, which began as a way to evade planned scrutiny by a proposed Federal Motion Picture Commission. Thanks to the film industry's self-regulation efforts, the planned federal agency never materialized. In its place came a series of morality codes, drafted by former U.S. Postmaster General William Hays. The “Hays Code” grew from a 1927 brief list of " Don'ts and Be Carefuls " into the more formal " Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures " which began to appear in t...

One of the more memorable new arrivals in the library this semester was The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance: And Other Real Laws That Human Beings Have Actually Dreamed Up, Enacted and Sometimes Even Enforced . Compiled by Kevin Underhill, the editor of the legal humor blog Lowering the Bar , this new title brings together silly, strange and just plain useless laws on the books in the federal code, the 50 states, several municipalities, and even foreign countries. Unlike other resources pointing to "dumb laws," many of which turn out to be either unsubstantiated or no longer in force, Underhill's book provides clear citation information for each law described, along with the editor's humorous commentary. The included laws range from quaintly outdated, to just plain odd. Out of more than 200 entries, though, none is stranger than a series of translated German statutes which regulate the ownership of runaway bees. As it turns out, fugitive bee swarms, or "Bienen...

Bankruptcy! Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200 . Most people first learn the concept of bankruptcy as children, when they run out of money in the board game Monopoly . If they are lucky, that's the extent of their experience with bankruptcy. Unfortunately, more than one million consumers filed some type of bankruptcy petition in the federal courts just last year. As the U.S. Courts' Bankruptcy Statistics page details, bankruptcy is a harsh reality for consumers and businesses alike. It's also a complex area of law for legal researchers. A brand-new research guide in the Goodson Law Library will point you to the appropriate sources of law and explanatory texts. From the quick general primer of Bankruptcy Basics to the nineteen-volume treatise Collier on Bankruptcy , the new research guide on Bankruptcy Law covers resources aimed at attorneys as well as those written for consumers. The guide also outlines free and subscription-based sources for the various statutes, ...

Just in time for Women's History Month in March, HeinOnline released a new collection, Women and the Law . It includes half a million pages of historical books, articles, and government publications on topics related to gender and law, including feminist legal theory, the suffragette movement, abortion and sex discrimination in employment. The Women & Society section of the new library is particularly interesting, featuring a number of 19th and 20th century treatises on marriage and divorce laws. The collection will continue to grow, and there are plans to include an additional sub-library of Title IX materials. Browse the new Women and the Law collection by accessing HeinOnline and choosing it from the alphabetical list of libraries. To locate additional titles in the Goodson Law Library collection, search the Duke University Libraries catalog for subjects like " Women – Suffrage – United States ", " Feminist Jurisprudence , " and " Gender & ...