BLS Library Blog

On Labor Day 2012, the American work force faces persistent high unemployment and a concentration of wealth and economic power not seen since the first Labor Day in 1894. That year, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill, S. 730, introduced in the United States and passed by the 53rd Congress, making Labor Day a legal holiday. In that Gilded Age, America was in the midst of an economic depression, a growing concentration of corporate wealth and power, and suppression of labor unions. Just six day before signing the Labor Day legislation, the President ordered federal troops to end the Pullman Strike between labor unions and railroads protesting deep wage cuts leaving more than 30 workers dead and the strike’s leader, Eugene V. Debs, in jail.

This Sunday September 2, 2012, (this weekend) there is a scheduled website outage for website maintenance on the CALI website.   CALI.org, 

CALI lessons, Classcaster, eLangdell and the CALIcon websites will all be affected and offline.

The maintenance is scheduled for 8:00am – 12:00pm (NOON).  After that, all of the websites  should be back and running and “in better shape than ever” according to CALI.

For more on doping in sports, see Brooklyn Law Library’s A Guide to the World Anti-Doping Code: A Fight for the Spirit of Sport by Paul David (Call # RC1230 .D38 2008). Chapters include Development of principles relating to anti-doping regimes: the role of the Court of Arbitration for Sport — Overview of the Code and the World Anti-Doping Program — Nature of the Code and its interpretation and application — Articles 1 and 2 of the Code: anti-doping rule violations under the Code — Article 3 of the Code: the proof of anti-doping rule violations under the Code — Responsibility for testing and investigations, results management, and hearings — Sanctions for anti-doping rule violations: Articles 9 and 10 of the Code — Article 13: appeals under the Code — Challenges to the Code in the courts.

LexisNexis announced today that a large collection of its legal eBooks are now available in the Amazon Kindle store.

The collection, available in the non-fiction department under Law, includes:

• LexisNexis eBooks covering a variety of practice areas including bankruptcy, immigration and tax.
• Legal textbooks, casebooks and study aids.
• Popular study guides such as the Understanding and Questions & Answers series.

Many LexisNexis eBooks now also feature embedded links to primary and analytical content in LexisAdvance.  Prices for LexisNexis eBooks in the Kindle Store vary depending on individual publications and more titles will be added over time.

A NY Times DealBook article, Problems Riddle Moves to Collect Credit Card Debt, quotes Kings County Supreme Court Judge Noach Dear, Brooklyn Law School Class of 1992, as saying “I would say that roughly 90 percent of the credit card lawsuits are flawed and can’t prove the person owes the debt.” Judge Dear, who won election in 2007 to a 10 year term (2008 to 2019), has been Acting Supreme Court Justice since 2010 and presides on a daily basis over as many as 100 cases involving debt collection practices of credit card companies. A NY Times editorial, Robo Redux, noted that “Judge Dear recently dismissed a suit brought by American Express against a woman who contested the amount being demanded. The Amex employee who testified, the judge noted, gave what he called ‘robo-testimony’ — the same generic evidence given in other cases.” The Consumer Credit Fairness Act, which has been pending in the New York Legislature, would incorporate changes to the present state of consumer debt litigation practice and help level the playing field for unrepresented defendants.

SARA, the BLS Library catalog, has in its listing the internet version of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act Annual Report 2012 published by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The report summarizes the activities of the Bureau in administering the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA” or “the Act”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692 et seq., during the past year.

SARA, the Brooklyn Law School Library catalog, has a Tag cloud feature that allows users to generate clouds for popular subjects. Users who log in to SARA can add tags for their own use. Library staff members check user-created tags to approve or reject them for public display. If a user-created tag is approved, it will show up in the tag cloud.

Also on reserve at the Circulation Desk is the 5th edition of the West Nutshell Introduction to The Study and Practice of Law in a Nutshell by Kenney Hegland (Call # KF273 .H43 2008). Incoming 1L’s can read the Westlaw welcome page excerpt Law School: What To Expect & How To Cope including Fear and Loathing in the First Year, I’m the Dumbest One Here!, Being Called on in Class: Herein the Socratic Method, and The Second and Third Years. The book covers reading and briefing cases, preparing for class, outlining and study groups and taking exams. It has exercises to apply to learned material. It also focuses on legal analysis: Why do courts follow precedent? How are cases applied and distinguished? How is ambiguous language interpreted? There are chapters on legal writing and on oral argument. These chapters will help in first year writing and Moot Court Programs.

