The Goodson Blogson

The end of the semester is almost here! Amid the flurry of final exams and the holiday rush, it might be hard to find time for your perfect winter break book. But a good read can help pass the time on long flights or airport delays, as well as give you a great way to wind down for the night at the end of busy holiday festivities. To help you find something appealing to read before you go, here are seven recommended titles that the Goodson Law Library staff have enjoyed recently. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall , by Zeke Faux ( Request a print copy   or put a hold on the e-book !) "In this up-close-and-personal account, Faux reveals the highly entertaining and, frankly, horrifying (for human beings and the environment) worlds behind the current crypto scandals. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg, Faux also manages to make abstruse cryptocurrency concepts digestible here. For my fellow legal news junkies looking for a deep dive beyond the FTX/...

Regular Goodson Blogson readers know that we have been recommending holiday gift ideas for the law students and lawyers in your life since 2009 (see past entries here ). We thought that was a pretty long history, until Assistant Director for Reference, Clinics, and Outreach Laura Scott uncovered an even earlier holiday gift guide from Duke Law in the December 2, 1964 issue of The Devil's Advocate newspaper. In the "Observed Around the Law School" column, student Alex Denson (LL.B.'66) shared a humorous "shopping guide for the law student who has everything" that would have been familiar to law students of the era, including " Delamirie Diamonds, Tubantia life rafts," and " Palsgraf 's Fireworks." (OK, modern law students will surely know that last one too.) In the following week's column, Denson reprinted additional humorous legal gift ideas from fellow student Don Gardiner (LL.B.'65), including "oil for the springing...

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will open its annual October Term, with its first oral argument scheduled for 10 am. The "First Monday in October" has marked the start of the Supreme Court's year since 1916. The Court recently confirmed plans to continue live-streaming oral arguments on its website; the first case of the new Term, Pulsifer v. United States , concerns the "safety valve" provision in federal criminal sentencing laws. To learn more about individual cases on the Court's docket this year, SCOTUSblog offers quick access to case information and filings on its October Term 2023 page , organized by argument date. The ABA also publishes a regular Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases (available in HeinOnline; Duke NetID required) that provides an overview as well as legal analysis of each featured case. ( Pulsifer is featured in the latest Preview issue, along with other cases from the October sitting.) A looming federal government shut...

If you’ve ever ventured to the Superseded Looseleaf collection on Level 1 on a cite-checking quest, you know that locating archived issues of BNA Law Reports and similar titles can be challenging. Bloomberg Law , which acquired BNA more than a decade ago , has long offered access to the full text of various Law Reports back to the 1990s, but many titles have had a much longer history in print than that. Thanks to an inquiry from Indiana University Maurer School of Law Library Director Susan deMaine this summer, Bloomberg Law has now activated a fuller archive of Law Reports publications for its users.  The BNA Current Reports Archive is accessible from the Practice Centers & Tools home page. To reach it, click on " Practice Centers & Tools " under "Popular Links" on the Bloomberg home page, then scroll down to News & Analysis > " Bloomberg BNA Law Reports (Archive) " to view available titles. Once you've selected a title, you can sea...

Sooner or later, we all hit a paywall while trying to read the news online. Sometimes a cleared cache or incognito browser window might provide limited access to one story, but many news outlets restrict even that practice. Understandably, newsrooms need to pay their bills in the face of declining subscriptions and increasing online competition. Some outlets face outright hostility for their work, such as the small-town Kansas newspaper whose editors' offices and homes were raided by law enforcement last week after the paper received a tip about a local restaurateur's criminal record. How can you ethically access so many different news sources without breaking the bank? Good news: current members of the Duke Law and Duke University community have many options for accessing the full text of popular news sources. Some require the setup of an individual account, while others need only a NetID login from a link on a Duke website. The Goodson Law Library offers current members of...

Since the founding of America, the United States has ratified 27 amendments to the Constitution. The first ten, of course, form the Bill of Rights ; subsequent amendments expanded rights for Black citizens and women, prohibited (and later repealed the prohibition on) the sale of alcohol, added presidential term limits and clarified presidential succession, abolished poll taxes and lowered the voting age, among other modifications. Background on each amendment can be found in the online treatise Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the United States Constitution . For every amendment in the Constitution, though, there are thousands more that failed to complete the arduous ratification requirements outlined in Article V. (For details, see the 2016 Congressional Research Service report The Article V Convention to Propose Constitutional Amendments: Contemporary Issues for Congress .) The Amendments Project at Harvard University , launched on July 4, has compiled over 2...

