The Goodson Blogson

As the days get shorter and the nights get colder, winter break is a great time to curl up with a good book! We asked the staff of the Goodson Law Library to share some recommended reading – either books they've enjoyed recently or titles they're looking forward to reading next. If you need some inspiration for your to-be-read pile, check out our seven winter 2022 recommendations below. What We Liked Candice Millard, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (2022) . ( Request a print copy! ): "A gripping account of adventure, personal rivalry, and innumerable obstacles in the search for the headwaters of the Nile by a formerly enslaved man, a British aristocrat, and the English translator of One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra . In this epic tale, Millard pulls together the history of British imperialism, literature, science, and geography (not to mention disguises, burrowing beetles, and Dr. Livingstone). I c...

Hard to believe that fall finals are just around the corner! As you prepare for a marathon of studying and essay-writing, fill in those outlines and clarify confusing concepts with the help of the Law Library. The Library offers access to hundreds of online study aids and supplements that can help you get ready for finals: The West Academic Library Study Aids provides full-text access to hundreds of study aids, treatises, audio lectures, and flash card sets published by West Academic. Series available include Acing, Concepts and Insights, Hornbooks, Nutshells, Black Letter Outlines, Legalines, Sum and Substance audio, and many more. The Aspen Learning Library (formerly known as Wolters Kluwer Study Aid Library) contains nearly 200 study aids published by Aspen Publishing. Available series include Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, Emanuel Law Outlines, and more. Elgar Advanced Introductions to Law is a small but mighty collection of brief, accessible texts on over two d...

Thirteen years after the very first Goodson Blogson holiday gift guide , one thing is certain: our readers seem to really enjoy looking at holiday gift inspiration from a law school library blog. Fortunately, we enjoy finding new recommendations each year! This list includes suggestions (at a variety of price points) for items that might be suitable for the law students and/or lawyers in your life. Some gadget ideas that could be suitable for law students and lawyers alike include a stylish wireless charger ( Wired breaks down 25 recommendations ). Smartphone charger and UV sanitizer combos might also be welcomed. Noise-canceling headphones will likely be in use from law school final exams all the way to lawyer business travel ( CNET recommends its top picks for 2022 ). While digital notebooks have been around for several years now, the brand recognition of Moleskine Smart might appeal to those who are just starting to make a transition toward paperless. (They also have some well-...

As the legal fallout over Elon Musk's bid to purchase social network Twitter continues to unfurl, the Wall Street Journal recently explored the situation from an unusual perspective: what would Charles Dickens think of it all? In a story for the paper's humorous A-Hed section , Ellen Gamerman notes the parallels between Twitter v. Musk and Jarndyce v. Jarndyce , the all-consuming inheritance dispute at the center of Dickens's 1852 novel Bleak House (available to the Duke community in a variety of formats) . Although Gamerman is careful to note that the lumbering Chancery Court of the Dickens tale (described at one point in the tale as "being ground to bits in a slow mill") bears little resemblance to Delaware's Court of Chancery today, she quotes a few fans and even one Dickens descendant who express amusement at the prospect of a modern-day chancery case playing out, should the parties fail to settle the dispute before the November trial date. Gamerman br...

Monday, October 10 is a federal and state government holiday, although the holiday differs depending on your jurisdiction. While many states continue to call the second Monday in October "Columbus Day," a number of others have renamed the holiday a variation on "Native Americans' Day" or "Indigenous Peoples Day," or observe the newer holiday in addition to the old one. Celebrations of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus's 1492 landfall in North America have occurred in various American locations as early as the eighteenth century, and October 12 (later moved to the second Monday in October) was established as a federal holiday in the 1930s. However, Columbus Day has sparked protests by Native American communities and others, who have highlighted the impact of colonization on indigenous people in the Americas, and the related history of violent conflict and forced assimilation. As noted in Smithsonian Magazine , South Dakota was the first state ...

Monday, October 3 marks the start of the United States Supreme Court 's October Term. Congress established the "first Monday in October" as the beginning of a new Court term in 1916, as seen in 28 U.S.C. § 2 . The term will be the first for new Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson , who was sworn in on June 30 following the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. (A formal investiture ceremony for Justice Jackson will be held on Friday, September 30.) With less than a week before the opening of oral argument, the Court looks a little more welcoming than it did at the end of the last term, although it has maintained some pandemic-era access protocols. In late August, the Court removed the 8-foot security fence that was erected in advance of the controversial opinion Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which overruled Roe v. Wade . However, the building still remains closed to the public, except for official business . The Court began streaming real-ti...

On August 28, a new law took effect in the state of Missouri, which in part added Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.016 : "A secondary source, including a legal treatise, scholarly publication, textbook, or other explanatory text, does not constitute the law or public policy of this state to the extent its adoption would create, eliminate, expand, or restrict a cause of action, right, or remedy, or to the extent it is inconsistent with, or in conflict with, or otherwise not addressed by, Missouri statutory law or Missouri appellate case law precedent." Most law students learn that secondary sources do not constitute the actual law of a jurisdiction in their first semester of legal research instruction, so this code section's text may seem strangely obvious. However, it's not the only such law on the books enacted or proposed recently: even North Carolina has one specific to insurance law at N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-1-2 which took effect last year, and a nearly identical version of t...

