New and Updated Legal Research Guides from the Library

Legal Research is an important skill that is acquired in law school and perfected over time.  At times, we all are required to do a research in an unfamiliar area.  To get you started and educated on an unfamiliar subject, it is helpful to consult a research guide. The Pace Law Library compiles research guides on various topics and the following are those that have been recently added or updated. Click here to view all 35 research guides compiled by Pace Law Library.

Elder Law Resources
A guide to online resources, including federal and state law, specific issues, journals and newsletter, and more.

Business and Corporate Law Research
Research in the law of corporations and other business entities involved learning not just about corporate law, but also the law of agency, partnerships, limited liability companies, and other business structures.

Legal News
this guide contains a wide variety of RSS feeds from legal blogs and news sites.

Legislative History Research Guide
The legislative history of a law is comprised of the documents created during deliberations leading to the law's enactment.  They are used to determine the legislature's intended purpose and to clarify any ambiguities in the statutory language.

Federal Administrative Decisions and Resources
Guide to federal administrative agencies, including links to decisions and regulations, along with the mission statement of each agency.

New York Legal Research
This guide provides links to primary sources of law and government websites for New York, New York City, and Westchester County.

Guide for Law Review Members
This guide will assist students who serve on the three Pace law review.  It provides a basic overview of cite checking, circulation policies, and interlibrary loan request procedures.

Land Use Law Research
This guide will assist you in researching local land use laws.

A New Way To Search For UK Law: legislation.gov.uk

Today the UK's Ministry of Justice launched legislation.co.uk, The Official Home of Revised Enacted UK Legislation 1267- Present. According to the web site's FAQ sheet, Legislation.co.uk is "the official place of publication for newly enacted legislation. The aim is to publish legislation on legislation.gov.uk simultaneously or at least within 24 hours of its publication in printed form."

Legislation.co.uk brings together data that, until today, had to be searched via two separate websites. Those websites, Office of Public Sector Information, and the Statute Law Database, will be shut down when the transfer of data to legislation.co.uk is complete. The creation of legislation.co.uk is part of a broader movement toward transparency in government in the UK.
According to a National Archives press release:

Containing a massive 6.5 million PDF documents, the new website shows both the original version of any piece of UK legislation covering all jurisdictions (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and details of any amendments, so that those accessing it can see how laws have evolved. A simple web search will quickly find key legislation like the Consumer Credit Act and the Data Protection Act, and special features include an interactive browse facility and timeline.

Mr Morley [Acting CEO of The National Archives] continued: 'By using the latest technology and opening up the raw data underpinning legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives has given global access to the nation's "operating system". I'm proud to say this website is the only example of its kind in the world. It provides access to an invaluable and historical resource for anyone wanting to know what the law actually says.'

Recently Added Research Guides

Pace Law Library uses LibGuides to create its legal research guides. Check out the home page and browse among our 28 legal research guides.

The following are the most recent additions:

Prisoners' Rights Law Resources

Includes federal, state, and international primary and secondary sources, in print and online, with a a particular focus on special populations and topical issues.

Securities Law Research Guide

Guide to statutes, regulations, treatises, and other sources of securities law.

Supreme Court Nominations

Information and resources about the Supreme Court appointment process and specific information about the recent nominees.

Genocide Resources

Sources of law, commentaries, and other secondary sources on genocide.

The 19th Edition of Bluebook Is On The Horizon

The 19th edition of the Bluebook is scheduled to be released in May 2010, according to HeinOnline, and available for purchase from HeinOnline for $32.00.

The online version of Bluebook, available for $25.00 subscription fee, states the following on its order page:

Please be aware that we will be releasing the Nineteenth edition of the Bluebook by June 1.

New and Updated LibGuides

Check out our collection of research guides.

Among some of the recently added or updated guides are:

Criminal Justice Information and Assistance for Victims, Juveniles, the Incarcerated, and the Accused

Collection of information about governmental (federal, state, and local) and non-governmental agencies, organizations, and services that provide assistance within the criminal justice system.

Criminal Law Statutes of the United States

Guide providing the federal criminal law code as well as the criminal law statutes of the fifty states. It also lists criminal law procedure and evidence rules when applicable.

Feminist Legal Theory Research

Guide to print and online resources, both legal and interdisciplinary, for feminist legal theory research.

Legal Treatises by Subject

Legal Treatises provide well-organized, thorough and detailed explanations and analyses of individual legal topics.

Opening Statements and Closing Arguments: Making Your Case

Guide to opening statements and closing arguments.

Pace Online Health Law Library

A gateway to online resources, including federal, state, and international health law, health law topics, legal and medicinal journals and newsletters, legal and medicinal agencies and organizations, and relevant discussion groups.

United Kingdom Legal Research

A guide to finding legal materials for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

United States Government Information Online

Most U.S. Government information is now available online, for free - a guide how to find it?

