Academic Law Research Articles

‘We're Going to Make You Popular': Popular Collections in the Modern Academic Law Library

One way to promote the relevancy of an academic law library is to create a special collection that generates interest in the patron base; a popular collection is a viable way of reinventing a law library's image in the hearts and minds of the law school community. Popular collections have been championed by general academic librarians because they promote reading and literacy, the use of the library as a place, and such collections represent the shift toward a user focused library model. Using data collected from interviews and analysis of collection development policies this article presents models of popular collections currently in use at academic law libraries, as well as considerations for the creation of such collections.

Law School Libraries and the U.S. News & World Report Rankings: An Empirical Defense of Library Investments in the Era of the Rankings Regime

Using both simple correlation and multiple regression analyses, this paper explores how measures of academic law library quality, like materials expenditures and number of librarians employed, have significant positive effects on law school rankings outcomes – an important point to make in this era of law schools’ collective obsession with the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

SLS/BIALL Academic Law Library Survey 2010/2011

AbstractThis is the latest report analysing the results of the Academic Law Library Survey conducted on behalf of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). It has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) Legal Information Literacy Statement

The Association hosts an annual conference which features a members’ ‘Have your say’ session. At the 2011 session, a BIALL member based in the commercial sector voiced their concern at the legal research competency of recent joiners to their firm, stating that senior partners were asking in-house law librarians to verify the research presented by new trainees. This member also queried the role of academic law librarians, questioning how legal research skills are being taught at academic and vocational level and stating clearly that the legal research skills of new joiners are not meeting the expectations of employers. The following debate prompted one of the authors to propose that BIALL should investigate the issue in depth, with the aim of producing legal IL guidance in the form of a toolkit, similar to legal IL guidance devised in the United States and IL initiatives within the NHS (Choolhun 2012).

The Public Mission of the Public Law School Library

This article explores the evolving public mission of the public law school library. Following a brief overview of the history of the public university and its public mission, the article examines the mission of state-supported law schools — particularly those affiliated with public research universities — and explores how that mission is affected as those law schools transition to a model of greater financial self-sufficiency. This consideration of the public mission of the public law school is crucial to understanding the public mission of the public law school library, as the library exists to support the law school’s mission. The article next reviews the public law school library’s traditional public mission and the unique challenges the public academic law library now faces in fulfilling that mission. The article concludes by encouraging public law school libraries to examine and, as necessary, redefine their public missions and to take a broader view of their role in supporting their law schools’ public missions. Public law school libraries also are encouraged to collaborate with one another and with state-supported university libraries to fulfill their public missions on a national basis.

Pursuing Professional Accountability

To develop an evidence-based approach to the identification, prevention, and management of surgical residents with behavioral problems. The American College of Surgeons and Southern Illinois University Department of Surgery hosted a 1-day think tank to develop strategies for early identification of problem residents and appropriate interventions. Participants read a selection of relevant literature before the meeting and reviewed case reports. American College of Surgeons headquarters, Chicago, Illinois. Medical and nursing leaders in the field of resident education; individuals with expertise in dealing with academic law, mental health issues, learning deficiencies, and disruptive physicians; and surgical residents. Evidence-based strategies for the identification, prevention, and management of problem residents. Recommendations based on the literature and expert opinions have been made for the identification, remediation, and reassessment of problem residents. It is essential to set clear expectations for professional behavior with faculty and residents. A notice of deficiency should define the expected acceptable behavior, timeline for improvement, and consequences for noncompliance. Faculty should note and address systems problems that unintentionally reinforce and thus enable unprofessional behavior. Complaints, particularly by new residents, should be investigated and addressed promptly through a process that is transparent, fair, and reasonable. The importance of early intervention is emphasized.

