The Goodson Blogson

One week into the U.S. federal government shutdown, federal workers have begun receiving their final paychecks from the period before the December 22 lapse in appropriations. Yesterday, Congress adjourned without much progress on a new spending agreement, and will reconvene on Monday, December 31. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are either furloughed or working without pay for the duration of the shutdown, and many federal parks and other tourist attractions are closed until the shutdown ends. The Northwestern University Libraries' research guide to Government Shutdown 2.0 outlines the agencies that will continue working without pay (including the TSA and the Department of Justice's Special Counsel office), agencies that will reduce or cease operations during the shutdown (including the Internal Revenue Service and NASA). Individual federal agency websites generally display a banner for the duration of a shutdown, explaining what services continue to function a...

The Goodson Law Library recently subscribed to the Federal Portfolio of Tax Analysts , a leading source for tax-related news and commentary. Current members of the Duke University community may register a username and password with their Duke.edu email address to obtain access. Available publications include Tax Notes , Tax Notes Today , FATCA Expert , Exempt Organizations Expert , and Tax Practice Expert . Duke's subscription also includes access to the Federal Research Library tool, containing IRS documents, regulations and legislation. For quick access to research materials, use the Key Documents menu at the top of the screen. The Tax Topics menu allows quick access to stories on a particular subject. Tax Analyst publications were previously available to the Law community in Lexis Advance and the campus community in Nexis Uni . Although these publications are currently still available full-text within Lexis research platforms, Tax Analyst titles will be removed from Lexi...

'Tis the season to succeed on Law School exams! Check out these tips to make your examination period run smoothly. 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 (Monday, December 17), 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. The Technicalities If you will use your laptop to take an exam, make sure you have installed Electronic Bluebook (EB...

Today, Lexis Advance launched its new Context product for legal analytics, currently featuring analysis for judges and expert witnesses. Lexis users at Duke Law can access this new tool from the grid in the top left corner of any Lexis Advance screen. (Be sure to choose "Context" and not "Litigation Profile Suite" – although the latter tool also includes profiles of judges and expert witnesses, these are separate products and do not appear to cross-link.) [ Update: currently, Context access is available only to Law School faculty; student accounts will see the new product on January 2.] If the Context report interface looks a bit familiar, you may have seen a similar version for judges on Ravel Law , the legal research start-up which Lexis acquired last year . Profiles for Judges include biographical information as well as "Analysis" data about motion outcomes, most-cited opinions and judges, and even the specific passages upon which the judge relies...

It's that time of year again! Since 2009, the Goodson Blogson has compiled a list of holiday gift suggestions for lawyers, law students, and anyone else with an interest in legal themes. (See past gift idea lists here .). The Goodson Blogson does not receive these items for review, or any payment for listing items in the annual gift guide. Is your legally-minded loved one always on the go? Some travel-related gift ideas to consider include the Trtl Travel Pillow , a wrap-around scarf with built-in neck support designed to let wearers sleep comfortably on planes, trains, or anywhere else. After one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time, Baubax has just released version 2.0 of its popular travel jackets, which feature numerous hidden pockets and built-in features like an eye mask, corded eyeglass cleaning cloth, and a telescopic pen/stylus. Earlier this year, CNet reviewed The Best Travel Gadgets and Gear , offering practical suggestions for international outlet...

Last week, Duke Today published the fall installment of its Guide to Duke Author Books Series . The roundup of recent faculty book publications features several new titles by Duke Law faculty, including: Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller: The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller ( watch video introduction ) Allen Buchanan: Institutionalizing the Just War Charles T. Clotfelter: Big-Time Sports in American Universities , 2d ed. Brandon L. Garrett, co-author: The Death Penalty Laurence R. Helfer, co-editor: International Court Authority Jack Knight, editor: Immigration, Emigration, and Migration The Goodson Law Library has print or online access to these and hundreds of other publications by Duke Law faculty. The display case at the library entrance features book publications and article offprints from roughly the last two years; additional print copies of faculty books can be found in the library stacks. To locate call numbers and avail...