Bridge The Gap Legal Research Program

On behalf of LLAGNY, the 15th annual Bridge the Gap Legal Research Program is scheduled for Friday, March 26, 2010 from 8:30 am - 4:00 pm in the New York City Bar Association.

This year's event will include programs aimed at legal career development and will be open to recent graduates who may have their employment offer deferred or who are still looking for work. The program include topics on Social Media: Ethics and the Practice of Law; Legal Research on a Tight Budget, and Research for Career Development. New York MCLE credit will be available for some of these sessions.

Check out more information for attorneys here and more information for law students here.

Splitting the Infinitive

Via the (new) legal writer, Raymond Ward's post titled Sure, You Can Split an Infinitive, But This Is Ridiculous points out the absolute NO way to split an infinitive. Those who are involved in any type of legal writing might find this useful and perhaps humorous.

This blog's official position on split infinitives is that they're okay. The Star Trek catch phrase - 'to boldly go' - as A-okay with us. But please, please don't use your freedom from the no-split-infinitives superstition to write a sentence like this:

'Is it kosher for a law enforcement agency to, pursuant to a lawfully granted search warrant, search your G-mail account without telling you?' [Wall Street Journal Law Blog].

Visit the original post (referenced above) to read a full post and be aware of those infinitives!

New Additions to LLRX

Law and technology resources for legal professionals (LLRX.com) added new guides to its collection during the October month of 2009.

The following are some of those included:

• Pretexting, Legal Ethics and Social Networking Sites (By Ken Strutin)
• Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Updated and Revised October 2009 (By Sabrina I. Pacifici)
• Legal Implications of Cloud Computing - Part One (The Basics and Framing the Issue) (By David Navetta, published in September 2009)
• Legal Implications of Cloud Computing - Part Two (Privacy and the Cloud) (By Tanya Forsheit)
• The Government Domain: A Handful of Classics (By Peggy Garvin)

Bloomberg Law

Legal Blog Watch has this article about Bloomberg Law, a new legal research service that competes with Westlaw and Lexis. Bloomberg's service is marketed to law firms, and integrates legal content with news and business information.

This new service is scheduled to be introduced later this month at a party at Wilkie Farr & Gallagher in NYC. It offers a citator, docket search, a law digest, law reports that integrate primary and secondary legal research with financial and business news, and the ability to search across multiple databases.

The Legal Blog Watch article includes reviews by beta testers (mixed verdicts) and questions the need for yet another proprietary legal research service.

CALI: New York Primary Legal Research

CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, produces new lessons daily. One that caught my attention is intended to practice and review NY primary legal research. It takes about an hour to complete. A user is given a hypothetical in the beginning of the lesson. After that, he gets to explore secondary sources, statutes, cases, and regulations (both online and in print) to try to answer the questions posed in the hypothetical.

This lesson is intended to acquaint students with basic information regarding sources of primary law in New York state: case law, statutes and regulations. It can be used to supplement instruction in introductory Research and Writing courses or as a freestanding introduction to doing New York legal research.

There are more lessons to chose from; they organized by topic, author, or by lessons recommended to 1Ls and to 2 and 3 Ls. See for yourself.

Internet Materials In Opinions: Citations and Hyperlinking

In the July 2009 Newsletter of the Federal Courts, titled The Third Branch, is an interesting article titled Internet Materials In Opinions: Citations and Hyperlinking mentioning some "suggested practices" to assist courts on how to deal with citations to Internet materials.

The Judicial Conference has issued a series of “suggested practices” to assist courts in the use of Internet materials in opinions. The recommendations follow a pilot project conducted by circuit librarians who captured and preserved webpages cited in opinions over a six-month period.

The guidelines suggest that, if a webpage is cited, chambers staff preserve the citation by downloading a copy of the site’s page and filing it as an attachment to the judicial opinion in the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files System. The attachment, like the opinion, would be retrievable on a non-fee basis through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. When considering whether to cite Internet sources, judges are reminded that some litigants, particularly pro se litigants, may not have access to a computer.

Guide For Law Review Members

The Pace Law Library created a new guide titled Guide For Law Review Members. This guide will assist students who serve on the three Pace law reviews. It provides a basic overview of cite checking, circulation policies, and interlibrary loan request procedures. You can find suggestions on how to find print and/or electronic sources, how to obtain sources via ILL, and what to consult to properly cite.

Also, take a minute to view the full list of Pace Law Library Guides.

Updates to Loislaw

Via WisBlawg, Forthcoming Loislaw Enhancements & Widgets by Bonnie Shucha and via Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin newsletter article, Wolters Kluwer: Loislaw Enhancements, Widgets, and Public Records by Nancy Scibelli from Quarles & Brady,

Wolters Kluwer will be making a number of enhancements to Loislaw this summer by improving Find A Case, document delivery capabilities, and the Loislaw homepage.

