Author: Ellen Augustiniak

Don’t forget to register if you want to use your student legal research accounts over the summer! Note that Lexis and Westlaw both have restrictions on what kind of work you can do with your student accounts – read the terms and conditions carefully.

• Lexis: Go to lexisnexis.com/lawschool and log in, then click “2012 Summer Access.” Follow the instructions to get access to Lexis Advance for the summer. (Note that a form to ask for summer access to regular lexis.com might be available later this month.)
• Westlaw: Go to lawschool.westlaw.com/shared/marketinfodisplay.asp?code=MI&id=322 and choose either “Current Student” or “Graduating Student,” whichever applies to you.
• Bloomberg Law (a new option for 2012). Use this google form this form to request a student ID for Bloomberg Law, a newer research platform. (Bloomberg registration is different; it can take a few days to process a request for a new password.)

Questions about Lexis or Westlaw? Contact your student representatives or your account representatives. Check home pages (not research pages) for contact information: lexisnexis.com/lawschool or lawschool.westlaw.com.

Update 7/30/2012 – New Bloomberg Law Registration Form.

View surveys, lists, and rankings of major US firms from ALM Legal Intelligence*, including:

• Diversity rankings (going back to 1985),
• Pro Bono surveys (going back to 1994), which rank firms based on the amount of pro bono work done (including average number per lawyer and percentage of lawyers with more than 20 hours of pro bono work),
• Summer associate surveys,
• Surveys of law firm economics,
• Detailed reports of firms, including lists of major clients, and
• Many other surveys and reports!

Related link: www.almlegalintel.com.  *Law students: use the Law VPN if you’re not in the Law Library computer lab.

The California Courts Judicial Council recently voted to stop deploying what was meant to be a statewide case management system after the State Auditor determined that the project had been poorly managed. California counties that are currently using the system will continue to do so (Sacramento, Fresno, Orange, Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura, and San Joaquin) but other counties will wait until issues of funding, logistics, and administration are resolved.

Some law students might be surprised to find that most states don’t provide a PACER-like system for court case management. After all, Federal courts have been using electronic case management for years now and most law students have heard of PACER. But in fact, states and counties have taken multiple approaches to case management due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is cost. In California, the Administrative Office of the Courts and several superior courts had spent $407 million by June 2010 on its statewide case management project, and the State Auditor projected a final cost of over $2 billion by 2015-16.*

* See Cal. State Auditor, Administrative Office of the Courts: The Statewide Case Management Project Faces Significant Challenges Due to Poor Project Management, (Feb. 2011), p. 1.The Auditor’s report is an interesting read, by the way, especially for anybody considering a career that might involve government contracts. The California State Auditor’s website has an archive of its reports, some from as early as 1993, and you can sign up to get an email when there’s a new report released: http://www.bsa.ca.gov/reports/.

Via: Sacramento County Public Law Library Blog, 4/9/2012

It’s always interesting to see legal information from a non-legal point of view. Wolfram|Alpha (a company that is most certainly not a legal publisher or legal research product vendor) recently added some information from federal courts to its “computational knowledge engine.” There are some intriguing results! From the Wolfram|Alpha Blog:

Input like “California courts” will give you a summary of key stats about all the district courts in a given state, including a list of the largest cities in each of them. From there, you can click a specific court to see a map of that court’s jurisdiction and detailed information about overall caseloads and judgeships, as well as annual filings for a variety of civil and criminal case types.

HeinOnline is constantly adding to its collection of “Subject Compilations of State Laws (1960 – 2011).” This is an invaluable resource for questions about laws across different states. It gathers law review articles, books, and other resources where the authors have researched state laws, then organizes the resources by subject and state.

Example: Enterprise Zones – 17 results, dating from 1979 – 2011.

Surveying laws in a variety of jurisdictions is a frequent summer project for law students in a variety of legal settings – HeinOnline’s Subject Complications is a great place to start for this type of research. Over the summer (and throughout the school year) UCI Law students have off-campus access to HeinOnline two ways: 1) the Law VPN and 2) web VPN.

The next Socio-Legal Studies workshop will feature UCI Professor Mona Lynch‘s paper “Theorizing the Role of the ‘War on Drugs’ in US Punishment.” The paper is a great example of legal scholarship that 1) appears outside of law-school journals and 2) is not available in Westlaw or Lexis. In fact, papers from a variety of peer-reviewed journals that might be of interest to law students (in criminology, sociology, and political science, for example) are available on UC campuses – you just have to look beyond the big legal databases.

In this case, the journal “Theoretical Criminology” will publish Professor Lynch’s paper. UCI Law students with an interest in this area should note that you can sign up to get an email alert every time a new volume of this journal (or any other Sage journal) is published. If you’re on campus or connected to the VPN, you can browse issues of Theoretical Criminology back to 1997 and sign up for email alerts here: http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/by/year.

Have you noticed that the “How cited” page for cases on Google Scholar now estimates how much the citing reference talks about the case? Think of it like the “depth of treatment” rating in Westlaw and WestlawNext, or a bit like “analysis” descriptions in Lexis and Advance.

Levels are: “discuss at length,” “discuss,” or “discuss briefly.” (It seems that no icon means that the earlier case was merely cited in a parenthetical or string citation.) Nifty. And free!

Via the Google Scholar Blog.