You may have seen the Duke Law Tech Hub on the third floor of the Law Library. The Tech Hub is a space to engage with and learn about different legal technology and tools. From virtual reality to analytics to design thinking, the Hub has a little bit of everything. Wait. What is design thinking, you ask? In short, design thinking is a problem-solving methodology for innovation . Rooted in engineering, design thinking has permeated education, business, and legal practice. More and more law firms are looking into how design thinking can help make their practice more efficient, while others adopted it long ago. With the growing popularity and curiosity around design thinking, the Tech Hub is hosting a lunch panel on Design Thinking and the Law this Monday, Oct 29th, with two leaders in the field: Camillo Sassano, IBM Design Principal & Kevin L Schultz, IBM Hardware Design Lead. IBM has been implementing design thinking into their business model for over a decade and did resear...

Last week, Fastcase announced a new partnership with the California Lawyers Association . Beginning in 2019, CLA members will receive access to Fastcase as a benefit of bar association membership. This move means that bar associations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia now provide their members with access to at least one of the low-cost research services Fastcase and Casemaker. This fills in the State Bar Association Research Benefits map that the Goodson Blogson has been tracking for several years, updating a map originally developed by 3 Geeks and a Law Blog in March 2010 . Currently, 30 jurisdictions on the state-level list provide their members with free access to exclusively Fastcase; 20 states provide access to exclusively Casemaker. 1 state (Texas) provides its members with access to both services. In addition, a number of county and local bar associations have struck their own deals with the research services. Both Fastcase and Casemaker contain U.S. federal ...

Even the most responsible library users can find themselves incurring the occasional late fee. Maybe you just needed one more day to finish that recalled book, or you were traveling, or the item was buried under a pile of other stuff. However that fine got there, if your Duke Libraries account shows an unpaid balance in the Fines/Credits/Fees section, we have some good news for you. From Wednesday, October 10 through Friday, October 26, every library on East and West Campus at Duke University will accept "Food for Fines" to benefit the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC . Each unopened, unexpired, non-perishable food item (or household good) donated will remove $1 from your library fines (up to a $25 maximum per account). You can bring the items to any campus library during the food drive – no need to travel to the specific library that charged the fine. The chart below details the most-needed food and household items for the Food Bank: Food Drive Most Needed Items...

Around this halfway point of the semester, many law students are thinking about potential topics for their seminar papers, law journal notes, and/or other scholarly writing projects. In the first year at Duke Law, professors determine the topic of LARW writing assignments – after that, students are largely on their own. This can be a difficult adjustment for many, since topic selection is a critical stage of the academic writing process. Authors must find a potential topic that is both interesting and novel, and examine it from an angle that has not previously been explored in great depth by prior publications. The associated process of preemption checking can seem frustrating and overwhelming, as it often results in false starts and discarded potential topics. Fortunately, the Goodson Law Library has resources to help students navigate the maze. Some guidebooks on academic legal writing are available in the Reserve collection, and may be borrowed for four hours at a time: Volok...

As reported earlier this week by the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports are now available at the new federal website crsreports.congress.gov . CRS is a nonpartisan legislative research staff office within the Library of Congress that prepares research reports for legislative committees and individual members of Congress. Researchers have long prized CRS reports for their expert analysis on a variety of topics, but for many years the reports were difficult to obtain. Appropriations legislation expressly prevented CRS from making its research public, and researchers beyond the Hill needed to obtain copies from an insider. By the 1990s, a CRS cottage industry had sprung up in the form of Penny Hill Press , a tiny family-run publisher in Maryland that obtained the reports and sold them for $20 apiece on its now-defunct website. As Penny Hill owner Walt Seager told the New York Times in 2009 , "We wear out a lot of shoe leather and get cauliflower ear...

The Goodson Blogson usually focuses on legal research-related news and resources. But the impending arrival of Hurricane Florence on the Carolina coast later this week has us thinking about the safety of our community. Many new law students may never have experienced a hurricane, and even some longer-term residents haven’t seen a storm of this predicted magnitude hit the Triangle region in more than twenty years. Here are some resources to help you prepare for whatever comes at the end of this week. Follow the forecast . The News & Observer is suspending its usual paywall in order to provide readers with full access to storm coverage. Other sources for updated local forecast information are WRAL and Spectrum News . Keep up to date with the latest forecasts and adjust your planning accordingly. Prepare a supply kit. Bottled water is already disappearing from local store shelves. The federal government's supply kit checklist at Ready.gov recommends stocking up on water, ...