International Legal Collections at U.S. Academic Law School Libraries

Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slissrj Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Acknowledgements This article originated as a final research project for Professor Jean Bedord's fall semester 2011 graduate course, Information and Society (LIBR 200-05). I would like to thank Prof. Bedord for her suggestions, insights, and criticism. I am also grateful to the other students in the course for sharing their own research and thoughts via on-line discussion boards over the course of the semester.

The Rise and Fall of Academic Law Library Collection Standards

This article provides a history of the American Bar Association (ABA) Accreditation Standards for law library collection development from a simple standard, “adequate for the use of the students,” to a more detailed list of requirements, and back again to simpler mandates. ABA standards are currently under review, and the author argues it is time to end the collection requirements in the ABA standards.

Having one's cake and eating it: the paradox of contextualisation in socio-legal research

Traditional doctrinal scholarship provides an important service to practising lawyers by analysing legal rules and decisions, clarifying ambiguities within rules, structuring them in a logical and coherent manner and describing their interrelationship (Chynoweth, 2008). The systematisation and formulation of the law in terms of doctrine creates a conceptual basis for constructing a legal context that helps to determine which rules should be applied in a particular situation. In this sense, doctrinal studies emerge out of the study of legal texts (or black-letter law), which are generated by legislature, courts and other legal authorities, and feed back in to legal practice once they are used in deciding cases. The method of doctrinal research, being functional to legal practice, dominates academic law and legal education. Notwithstanding its role in supporting legal practice, the doctrinal approach is criticised for conveying a normatively closed image of law (Cotterrell, 1995, pp. 50–53), for constructing the legal context narrowly, for presenting the legal system as a body of rules which can be studied in isolation from the broader societal context of the legal system by the exegesis of authoritative texts (Bradney, 1998, p. 76; Vick, 2004), for ‘not being self-conscious about its assumptions’ (Twining, 1999, p. 44) and for cultivating what Geoffrey Samuel (2009) calls the ‘authority paradigm’. Internally, i.e. from the standpoint of the legal system and its functionaries, this paradigm (or legal context) is produced by way of self-reference and normative closure, continually reaffirming the authority of legal sources such as legal texts, previous legal decisions and/or legislation, and prioritising definitions and methods based on what William Twining called the ‘practical insider attitudes’ (Twining, 2000, p. 129; for a discussion, see Banakar, 2003, p. 8). Externally, i.e. from the standpoint of policy-makers and citizenry, it is upheld through the threat of violence against non-compliance, backed by the authority of the modern state. The authority paradigm's normative closure and its dependency on coercion encourage ‘rigidity and introspection rather than an open-minded attitude to academic methods and pursuits’ (Samuel, 2009, p. 432). It fosters an understanding of the law as a system, which exists independently of societal forces. In order to escape the intellectual constraints of the authority paradigm, many academic lawyers turn to social theory and social sciences, which in contrast to law are based on the ‘perspective of enquiry’ (Samuel, 2009; see also Banakar, 2009b). These scholars place the law in the broader sociocultural context of the legal system and study legal phenomena in relation to societal forces, which are the prerequisite for the existence of the legal system and the production of the narrow legal context of the law. However, such an evasive strategy often comes at a price.

Cloudy with a Chance of Open Source: Open Source Integrated Library Systems and Cloud Computing in Academic Law Libraries

Integrated library systems (ILSs) have been fundamental to library workflow in both technical services and public services for decades. However, many of the proprietary ILSs currently on the market do not provide law libraries with the flexibility and adaptability necessary to keep pace with advances in technology. Some law libraries are considering abandoning proprietary ILSs and implementing one of the nascent open source ILSs that have sprung up in the last few years. As the lines blur between hardware and software, many organizations are trading in-house information technology infrastructure and personnel for full-service cloud hosting. This article examines these trends for those contemplating a move to an open source ILS and/or cloud computing.

The End of Scholarly Bibliography: Reconceptualizing Law Librarianship

The dawning of the age of digital information shifts the paradigm of the traditional scholar librarian. As three dimensional representations of information wither away, he scholarly legal bibliographer, a fixture in legal academia is devolving into an antiquarian. This brings into question the future of academic law librarianship and how it can be saved.

