Library Access During Finals
Effective today, the library has begun our extended hours for the reading period and finals. Please see the library schedule online for full details on the extent of hours. Please help us maintain a good study space for you and your colleagues. During this period, the library staff will be checking IDs and refusing most …Read the Rest…
Marriage Cases
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a challenge to the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage after it was (briefly) made legal in that state. Tomorrow, the Court hears oral arguments in United States v. Windsor, which is a challenge brought to …Read the Rest…
Do you know how to find the law? Advanced Legal Research can help.
In the coming semester, the law librarians will participate in teaching an Advanced Legal Research course. The course is designed to provide in-depth exposure to the sources of law and legal commentary in American and other legal systems, and provide hands-on exposure to sophisticated methodologies for effective legal research in all media. An effective, sophisticated, …Read the Rest…
New Law Review format on display at Circ. Desk
The Case Western Reserve Law Review has put a lot of really solid work into the typesetting and page layout of their journal. Besides some real benefits for their operation in the pre-production process, this reformatting makes the Law Review uniquely well-suited to viewing on tablet and portable e-reading devices. Stop by the library’s circulation …Read the Rest…
Legislative History “genres”
In my last post I mentioned that the technical/mechanical tools for working with legislative materials (at least at the federal level) have lately become much more accessible and, if not intuitive, at least not so much of an actual barrier to research. This has in fact been the general trend in legal information, and therefore …Read the Rest…
Demystifying Legislative History
Knowing how to do legislative-history research, at least in the federal system, is now not really any different than simply having general knowledge of the work-product of Congress: what, in a documentary sense, is it that the legislature actually does? It wasn’t always so. “Legislative history” research has long had a sort of mystique among …Read the Rest…