The following guest post was written by Rachel Gordon , Head of Access and Collection Services. You probably know by now that the Law Library keeps copies of Law School textbooks on Reserve, but did you know that we have other items as well? We have many current study aids , including selected subjects in the Examples and Explanations , Questions and Answers , Nutshell , Glannon Guides , Understanding , and Mastering series. For more information on available study aids, see the Law School Success guide, linked in the JD and LLM orientation packets. We also have selected dictionaries, multiple copies of The Bluebook , popular legal movies and TV shows on DVD, and various Mac laptop chargers. New to the Reserve Collection this year are calculators , noise-cancelling headphones , and (coming soon) bookstands . Reserve items are available on a first-come, first-served basis and can be checked out for up to four hours, or overnight if checked out within four hours of closing. (Aft...

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit made headlines for using emoji in a published opinion. While they are not the first U.S. court to discuss or reference emoji, many commentators assert that Emerson v. Dart is the first time that emoji images have been embedded in the text of the opinion itself rather than described verbally. It also marks the judicial debut of the "poop emoji," a cartoonish depiction of a pile of excrement. Emerson v. Dart involved a Title VII retaliation claim brought by a female corrections officer. During the course of the litigation, the plaintiff was sanctioned for making a threatening Facebook post to a group of fellow correctional employees: To my fellow officers! DON’T GET IN A FIGHT THAT IS NOT, I REPEAT THAT IS NOT YOURS. I’VE JUST RECEIVED THE NAMES OF SOME PEOPLE THAT THE COUNTY IS ATTEMPTING TO USE AS WITNESSES, (1) IS A SGT, (2) OFFICERS, (1) OPR INVESTIGATOR, on the job 18mths, this fight is from 2009 & I’...

While Duke Law students, faculty and staff have long enjoyed 24-hour access to both the Law School and Law Library, the Duke Law community didn't have a 24-hour service desk…until now. A Self-Checkout Station is now available at the Circulation/Reserve desk. If you need to check out a Law Library item after hours – or just feel like bypassing a line during the day – bring your items to the iPad kiosk at the service desk. Follow the instructions on the touch screen to log in with your NetID and password, use the camera to take photos of the item barcodes, and verify that the system has logged you out when you are finished. Need to borrow items even faster? With the Duke Self-Checkout smartphone app , you can borrow Standard Loan library items right at the shelf. MeeScan Duke Self-Checkout apps for iPhone and Android devices are available at the App Store and on Google Play . Note that this station offers checkout service only – to return items for check-in after hours, use th...

The ABA Journal 's cover story this August updates its 2008 list of The 25 Greatest Legal Movies . The 2018 update expands the scope of the original list. More recent examples of award-winning courtroom dramas are here (such as Loving and Marshall ), but the list also includes films whose subject matter intersects with the law (such as the investigative journalists in 2017's Spotlight ) and legal documentaries (such as this summer's breakout hit RBG ). The 2018 list also makes a bit more room for laughs: 2001's law school comedy Legally Blonde has been added to the 2018 best-of list, and 1992's hilarious My Cousin Vinny retains its place on the list. An additional 25 Honorable Mentions are featured in the 2018 update as well. See the original 2008 list gallery and the 2018 update . The Goodson Law Library has many of the original 25 films, as well as the new updates, in its Legal DVD collection on level 3. DVDs may be borrowed for 3-day loans; just bring...

The U.S. Supreme Court and Sports Illustrated don't often intersect. But the July 30 issue of the popular sports magazine features a delightful story about the true "highest court in the land" : the small basketball court above the U.S. Supreme Court's historic courtroom. You can read it online now, or look for the print edition in the Goodson Law Library's Leisure Reading collection soon. Keeping with Court tradition, the story does not include actual photographs of the basketball court and its neighboring gym. As with the Court's longstanding ban on photography and video in the SCOTUS courtroom, the SI story instead features illustrations by sketch artist Arthur Lien . The basketball court and gym began life as a Court storage room, before their transformation sometime in the 1940s. From that point on, Justices, clerks, and Court staff alike enjoy the facilities for games of basketball and other athletic pursuits – as long as the Court is not in session...

Researchers have many options for accessing historical full-text archives of major news publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post , or popular magazines like Time and Newsweek . (Search the Duke Libraries Catalog   to see your options in print, electronic, and microformats.) But if you are researching a topic of limited geographic reach, or just interested in finding a variety of perspectives, a search of more specialized news resources might be in order. Two campus-wide databases provide access to alternative press publications: Alternative Press Index Archive covers the period 1969-1990, and indexes the contents of alternative, radical, and left-leaning publications. Independent Voices covers the 1960s to the 1980s, and includes full-text scans from participating libraries' alternative press archives (including Duke's own Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture ). The collection includes some digitized editions of the Durham public...