Idea prawa narodowego na łamach „Prawa” (1928–1939) i „Współczesnej Myśli Prawniczej” (1935–1939)

The Idea of National Law on the Pages of “Law” and “Contemporary Legal Thought” “Contemporary Legal Thought” At the turn of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, the idea to elaborate Polish national law was born among some law students of Polish universities. The place where this concept was being shaped was the student journal “Law”, which from mid-thirties represented the majority of the academic law circles existing at law faculties of Polish universities, and then “Contemporary Legal Thought” on whose pages law faculty graduates presented their ideas. The aim set by young lawyers was to formulate a legal doctrine whose centre would be constituted by a nation understood as a community based on centuries-old tradition of experiences. The form of national organisation which the publishers of the above mentiones journals attempted to create was a national state. The shaping of national law was to be the consequence of the process of its nationalization (to make it national and free from foreign influences). This process was to take place in three areas: normative, axiological and psychological one. Therefore, in the first sphere, the eff orts were to be undertaken in order to make law national by basing it on historical sources of Polish constitutional tradition. The objective of the activities in the second area was to define the main ideas, that is, moral imperatives which had been developed in Polish politico-legal thought in its historical evolution, and in the third one — fundamental principles were to be determined deriving from the Polish nation’s experiences in its spiritual development. The idea of national law formulated by these young lawyers should be perceived as the response to the conviction about the crisis of civilization prevailing in Europe at that time. This crisis, in their opinion, had moral, economic and political dimensions. They saw improvement of the contemporary relations in each of the mentioned spheres in the reception of national law in political practice.

How Law Schools Benefit When Librarians Publish, Teach, and Hold Faculty Status

Many nondirector academic law librarians publish and teach legal research classes. Some hold faculty status as well. Law librarians have expertise in the development and delivery of legal research instruction methodologies and are developing a body of literature documenting their efforts to create and share a pedagogy of legal research instruction. Principles of shared faculty governance entitle library faculty to contribute to the development and delivery of a curriculum of legal research instruction. Encouraging law librarian participation in the shared governance of law schools should lead to increasing opportunities for the successful reform of legal education curricula with respect to legal research instruction.

Medical Magic and the Church in Thirteenth-Century England.

Medical Magic and the Church in Thirteenth-Century England.

Metaphor, Models, and Meaning in Contract Law

Why does there seem to be such a wide gap between the subject matter of the usual first-year contracts course and what practitioners (particularly transactional lawyers) actually experience? This article is an attempt to bridge the gap, combining insights from academic theory and real-world law practice. My claim is that the law as discipline has developed its own powerful but self-contained conceptual framework — in the coinage of one noted scholar, “an epistemic trap.” The subject matter of contract law, something that is largely the creation of private parties and not the state, requires dealing with legal truth not just as a coherent body of normative doctrine, but also correspondent in some way to the parties’ actual self-legislation. In other words, the exercise of understanding the law relating to transactions is not wholly descriptive —“to what did the parties agree? Nor is it wholly normative — “what should be done when the parties dispute the nature or terms of their agreement after the fact?” Much of the difficulty of the first-year contract law enterprise lies in this conflation of the law’s usual after-the-fact normative focus (as, say, in tort or criminal law) with an inquiry into what private law the parties actually meant to create before the fact. I propose escaping the epistemic trap with a turn to metaphor theory. The underlying metaphor common to prevailing conceptions of contract law, and which demands some form of correspondent truth from the contract (and contract law), is “contract as model of the transaction.” I suggest alternative metaphors of categories as containers, ideas as objects, and the transaction lifecycle as a journey. The goal is to focus on the “subjective to objective” process of the transactional lifecycle, and to consider the perspectives of the participants in or observers of that process. In particular, I consider the models and metaphors that shape the conceptual frames from within which those participants and observers perceive, make use of, and derive meaning from what end up as contracts, the objective manifestations of agreements.

