The Goodson Blogson

The Goodson Law Library now subscribes to the legal research service Fastcase . Members of the Duke Law community may access Fastcase with a current Law School NetID through this link , which is posted on the Legal Databases & Links list as well as in the Duke Libraries Catalog . You may be thinking, "Not another legal research service to learn!" It’s true that the interface will look somewhat familiar to users of Westlaw , Lexis and Bloomberg , and the primary law content can be found elsewhere. But it's still worth taking a look at Fastcase, especially if you plan to practice in one of the 27 states (or a handful of cities and counties) whose bar associations currently offer the service for free as a membership benefit, a list which includes New York and North Carolina. In jurisdictions with free access to the service for bar association members, Fastcase can be a highly cost-effective starting place for your legal research. Like other legal research servic...

Online passwords: so necessary, so hard to create, and so easy to forget. If you're prone to keeping the same passwords on multiple sites for long stretches of time, Westlaw is about to make your life a bit more difficult: all academic Westlaw users should change their OnePass password as soon as possible, in order to avoid an upcoming automatic reset which would lock you out of your account until a new password is created. A similar reset occurred last year for law firm Westlaw subscribers; the academic reset may take place as early as mid-January. To change your OnePass password before the automatic reset, log in to http://lawschool.westlaw.com , click "Update" in the left-hand welcome sidebar, and create a new password following the requirements. Passwords must be between 8-16 characters long and contain at least 3 of the required features (upper-case letter, lower-case letter, symbol, and/or number). But think twice before typing your pet's name or "Pa...

The 114th Congress begins its first session on January 6, after a flurry of legislative activity by its predecessor: Once derided as on track to become the "least productive Congress" in modern history , the 113th Congress escaped the title by passing more than 100 new laws after the November election. (It is, however, still the second least productive Congress since 1947, with the 112th holding the dubious honor .) Among the many laws passed between the November election and the December adjournment was H.R. 1068 . This bill created a new Title 54 within the U.S. Code, dedicated to the " National Park Service and Related Programs ," and enacted it into positive law . This marks the first positive law enactment since the creation of U.S.C. Title 51 (National and Commercial Space Programs) in 2010 , and the second new Code title added in 2014 (Title 52, Voting and Elections, was created in August as an editorial reclassification , which did not require Congress...

The New Year is more than a fresh start for post-holiday diets and personal goals. It's also often the effective date for new legislation which was enacted in the previous year. Legislative research service StateScape offers a handy chart of Effective Dates for state legislation . Effective dates vary widely by jurisdiction, and individual bills can also specify a different effective date than a jurisdiction's general rule. When reading a session law or code section online or in print, look for a note about its effective date , usually located at either the top of the screen (particularly online) or at the end of the law's text (especially in print). These notes help legal researchers determine whether a particular law was in force on a specific date in time. So what new laws took effect on January 1? Here in North Carolina, the Legislative Library has compiled a helpful chart of 2013-2014 legislation sorted by effective dates . The 20+ new state laws which took effect...