Among the 64 titles in the Brooklyn Law School Library’s most recent New Books List is Lee Peoples’ Consumer Law: A Legal Research Guide (Call #KF241.C64 P46 2012). Researchers of consumer law need to focus on several interrelated subject areas that are governed by both state and federal laws, including a complex array of administrative agencies and regulations. This legal research guide provides a pathway for researchers of consumer law. It begins by laying out a research strategy for tackling consumer law issues. A thorough introduction to secondary sources is included. The most important treatises, looseleafs, and practice resources for consumer law and the related fields of bankruptcy, sales, real estate, mortgages, and banking law are discussed. There is an overview of important federal statutes related to consumer law and a discussion of the administrative agencies charged with implementing and enforcing consumer law.

Peoples, Associate Professor of Law Library Science and Law Library Director, Oklahoma City University School of Law, also authored a 30 minute CALI lesson Consumer Law Research available in SARA, the BLS Library catalog. The lesson, a First Year Lesson Topic, introduces students to consumer law research as they assist a hypothetical client “Joe” who is the victim of a used car salesman’s sleazy tactics. Students will develop strategies for researching consumer law issues on both state and federal levels. It covers the “major player” consumer law statutes and the agencies empowered by those statutes as well as consumer law treatises, looseleafs, and practitioner resources in print and online formats.

Brooklyn Law School Professor Nelson Tebbe recently posted Government Endorsement and Disparagement on SSRN. The abstract reads.

What are the constitutional limits on government endorsement? Recently, a sense has been spreading that when the government speaks on its own account, it faces few restrictions. That impression has been fed by two doctrines and their accompanying literatures. First, the Court’s cases developing the government speech doctrine have implied that the only constitutional restriction on government expression is the Establishment Clause, and scholars have adopted that assumption. Officials cannot endorse, say, Christianity, but otherwise they enjoy wide latitude to promote democracy or denigrate smoking. Second, experts on religious freedom likewise have assumed that there is no secular Establishment Clause. So the belief that government is free to endorse and denigrate secular ideas is common, thanks in part to the Supreme Court and in part to scholarship on free speech and religious freedom. But it is mistaken. In this Article, I argue that in fact the Constitution properly limits government endorsement through multiple provisions. I give examples of situations where official expression runs up against such limitations, including racialized speech, electioneering, same-sex marriage exclusions, political gerrymandering, and messages concerning reproductive decisions. Limits in these areas are grounded in equal protection, due process, and free speech itself. Together, my examples suggest a constitutional theme, government nondisparagement that has been overlooked. Drawing out that theme, I suggest new contributions to theoretical debates surrounding political morality, free speech, and religious freedom.

The Law Librarian Blog has a post that incoming 1Ls ought to read: New Law Students: Make Friends With A Librarian. The blog post is reprinted below:

U.S. News & World Report has a short post out for new law students who will start their law school career in the next few weeks. It offers four points for navigating law school:

1. Come prepared 
2. Focus on finals 
3. Make friends 
4. Remove distractions

I’d like to focus for a moment on the third one. The author suggests making connections within the law school and the wider university through activities and other diversions as a break from the law school routine. That’s great advice as law school can be a highly competitive grind. I’d like to make one other suggestion that may help the new student: get to know a librarian. Why? Because we know stuff that students do not.

We know the cycle of the law school academic year. It normally doesn’t shock us when 1Ls invade the library for the legal writing treasure hunt. It’s not exactly the running of the bulls, but there are certain parallels. For students it’s a new experience. For us, it’s “been there done that.” Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even for the simple stuff. There’s usually a ready answer that can make a student’s life easier.

We also know the resources. It may be nice to have all of those apps on tablets and phones. And I’m sure there are plenty of new law students who have a lot of experience doing research in college. Legal research, however, is a different animal. Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law are not free in the wild. The mechanics can be a challenge despite the trend to provide Google-style interfaces. Librarians understand how this stuff works and can help.

I’ll offer related word of advice: not everything is online. More important, not everything is online and is free. It’s more often than not a pay for play world. Luckily the law library has licensed a lot of the good stuff. We can tell students what information is easily accessible and what is not. We can also explain how to get remote access to stuff, like articles, hard to find documents, exams, and other materials.

Librarians know the law school. We’re not the concierge for the school, but we know how it works. We can tell you generally which office likely handles what responsibility. We can tell you where are public copiers, scanners, microform readers (yes, they are still necessary) and other useful resources may be. We can also tell you generally what your expectations should be in using them. The library is probably the friendliest location in the law school. Students use the library facility regularly in spite of the integration of technology into the curriculum. We try to make the place a comfortable and quiet space to study. Take advantage of that.

So, make friends with a librarian. We won’t break the rules for you. But our institutional knowledge of the law program and legal information can make a student’s life easier. We even know where the bathrooms are located. Don’t be afraid to ask.