Invasive searches: penile washings, bodily examinations, and other investigative considerations for sex‐related offences

Foreign material, debris, blood, saliva, hair, and other biological material found on the male penis have long served as indicators of recent sexual intercourse in forensic investigations. However, the legality and process of recovering this evidence from the suspect’s penis has received no attention from the academic community, the courts, or law enforcement agencies in Canada until recently. As a result, this paper attempts to review the literature and case law that does exist surrounding the historical use of penile swabs in sexual assault investigations in the USA and Europe and the current use of this technique in Canada by the Winnipeg Police Service.

The Academic Law Library and the Prospects for Diversity in the Legal Profession

AbstractThis study examines the interpretation of the American Bar Association's accreditation standard for law schools in the United States and the effect it could have on minority students studying in such law schools. It shows how such students will be greatly disadvantaged. It also shows the principle underlying the solution and how academic law libraries can aid in solving the problem and make a diverse bar a reality.

Examining European Community Law Principles in a New Legal Context: Placing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement Under the Constitutional Legal Framework of Albania

This paper primarily attempts to present a broad historical overview of relations between Albania and EU, with a view to establish a basis for an advanced legal analysis of several questions contained in it. Subsequently, it focuses on the structure, key legal provisions and the role of the Stabilisation and Association Process, the Stabilisation and Association Agreement itself and the Stabilisation and Association Council, being the organ in charge for implementing the agreement. In addition it includes a detailed legal analysis of the Constitution of Albania, with a view to weigh its legal framework against the legal novelties contemplated by the integration processes. It is important to note that in the analysis of these documents the controversial question as to whether the legal provisions of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement have direct effect and whether the supremacy principle of EU law is currently applicable in the Albanian legal order, including the interpretation by the national courts, will be thoroughly elaborated.Besides, the paper examines a couple of other questions. Among them is the one related to the sovereignty issue. In light of the integration process and according to the present Constitution, national sovereignty is inalienable, indivisible and non-transferable, which, I argue, might not be aligned with the EU legal principle of shared sovereignty. This is arguably a central point which leads to the second question of how the Albanian Constitution deals with the implementation of international law in the national legal order, i.e. through the courts system, and whether it allows, and if so to what extent, the transfer of legislative powers to international organizations, including EU, in the future.Finally, to support my arguments, I make extensive use of primary legal sources, including but not only, the text of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the Constitution of Albania, and other academic materials and case law from the European Court of Justice.

Jackson and Before-the-Event Insurance: A Missed Opportunity or a Pitfall Avoided?

This article looks at particular recommendations of Lord Justice Jackson in his recent review of the costs of civil litigation. The review proposes to make radical changes in a complex package of measures which, if they were introduced, would be even more significant than those procedural reforms set in train by Lord Woolf thirteen years earlier. The review has already generated much discussion in the legal profession, but it has escaped the attention of academic law journals. Here the focus is upon one particular topic considered in the report: the potential use of before-the-event insurance (BTE). This is used to make wider points about the problems the report identifies and the solutions it proposes. The effect of reforming this particular means of obtaining legal representation could have wide repercussions upon litigation. Whether extending BTE would lead to an increase in access to justice is a question which has divided practitioners; whether changing BTE could provide a more workable solution than some of those put forward by Jackson may provoke a more favourable response. The argument here is that more attention should be paid to this area than has previously been the case: it may hold the key to access to justice for many potential litigants.

Fostering the Profession of Law: The Lifetime Achievements of Harry Bitner

This article describes the life of Harry Bitner, one of the giants of academic law librarianship. His career serves as a model for professionalism and service to the academy. This article was the winner of the annual Earl Borgeson Award at the University of Washington's Information School, a writing competition for students in the law librarianship program.