Supreme Court of California cases – free resource

SCOCAL provides free access to opinions, annotations, and related documents from the Supreme Court of California. It’s a joint project between Stanford Law School and Justia. SCOCAL’s interface is clean and easy-to-use. I encourage you to give it a try if you’re doing California legal research!

One especially interesting note about the SCOCAL system (for legal research aficionados) is its editorial staff. SCOCAL takes a novel approach to creating the kind of editorial enhancements that are usually only found in expensive commercial resources.  In SCOCAL’s system, annotations are written by SLS students who take Advanced Legal Research. From the the Spring 2011 Stanford Lawyer:

The most interesting part for me was realizing that all the resources we use are created by people who invest time and effort in researching and analyzing cases, statutes, and other materials. It’s so easy to just go online and think that things appear there by magic. But in creating some annotations myself, I realized that every link, every insight, every connection is put there by a researcher,” says Amy Burns ’12, who took the class. (emphasis added)

You can read a bit more about the process at Stanford’s Law Library Blog.

 

Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made

The ABA Journal recently asked 30 influential lawyers—including our own Dean Chemerinsky—what book they would recommend that every lawyer read.  The list focuses on books that many of us have not yet read, and the recommendations come from lawyers across a broad spectrum of public and private practice settings.  The list is a great source for summer reading and ideas to kick-start a law student reading group:
http://www.abajournal.com/gallery/30lawyers30books/569

Dean Chemerinsky’s pick, a judicial biography of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969), is available in the Law Library:
Jim Newton, Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (Riverhead Books, 2006). 614 pages.
Law Library – KF8745.W3 N49 2006.
Check ANTPAC to see if it’s on the shelf.

United States Code online

United States Code OnlineThe Office of the Law Revision Counsel has announced their beta site for the United States Code.

The new site has a “Cite Checker,” which shows

  • a quick overview of a section, including the heading,
  • the citation for the public law(s) that added or amended the section,
  • editorial notes,
  • and citations to enrolled legislation that hasn’t yet been codified. (As opposed to citations to  proposed legislation that would amend or repeal the section, if the legislation passes.)

I was glad to see that Chapters show the corresponding sections in a Table of Contents view. So I can quickly see that Chapter 77 of Title 42 is where I need to go for a citation to “42 U.S.C. 6201.”

The US GPO also allows you to search and browse the US Code. But if you’re looking for the free federal Popular Name Tool, or more information about the Code, uscode.house.gov is the site to use.

For more information, including a link to the beta site, check the announcement at uscode.house.gov.

Free Film Series – Summer 2011

Are you in Orange County this summer? Check out the Free Film Series on campus. This Thursday, July 7 they’re showing Waking Life (2001) and Threnody (2004).

  • Location: Lucille Kuehn Auditorium (Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100, Bldg. #610 on campus map)
  • Parking available in the Mesa Structure for $2/hour

More information and a complete list of films are at summer.uci.edu/calendar/filmseries.aspx.

Typography for Lawyers

book coverThe Typography for Lawyers website made a splash when it launched, with its opinionated and informed take on legal document design. Written by a former professional font designer who is currently a civil litigator, the blog recently evolved into a book. Now both the blog and book offer advice, anecdotes, and examples.

The Law Library recently purchased the book in response to a law student’s suggestion.* Now you can come check out the author’s design aesthetic in print, and see for yourself the differences between print-optimized and screen optimized fonts.

Matthew Butterick, Typography for Lawyers: Essential Tools for Polished & Persuasive Documents. (Jones McClure Publishing) 216 pages, paperback.
Reading Room – KF250 .B88 2010.
Check ANTPAC to see if it’s on the shelf.

* The Law Library welcomes your feedback. Let us know if you have a suggestion!

New resource for Legislative Histories

The Law Library recently purchased a new product: ProQuest Legislative Insight. It gathers all major legislative history documents for enacted legislation going back to the 1960s, with more on the way. It also provides an easy-to-use search interface, with color-coded results. It’s not cutting-edge visualization, but it’s a helpful cue when you are sorting through a long list of legislative history documents.

Legislative Insight also aims to provide a broader context for legislative history research. It has general background information, including the “historical context” for each Congress. And  it provides a “Legislative Process” view that shows you a graphical map of the legislative process on the side, so that you can see where each document was produced as a bill wound its way through Congress. To get to that view, click the “Legislative Process” link at the top of a Legislative History result.

Legislative Process
Legislative Process - link at the top of a result

Note that the “Legislative Process” view hides some related legislative history documents (like CRS reports and committee prints), perhaps because those documents are not explicitly linked to a particular bill.

To look at a sample legislative history–one that includes related documents–try the Legislative History for the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-311.

 

PDFs from HathiTrust

HathiTrust IconReminder to cite-checkers: you can log into HathiTrust to download the scanned versions of entire books and other documents. Use your UCInetID and password (not your LawNetID). To login to HathiTrust:

  1. go to www.hathitrust.org
  2. click on the “My Collections” link in the top navigation bar
  3. click on the “Log in” link
  4. select “University of California, Irvine” from the pull-down list of HathiTrust Partner Institutions and click on the “Login” button.
  5. you will be transferred to a UCI authentication display, where you can enter your UCInetID and password
  6. click on the “Home” link to search HathiTrust

What you see is (sometimes) not what you get.

WestlawNext is a tremendously powerful research product, with an attractive, up-to-date interface that law students love. Like all research tools, though, WestlawNext has some peculiarities that can trip you up in certain situations. In working with students and other researchers, the librarians at UCI Law have found two small things about searching cases–specifically, the Document Preview in case search results–that you might want to be aware of:

  • When you see a word highlighted in your search results, it does not necessarily mean that word was used in the search.
  • When you see a phrase that looks very much like a West “Topic” in your search results, it’s not necessarily from West’s Key Number System.

Continue reading “What you see is (sometimes) not what you get.”