The Goodson Law Library has recently added a campus-wide subscription to the Global-Regulation database. This resource contains more than 4 million laws from 110 countries, with side-by-side machine translations provided for non-English documents. Access this resource via the library's Legal Databases & Links page or the Duke Libraries Catalog . The Database Coverage map provides an illustration of the included jurisdictions; the Americas, Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia have the deepest coverage, with only a limited number of African jurisdictions represented. Additional resources for locating laws of foreign jurisdictions, either in translation or original format, include: Foreign Law Guide : A subscription database, available to current members of the Duke University community. Entries for a particular country will provide an overview of the legal system, details about primary sources of law, and a subject index. Foreign Law Guide includes pointers to online avai...

Last week, Bloomberg Law announced a change to its academic subscription docket usage caps. Effective July 2022, the system will reset educational account users' docket "billing" for the year on July 1, rather than January 1, to more closely track the academic calendar. As many Law School community members already know, Bloomberg Law provides subscribers with robust access to federal and state court dockets and filings. Individual users can request the full text of documents that are available for electronic retrieval, and track/update pending case dockets as well. Although this service comes at a cost to commercial subscribers, Bloomberg subsidizes these costs for academic users: up to $1,500 per person each year or up to an institutional cap (equivalent to 30% of the annual subscription cost paid by the institution, which varies depending on size). ( Note: Academic subscribers are not eligible to request items that require courier service to retrieve.) More informa...

The Goodson Law Library has recently expanded its access to historical content in the ProQuest Supreme Court Insight database, adding U.S. Supreme Court records, briefs, and case histories back to 1933 (expanded from its previous start date of 1975). The Duke University community can now access this nearly half-century of additional materials via the Duke Libraries Catalog or Legal Databases & Links page. ProQuest Supreme Court Insight provides browse and search capability for U.S. Supreme Court materials. For quick access to a specific case's materials, use Search by Number or select "Supreme Court Case Name" from the Basic or Advanced search menus. A section of Landmark Cases also allows browsing or searching for selected noteworthy cases decided during the coverage period. Results will include petitions for certiorari, briefs, appendices, docket listings, and the Court's final opinion. (Cert petitions are also included in cases where the Court did not gran...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this May or continuing your legal studies next year, your access to legal research services and other campus databases may change this summer. Below is a summary of policies for the major legal research databases that you might wish to access over the summer. Graduating Students Westlaw : You may opt in to Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw and Practical Law, for six months after graduation for non-commercial use . This "Grad Elite" access allows 60 hours of usage on these products per month to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills. While you cannot use it in situations where you are billing a client, Thomson Reuters encourages you to use these tools to build your knowledge of the law and prepare for your bar exam. In order to activate Grad Elite access: 1) Log in at lawschool.tr.com ; use the drop-down menu by your name to access Grad Elite Status 2) Or click on this link: https://lawschool.westl...

As part of a new consortial arrangement, Duke now has campus-wide access to all database titles published by Adam Matthew Digital . While the Duke University Libraries already subscribed to a number of the company's historical research titles, the deal has added more than a dozen new sources to the Duke community’s access. One of the most intriguing of these new additions is London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld , a full-text research database of primary sources related to London in the 1800s and 1900s. The "Browse Documents" section provides easy access to materials on topics like "Crime and Justice" (pamphlets, broadsides, and news accounts of crimes and trials), "Politics, Scandal, and the News" (political cartoons and other publications, often related to legal proceedings), and "Disreputable London" (tourist guides to the seedier side of the city as well as slang dictionaries of the era). The databas...

Current members of the Duke University community now have access to the database World Trade Online , a news and current awareness service for international trade topics. This database is accessible from the Legal Databases & Links page, the campus library Research Database Finder , and the Duke Libraries Catalog . Off-campus access requires a current Duke University NetID and password. World Trade Online includes access to the weekly newsletter Inside U.S. Trade , as well as breaking and archived news stories. Users can browse or search the site, as well as sign up for alerts in several categories (breaking news, weekly headlines, etc.) under About Us > E-mail Alerts and Mobile Devices. The new campus-wide database joins WorldTradeLaw.net (available to members of the Law School community on networked computers) as a resource for international trade law news and analysis. For additional resources in the library collection related to international trade, be sure to Ask a Lib...

Earlier this week, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer announced his intent to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of this term. The vacancy will be the first on the high court for President Biden, who has spent much of his first year in office filling vacancies in the U.S. District Courts and Circuit Courts of Appeals. (A running list of confirmed judicial nominations , as well as all judicial nominations, is available at the Senate Judiciary Committee website. Similar data can be found on the Judicial Vacancies page at the U.S. Courts.) President Biden had pledged on the campaign trail to nominate the Court's first Black female justice in the event of a vacancy during his presidency, a promise he reaffirmed at the White House yesterday following Breyer’s announcement . Washington insiders have circulated a shortlist of likely nominees , including current D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and Judge J. Michelle Chil...