Late last week, a former member of the Apex Town Council sued North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore for "alienation of affection" and "criminal conversation," domestic torts claims that are currently recognized in only a handful of states. Scott Lassiter, now an assistant principal in Wake County, alleges that Moore engaged in a years-long extramarital affair with the plaintiff's wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter, from whom he is now separated. The complaint also includes causes of action for conspiracy, trespass, conversion, and invasion of privacy against an unknown "Defendant John Doe" for allegedly entering Lassiter's property to install a motion-activated surveillance camera. The suit seeks more than $25,000 in damages. House Speaker Moore and Lassiter's wife both criticized the lawsuit to the media this weekend, with Moore calling the claims "baseless" and Liles Lassiter describing the filing as an "outrageous and defamatory su...

Getting ready for the July bar exam? You're not alone: next month, thousands of aspiring attorneys will sit for a bar examination, just like more than 45,000 applicants did in July 2022. (The National Conference of Bar Examiners publishes annual statistics on bar exam administration in its Bar Examiner magazine and website.) The majority of jurisdictions now administer the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) , a two-day exam that allows test-takers to more easily transfer their score from one UBE jurisdiction in order to seek admission to another. UBE components include the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE) , a set of brief essays; the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) , an analytical writing simulation; and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) , a 200-question multiple-choice portion. UBE jurisdictions may also separately require a state-specific essay component. In addition, nearly every US jurisdiction (excepting Wisconsin and Puerto Rico) requires bar-takers to pass the separate M...

In 2019, engineer Phillip Wang launched a website called "This Person Does Not Exist," which harnessed the StyleGAN AI system to generate realistic-looking photographs of nonexistent people. Although Wang's original website is now defunct, scores of similar sites do exist, including a variation of This Person Does Not Exist and a variety of generators designed for such diverse uses as helping programmers look busy at work , creating a geography guessing game out of Google Street View , and introducing made-up dictionary definitions into the lexicon . Just a few years later, large language model (LLM) chatbots are the hottest trend in generative AI technology, with OpenAI's ChatGPT , Microsoft's Bing Chat (powered by ChatGPT), and Google's Bard the best-known of their kind. It's easy to see their appeal – type a quick prompt and almost instantly generate a wall of convincing-sounding text, complete with citations. Sound too good to be true? Alas, it ...

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. Continuing Students Westlaw allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw® and Practical Law, over the summer for non-commercial research (i.e., "to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills, but you cannot use them in situations where you are billing a client"). Examples of permissible uses for your academic Westlaw password include summer coursework, Research Assistant assignments, research for journal/law review or moot court, non-profit/clinic work, or an externship sponsored by the school. Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on your part. Lexis : All returning students have auto...

2023 marks the 100th anniversary of The American Law Institute (ALI) , whose mission is "to clarify, modernize, and improve the law" through its highly respected publications and projects . While the Restatements of the Law are likely the ALI's best-known publications (due to their frequent citation and endorsement by courts, which can "adopt the Restatement view" of a particular topic), the ALI has also developed important codifications like the Model Penal Code and the Uniform Commercial Code , among other publications, studies, and projects. The Goodson Law Library is joining the celebration of the ALI Centennial with an exhibit on Level 3 of the Library. From Monday, March 20 through the end of spring semester classes, visit the main floor of the library and the Riddick Rare Books and Special Collections Room (accessible on weekdays from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm) to learn more about the history of the ALI and of Duke Law faculty contributions to their semin...

The end of 2022 also marked the end of a long-running government publication series, when the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register published a rule announcing the discontinuation of the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States . The Public Papers book series began in 1957, after the National Historical Publications Commission recommended the creation of an official government publication that brought together the various speeches, remarks, and writings for a particular presidential administration. Prior to the Public Papers , access to presidential materials was less consistent and less timely, with some materials published decades later at the direction of Congress (such as Richardson's 20-volume set A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789 – 1897 ), and other materials privately published (such as the Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt ). The Public Papers has covered the administration of every U.S. preside...

"This content is available only to subscribers." "You have used your allotment of free articles this month." "Buy a day pass or subscribe to access this content." If you usually give up after you receive pop-ups like these on a news website, you might be missing out on alternative paths to accessing the full text of the stories you want through Duke's many subscription databases . While some sources do require pre-registration or a few additional steps to reach the same article, the access to the stories you want to read is often worth the extra effort. First, be aware of the complimentary direct access that the Duke Law and Duke University community enjoys to several major news outlets:  New York Times : Current members of the Duke Law community may join the Law School group account to receive complimentary access to NYTimes.com content on the web and selected smartphone apps. Student accounts will last until December of their graduation year; facult...