The Goodson Blogson

The North Carolina State Library has completed its digitization project of official North Carolina Supreme Court reports . Although additional search features will be released later, the collection is now available at http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/search/collection/p16062coll14/order/title/ad/desc . The scanned volumes date back to volume 1 (decisions from 1778-1804) and conclude with the recent volume 365 (2011-2012). The State Library also continues to digitize the North Carolina Court of Appeals Reports , with the first 100 volumes already available. Although both the North Carolina Reports and North Carolina Court of Appeals Reports are available in the Goodson Law Library's collection as well as online sources like LLMC Digital , this additional free access is a welcome public service to legal researchers. In addition to centuries of case law , the reporters also include valuable biographical information about court justices, such as reprinted remarks from portrait dedicat...

[The following guest post was written by Goodson Law Library Reference Intern Aaron Kirschenfeld , who is completing a dual J.D. and Master's of Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill in May.] The monumental changes in American law, let alone in society, brought about by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s are well known to many in the legal community and to our country as a whole. Cases like Katzenbach v. McClung , 379 U.S. 294 (1964) and Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. U.S. , 379 U.S. 241 (1964), and major federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 Stat. 241 , and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 437 , have left a lasting impression on the nation. But what about the significant legacy of legal reform in the years following the Civil War? A new display in the Goodson Law Library's Riddick Rare Book & Special Collections Room , located on Level 3, commemorates Black History Month with a gathering of materials related to 19th cent...

This morning, the U.S. Government Publishing Office released the President's Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2016. The Goodson Law Library's print copy has not yet arrived, but users can read and search the online version at GPO's FDsys website or through the Office of Management and Budget . An app version for mobile devices reproduces the main budget text, and directs readers to FDsys for access to the supplemental Analytical Perspectives, Appendix, and Historical Tables volumes. The President's budget request to Congress is step one of the federal appropriations process for the upcoming fiscal year, which for the government begins on October 1. (Although this first step can sometimes be delayed, today's release meets the traditional due date of the first Monday in February.)   Following the President's budget request, Congress then works to pass a budget resolution , which has a target due date of April 15 (but is also frequentl...