Category: Databases

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Updates on Socio-Legal scholarship

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.

The Socio-Legal Studies Workshop is an interdisciplinary seminar that meets one Friday each month over lunch (12-1.15 pm) in the Law School. The conveners are Catherine Fisk and Chris Tomlins. Information for the April 2012 seminar is below.

  • When: Friday, April. 6 at noon
  • Where: In the Law School (room 3500H).
  • Who: All interested law faculty members, faculty members from outside the Law School, law students, and graduate students are welcome.
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Google Scholar’s enhanced citing references

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!

Cases citing Wal-Mart v. Dukes, 2011

Via the Google Scholar Blog.

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New Research Guide on Career Resources

The Law Library created a guide to the career directories and databases we provide. It is intended to serve as a companion to the resources and databases provided by the Career Development Office. Find the guide at http://libguides.law.uci.edu/career.

Look to this guide when you are:

  • Building lists of legal employers, attorneys, or judges.
  • Searching for contact information for courts and other employers.
  • Preparing for OCI: learn about the types of cases and clients a law firm or lawyer has handled.
  • Researching a judge for a clerkship interview: review attorney evaluations and read about noteworthy cases.
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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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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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New Research Guide for Pro Bono Projects

The Law Library created a new guide with resources for UCI law students working on select pro bono projects that may require intensive research. The guide is available at: http://libguides.law.uci.edu/probono.

The guide is organized by tab, with one for each of the following types of pro bono projects:

  • Asylum (with a particular focus on forms): to assist the HIV Asylum Project and the Iraqi Assistance Project
  • Environmental Litigation: to assist students working the Surfrider case involving Dana Point
  • Mississippi: to assist students working on various projects at the Mississippi Center for Justice over winter break
  • Native American Law: to assist the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition Research Project

Additional resources and projects may be added to the guide throughout the year, so continue to check back for updated content. Please send any comments or suggestions to Jackie Woodside, Research Law Librarian for Experiential Learning, at jwoodside@law.uci.edu.

A full list of this semester’s projects is available on the UCI Law School website: http://www.law.uci.edu/pro_bono/project_list.html.

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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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