Author: Ellen Augustiniak

Online Services Librarian
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Lawyer’s Guide to Microsoft Word 2010

Did you know that Word can automagically create and update tables of authorities, tables of contents, endnotes, footnotes, and all sorts of other useful cross-references? That it can merge to email? That it can link multiple files? That you can create shortcuts for symbols like § and Δ? That it can have a tiny icon for small caps, right in the menu bar?!

Microsoft has a robust selection of online help options to teach you how to do all of those things, but sometimes it’s nice to be able browse a book instead of switching between screens. Folks writing notes, memos, briefs, and other heavily-formatted documents: it might be worth your while to check out this new title.

Reading Room –  KF322.5.M53 S363 2011
Check ANTPAC to see if it’s on the shelf.

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Tax Research

Students taking Federal Income Tax were recently treated to a short introduction to tax research during the first part of class. The talk covered:

Slides from the talk are available online. An electronic version of the tax research assignment will be available on the course TWEN page.

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Clearinghouse Review

Covering “the latest legal strategies and best practices for representing low-income clients,” electronic issues of this journal are now available online to the UCI community.

In the past few issues, there have been articles on:

  • “using the Fair Labor Standards Act to support immigrant workers organizing.” (Jan-Feb 2012)
  • “adopting a human rights framework [to] help legal aid attorneys meet broader advocacy goals for their clients.” (Jan-Feb 2011)
  • “using disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act to challenge housing barriers against people with criminal records” (May-Jun 2011)

Print issues will soon arrive in the Law Library–they will be shelved downstairs with other journals. Older issues are searchable in HeinOnline and LexisNexis.

Related link: The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law.

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New Research Guide on Legislative History

The Law Library created a guide to legislative histories, a common summer research project. Find the guide at http://libguides.law.uci.edu/legislative_history.

Highlights include information on:

  • Full legislative histories that have already been done by experts, in the form of compiled legislative histories. If you find yourself in the delightful position of having to research the legislative history of  a statute,  it’s generally best to see if another researcher’s already found everything and put it all together in a tidy bundle for you.
  • Finding and citing the basic documents, including bill versions, hearings, reports, floor debate, and committee prints.
  • State-law starting points, with a focus on California. State legislative histories can be particularly challenging; this page can get you started in the right direction.
  • Off-campus access to databases, with a short FAQ. Protip: get the VPN set up on your laptop before you go away for the summer.
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Court documents on Scribd

Minutes after it was announced, the 9th Circuit’s Prop 8 decision was available this morning at Scribd.com, among other places.

So what’s Scribd? It’s a newer website that lets authors, reporters, bloggers, and other folks upload documents (of all sorts) and share them in a web-friendly layout. Librarians and research specialists here at UCI Law have found that Scribd can be a great source for court documents from recent cases in the news. If you see links to Scribd in your search results, go ahead and click through to check them out!

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What’s happening – new titles

Several new titles commemorate the student reading groups at the Law School. They’re on display in the Reading Room, along with titles from earlier groups.

  

Law students: contact us if you’re in a reading group and you’d like the Law Library to consider adding the group’s books to the collection.

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New Research Guide for Jessup International Moot Court

The Law Library created a guide with resources for UCI Law students who are participating in the Jessup International Moot Court, at http://libguides.law.uci.edu/jessup

The Guide has tabs for:

  • Jessup-specific information;
  • basic international law resources, including links to in-depth research guides, as well as Encyclopedias;
  • treatises on international law in the Law Library;
  • major databases with international law resources; and
  • news and websites devoted to international legal issues.

Additional resources may be added in the future. Please send comments or suggestions to Ellen Augustiniak, Research Law Librarian for Web Resources, at eaugustiniak@law.uci.edu.

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The quiet zone

Over the next few weeks, please be extra careful to keep the noise level in the Library as low as possible so we can provide law students and other Library visitors with a quiet place to study.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • When it comes to noise, the biggest source of complaints is from talking. So if conversation is necessary, keep it brief and be attentive to how well others can hear you. Even whispers can carry quite far in some parts of the Library.
  • The computer lab and group study rooms are not entirely sound-proofed, so your classmates nearby can definitely hear it if things get boisterous.
  • We encourage you to try the lower level if you’re hoping to minimize distractions.
  • We also encourage all law students to contact anyone on the Library staff with Library-related questions or concerns.

 

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Advanced Google

Google announced that it’s rolling out a new tool for advanced searches called “Verbatim,” which replaces search syntax that’s been phased out. “Verbatim” lets you force Google to treat your search terms precisely as you typed them, in the same way that some of the expensive legal research systems allow you to specify precise terms or phrases.

An interesting aside: in the announcement, Google provides a quick summary of how its regular search method works. It’s common knowledge that Google doesn’t just find all the websites that have the same words you’ve typed into the search bar–instead, it (usually) finds the best, most useful websites. To do this, Google “improves” your searches by doing some or all of the following:

  • making automatic spelling corrections
  • personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
  • including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
  • finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
  • searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
  • making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

So next time you’re looking for a specific phrase, try using “Verbatim” your results (click “More search tools” under All Results) if it seems like Google’s “normal improvements” aren’t working well for that search.

Related link: Google Help’s Verbatim tool – Web Search Help.

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