BLS Library Blog

Law Technology News (LTN) magazine and website reports that ALM, the leading provider of specialized business news and information focused on the legal sector, has launched 14 smartphone apps for use on Apple Inc.’s iPhones, iPods, and iPads. The apps provide content from the company’s national and regional web and print publications, and support iOS 6.1 and above. The available publications are:

The American Lawyer 
Corporate Counsel 
Law Technology News 
The National Law Journal 
Connecticut Law Tribune 
Daily Business Review 
Daily Report Online 
Delaware Business Court Insider 
Delaware Law Weekly 
New Jersey Law Journal 
New York Law Journal 
Texas Lawyer 
The Legal Intelligencer 
The Recorder

An ALM press release stated: The apps offer a superior and faster reading experience than what is possible through a smartphone or tablet Web browser. They also provide offline reading capability so users can view news stories and other articles even when they are not connected to the Web. . . The apps are being sponsored by leading financial and legal institutions who are providing end-users free complimentary access to the content during the launch sponsorship. 

Content that might otherwise be behind a paywall is now available thanks to the sponsor. In fact, if you look at the NYLJ front page using the iPhone’s Safari browser, several of these stories are locked. If you look at the same stories using the app, they are unlocked. Brooklyn Law School students can now regularly follow any of these ALM publications.

With New York State’s recent adoption of a rule on Inmate Access to Legal Reference Materials, the article Ineffective Assistance of Library: The Failings and the Future of Prison Law Libraries, 101 Geo. L.J. 1171, is timely reading. See Westlaw or LexisNexis for digital access or check the Brooklyn Law School Library Circulation Desk for the print version. 

The abstract reads in part: 

The prison law library has long been a potent symbol of the inmate’s right to access the courts. But it has never been a practical tool for providing that access. This contradiction lies at the core of the law library doctrine. It takes little imagination to see the problem with requiring untrained inmates, many of them illiterate or non-English speakers, to navigate the world of postconviction relief and civil rights litigation with nothing more than the help of a few library books. Yet law libraries are ubiquitous in American prisons. Now, in light of a technological revolution in legal research methods, prison libraries face an existential crisis that requires prison officials, courts, scholars, and inmates to reconsider the very purpose of the prison law library. . . This Article uses original historical research to show how prison law libraries arose, not as a means of accessing the courts, but rather as a means of controlling inmates’ behavior. . . This historical account helps explain a prison law library system that never really made sense in terms of providing access to the courts.

Unpaid internships suffered a setback this month when US District Court Judge William H. Pauley III ruled in Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures that the defendant violated minimum wage and overtime laws when it failed to pay interns who worked on the movie Black Swan. The lead plaintiff is a Georgetown University law school student. The decision, the first to adopt this argument, rigorously applied the Department of Labor six-part test where internships in the for-profit private sector are viewed as employment relationships for which the federal minimum wage and overtime rules will apply, unless the intern is truly receiving training. The six criteria are:

(1) The internship is similar to training that would be given in an educational environment; 
(2) The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern; 
(3) The intern is not replacing employees and works under close supervision; 
(4) The sponsor of the intern does not derive immediate benefit from intern’s activities and at times, its operations may actually be impeded; 
(5) The intern is not entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; 
(6) The sponsor and the intern understand the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship. 

While not every factor weighed strongly in favor of finding the plaintiffs entitled to pay, Judge William H. Pauley III concluded that the plaintiffs “were classified improperly as unpaid interns and are ‘employees’ covered by the FLSA,” and that “[t]he benefits they may have received—such as knowledge of how a production or accounting office functions or references for future jobs—are the results of simply having worked as any other employee works, not of internships designed to be uniquely educational to the interns and of little utility to the employer.” 

For more on the decision, see the Bloomberg BNA article Judge Rules Fox Searchlight Interns Are FLSA Employees, Certifies Class Action which concludes by noting that “In the past few years, unpaid interns of for-profit, private sector employers have brought several wage and hour suits in New York courts. The district court’s ruling here is the first to find that such interns are employees under the FLSA.” The article cites to another case from the Southern District of New York, Wang v. The Hearst Corporation, where Judge Harold Baer ruled differently in denying partial summary judgment on the employee issue and finding various factual disputes concerning DOL’s unpaid intern criteria.

Another class action, Bickerton v. Rose, which a former intern filed in New York Supreme Court last year, alleged that she regularly worked at least 25 hours per week without pay as an intern for The Charlie Rose show. The case ended when Rose and his production company agreed to pay up to $250,000 as a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.