Find A Case is a Loislaw tool to pull cases by citation. It is similar to Westlaw's Find & Print or Lexis' Get & Print tools. It will be improved so researchers can retrieve multiple citations at once. Find A Case will also be enhanced so individuals can extract citations automatically from an electronic copy of a document, such as a brief or memo, by uploading the document into Find A Case.

The document delivery tools on Loislaw will be improved so researchers can print, email, or save multiple documents simultaneously. Researchers will also be able to print, email, or save search results including Global Cite and Find A Case results. These document delivery options are not currently available on Loislaw.

The Loislaw homepage will be reconfigured so only the content available is displayed. Wolters Kluwer is calling this a Smart Start Page. The Smart Start Page will display only the content available under your agreement. Currently, the Loislaw homepage displays all Loislaw content including content not available under an institution's agreement and thus not available for use.

Wolters Kluwer anticipates releasing all of these tools this coming summer.

In addition, Wolters Kluwer will release a Case Law Widget later this month. The widget is a Internet webtool that Loislaw subscribers can put on their webpage to retrieve cases via the Internet portal. It simply provides an external access point to Loislaw's Find A Case tool. The widget is highly customizable and can be modified to match the Internet portal design.

2006 United States Code Available Online

The United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States based on what is printed in the Statutes at Large. It is divided by broad subjects into 50 titles and published by the Office of law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The USC has been published since 1926 every six (6) years. To stay current, annual cumulative supplements are published in between the years. The GPO Access has the 1994, 2000, and now even the 2006 versions of the United States Code, including the annual supplements. Files are available in ASCII Text from the 1994 edition forward and Portable Document Format (PDF) from the 2006 edition forward.

Project: RaceTracker

A project of the Sunlight Foundation and PPF,

The RaceTracker project on the OpenCongress wiki tracks every election for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and state governor. RaceTracker is a free, open-source, fully-referenced, and non-partisan public resource.

You can find:

• Candidates for each seat and their status
• Campaign contribution information
• District maps, past election results, and more

Check out the RaceTracker Project wiki and find out how you can participate. The home page features current hot topics, such as 2010 elections, 2009 stimulus bill, 2008 bank bailout bill, 111th Congress, members of Congress who twitter, members of Congress under investigation, members of Congress posting schedules online, and many other topics.

More To Legal Writing

Carrie W. Teitcher, from Brooklyn Law School, published an article titled Legal Writing Beyond Memos and Briefs: An Annotated Bibliography that is available on SSRN. There is more to legal writing than just memos and briefs. Legal professionals often need to draft affidavits, contracts, e-mails, jury instructions and verdict forms, letters, motions, discovery demands, or pleadings. This is an annotated bibliography of legal writing sources. They are organized by subject. And many in the legal profession will find it helpful.

Guide to International Legal Research

The Pace Law Library published another resource guide. Check out our newest addition, International Legal Research Guide. This is a guide to international public and private law, with an emphasis on international public law. This guide presents print, digital, subscription and free online resources to international legal research. It is organized by the type of resource.

Also, take a minute to view the full list of Pace Law Library Guides published so far via LibGuides.

Internet Sites for Attorneys & Other Legal Professionals

An article published in Richmond Journal of Law and Technology about helpful Internet sites for attorneys and other legal professionals is worth while reading. Access full article.

This listing of Internet sites for legal, factual, and other research presents a variety of sources for attorneys, law students, law librarians, and others who use the Web. Initially developed for an Advanced Legal Research course and a continuing education session for legal assistants and paralegals, the listing includes sites for primary authorities, both federal and state, as well as URLs for other types of information such as names of possible expert witnesses and biographical and background information about individuals.

Timothy L. Coggins, Legal, Factual and Other Internet Sites for Attorneys and Legal Professionals, XV RICH. J.L. & TECH. 13 (2009), http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/v15i4/article13.pdf

JD Supra Introduced Law Centers

For those who don't know of JDSupra, take a moment to read one of our previous posts, JD Supra & Facebook. JDSupra recently introduced its Law Centers. All the donated documents are now organized into four categories by topics and areas of interest: Business Law Centers, Personal Law Centers, Government Law Centers, and Law Practice Centers.

Each section features news first, which is followed by three main sections: News and Analysis, All Documents, and Contributors. One can easily see what is new in the area of research, what new documents have been shared and posted, and who contributed them.

If you are a twitterer, the Business Law and Personal Law Centers have their own Twitter Feed that you can follow.

2006 Federal Justice Statistics

Bureau of Justice Statistics released the 2006 federal justice statistics. It describes criminal case processing in the federal justice system, including arrest and booking through sentencing and corrections.

These statistical tables present the number of suspects arrested and booked by the U.S. Marshals Service, suspects in matters investigated and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, defendants adjudicated and sentenced in U.S. district court, and characteristics of federal prisoners and offenders under federal supervision.

Data are from the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP), which collects comprehensive information describing suspects and defendants processed in the federal criminal justice system, and annual data on workload, activities, and outcomes associated with federal criminal cases.

It is available in printable PDF format or as an Excel Spreadsheet.