The Goodson Blogson

The vast majority of state bar associations offer their members free access to one of the major low-cost legal research services, Casemaker and Fastcase . The advantages are obvious for solo practitioners and small-firm attorneys, who rely on these research services for access to primary law and selected secondary materials. But even Biglaw practitioners can benefit from access to these alternatives to premium services like Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg: they provide uncluttered case law and statute searching, and include unique features like Fastcase's interactive search results timeline ( covered in the ABA Journal last year), local legal materials such as county and city codes, and secondary sources like CasemakerLibra's Continuing Legal Education collection or Fastcase's treatise library (added after its recent acquisition of the now-defunct service Loislaw). There have been some changes to the state bar associations' legal research offerings since the Goodson B...

The Goodson Law Library has subscribed to the ProQuest Regulatory Insight database. Current members of the Duke University community may access this new electronic resource via the online catalog , or through the Legal Databases & Links list. Much like its sister site ProQuest Legislative Insight offers for federal legislative history materials, ProQuest Regulatory Insight includes compiled regulatory histories for administrative materials related to enacted federal laws. (For an example, see the compiled history for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 .) The just-released first phase of this database includes regulatory histories from laws enacted during 2001-2015. As additional regulatory histories are added throughout the year 2016, the database will eventually cover the time period 1936-2016. ProQuest Regulatory Insight also provides detailed indexing and full-text searching of the text of the Federal Register (back to 2000) and the Code of Federal...

With final exams on the horizon, we wanted to review some important library information and resources to help you through the end of the semester. Library Access Exam time brings a temporary change to the library's access policy , most notably in the evening hours. From now until the end of exams (Friday, December 18), access to the Goodson Law Library for study purposes will be limited to current Duke Law students, faculty and staff. Card-swipe access to the library entrance will be required after 5:00 p.m. on weekdays and all day on weekends. Members of the Duke University community or general public who require access to the library for legal research purposes should contact the library service desk for assistance during reference service hours (Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). Additional study space is available to all throughout the building, such as in the Star Commons. Getting Technical If you will use your laptop to take an exam, make sure you have ...