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"As extra precaution against too much confidence as a result of improvement in the situation, the board in its daily statement issued last night urges the people of the city not to celebrate Hallowe'en night in the usual manner (by congregating) owing to danger from crowding in rooms and on the sidewalks." While this statement could just as easily be written today, it comes from a 1918 influenza briefing by the Durham City and County Board of Health, published in the October 31 issue of the Durham Morning Herald ( available to the Duke community via Newspapers.com ). Durham was no outlier -- officials around the country restricted public gatherings and Halloween festivities during the influenza epidemic of 1918, as CNN and History.com have both explored recently. The discouragement wasn't entirely successful -- only days later, the Nov. 3 society page of the Herald highlighted the "very bright and attractive Hallowe’en party […] given by the nurses of the Wa...

Most people associate voting with early November, specifically the first-Tuesday holiday known since 1845 as Election Day . However, the current pandemic as well as expectations of record voter turnout has brought renewed focus onto other methods of voting, including mail-in voting and early in-person voting. In North Carolina, for example, one-stop early in-person voting begins today , October 15th, and will last until October 31st. Issues surrounding voting this year, especially related to COVID-19, have made finding accurate information about the voting process all the more urgent. In response, the Goodson Law Library's Faculty and Scholarly Services Librarian Wickliffe Shreve has worked with the Government Relations Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) to create a Voting Resources page as part of AALL's Advocacy Toolkit . The Voting Resources page has information and links to nonpartisan resources on information about state primaries, locat...

The Goodson Law Library has recently subscribed to the National Consumer Law Center's NCLC Digital Library . This campus-wide database includes full-text access to 22 e-book titles on consumer law topics, including: debtor rights, mortgages & foreclosures, credit & banking, deception & warranties, and consumer litigation. A how-to guide for consumers on Surviving Debt is also included in this subscription. The Quick Start Guide contains tips and tricks for searching and browsing the digital library. Recent updates to online editions as well as significant law changes in the last six months are marked with blue or red flags, respectively. As the guide cautions, the database's search features differ from research services like Lexis and Westlaw, but it is possible to develop proximity searches and exclude unwanted words using the NCLC search syntax. A separate "Advanced Pleadings Search" link is available to limit results only to sample documents included...

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a reckoning nationwide about the administration of bar examinations, usually offered two times a year in each jurisdiction. While about two dozen states did hold a late-July, socially-distanced bar exam in person, other states postponed to a planned September administration, which some jurisdictions postponed again in favor of a remotely-administered online exam to be held on October 5 and 6 (see chart at the National Conference of Bar Examiners ). Concerns have grown over the possibility of technical issues with the upcoming online bar exam, with a number of test-takers reporting problems with practice exams and difficulty in obtaining remote support . Michigan's online bar exam, held in late July, experienced widespread technical issues which the State Board of Law Examiners later blamed on a hacking attempt. Whether or not next week's online examination faces similar technical issues, it seems certain that conversations about alternative...