The Goodson Blogson

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...