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his intent to retire from the Court earlier this week, speculation immediately began as to the identity of the next Court nominee. Back in November 2017, the White House released a list of 25 potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees from the federal and state benches, and the President confirmed this week that the next nominee would be a member of that shortlist. Online oddsmakers have been busily tracking the most likely nominees, with Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit and Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit as the current front-runners. The Washington Post has written brief summaries of the likeliest nominees , but there are additional resources available to conduct research on these or any other judges. Many are listed in the library's guide to Directories of Courts & Judges . Highlights include: Almanac of the Federal Judiciary (online in Westlaw & Wolters Kluwer ): A unique biographical directory f...

With only a few days left in the U.S. Supreme Court's term, all eyes have been on SCOTUSblog and other sources for news and analysis. Yesterday, the Court released four opinions, including the much-discussed "Internet sales tax" case South Dakota v. Wayfair , and Pereira v. Sessions , which interpreted rules regarding immigration removal notice and procedure. Compared to those higher-profile opinions, Wisconsin Central Ltd. v. United States received less attention in yesterday's news media. A case determining that stock options are not taxable compensation under the Railroad Retirement Tax Act, this opinion is likely of greatest interest to tax professionals (or, presumably, retired railroad employees). But something notable lurks in the dissenting opinion by Justice Breyer: the Court’s first-ever reference to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in its opinions. Moreover, what we view as money has changed over time. Cowrie shells once were such a medium but no longer a...

Why do lawyers join the American Bar Association and state or local voluntary bar associations? These organizations provide attorneys with a professional networking community, access to continuing legal education (CLE), and discounts on products and services. In 49 states and the District of Columbia , bar association membership also comes with the benefit of free access to an online legal research service: either Fastcase or Casemaker . (California is the only state bar association that does not provide statewide legal research access, but many local bar associations in California offer members a similar benefit.) Law firms with access to premium research services like Westlaw and Lexis may require their attorneys to consult these low-cost alternatives first; for other attorneys, the state bar research benefit may be their primary source for online legal research. Both of these legal research services provide attorneys with access to case law, statutes, and regulations. Fastcas...

As reported in the ABA Journal this week , the North Carolina State Bar has proposed an amendment to its annual requirements for continuing legal education (CLE) . Attorneys in North Carolina are already required to complete 12 credit hours of approved CLE each year; the proposal, if approved, would mandate that one of those hours be focused on "technology training" topics. (As outlined in the State Bar website , some of those hours must already focus on professional responsibility topics, including substance abuse awareness.) Back in 2012, the American Bar Association amended Model Rule of Professional Responsibility 1.1 on competent representation, in order to include an understanding of technology within its scope. Comment 8 to the rule now reads, "To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology , engage in continuing study and e...

The start of summer always brings changes to the Law Library – most notably, access and service desk hours (now weekdays 8:00 am – 5:00 pm until the start of fall classes in August). But some important additional changes are taking place this summer, with accompanying moves to library collections and equipment. The library's former Document Production Room on level 3 will be transformed into a new classroom and meeting space this summer. As a result, ePrint station 3A has moved to the end of the library service desk, along with one overhead scanner. The other overhead scanner, and color printer/photocopier device have moved to the Microforms Room on Level 1, where additional ePrint stations and a Lexis printer are already available. The document feed scanner/outbound fax device is temporarily located outside of the library entrance, next to printer 3C (it is expected to move back into the library Reading Room later this summer). Changes are also coming to the four library al...

[This guest post by Reference Librarian Wickliffe Shreve highlights the new digital version of Prestatehood Legal Materials in HeinOnline .] Depending on your outlook, a request to do a legislative history or other legal historical research for a project can inspire dread, excitement – or perhaps a mixture of both. The Goodson Law Library's guide to Federal Legislative History helps get you started so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel...as long as the question is, of course, one of federal law. If you need to do research on a state statute or regulation, not only will you have to learn the state's government structure and legislative process, you may have to cobble together sources from the state law library, state courts, and local law schools to be sure that you have covered all your bases (see, for instance, Indiana University's State Legislative History Research Guides Inventory ). But what if your research requires looking to sources of law that ex...