The Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey, has become the first correctional facility in the country to provide laptop computers to its inmates. Why? Legal research, of course:

Before, inmates who wanted to use the Westlaw research service had to file into the jail's law library, where 12 computers are crammed into the same space as guards and stacks of legal texts.

Now, they can request a laptop delivery to their cells, meal-style. They can then access Westlaw via an internal system.

"There's virtually nothing else installed on these laptops," said Lenny Hennig, the jail's network administrator.

Expectedly, there are many critics of this move, but as the sheriff and others have pointed out, a large percentage of inmates in county jails have not yet been found guilty of anything. These inmates are still awaiting trial and access to comprehensive legal research materials may be vital to trial preparation.

The PCs officials are distributing to inmates are extremely small, about the size of of a hardback novel, and are not connected to the Internet in any way. (To see a photo of these mini PCs, check out this news story.)

This is certainly an innovative idea, and I'll be curious to see how things develop.

[NorthJersey.com] Bergen Jail first to provide online legal aid in cells

Now that I'm somewhat settled into my new position at Yale, I hope to begin posting again on a regular basis...

AltLaw, a joint project between Columbia University and the University of Colorado, offers users free access to U.S. Supreme Court and Circuit Court of Appeals decisions. Best of all, the site includes full text search functionality. Here's what the developers have to say about the database on the site's "About" page:

The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find. Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

AltLaw is a small effort to change that—to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public.

Thus far, the coverage is not much better than other free online resources, most notably FindLaw. For most jurisdictions, AltLaw only goes back to about the early 1990's. This includes the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes cases dating back to May 1991. The site notes that cases are being added daily, and with the database still in beta status, there is certainly hope for more comprehensive coverage. In addition, work is apparently in progress to add West Reporter citations, a vital feature missing from just about every free case law resource on the web.

[via Law Librarian Blog]

"It is time to dispense with the all-electronic library as a goal," says Kay M. Todd in a Legal Times article.

A great deal of Todd's argument stems from a recent study of students taking a history class online. The study, Todd reports, found sixty-eight percent of the survey-respondents printed out all the readings for the class. Amongst the reasons given are a cadre of standard reasons including readability, easier means for taking notes and better retention of the material. Personally I don't find issues with any of these reasons. Only recently have I become adept at making notes in electronic materials in a way that is terribly useful. A few small (I hope) forests have given their all for the web and electronic based materials I've committed to the printer. Where the disconnect occurs in Todd's article is that an "all-electronic" library doesn't have to be used only on-screen to make it both valuable and potentially superior to its volume-based predecessor.

One vital omission in Todd's argument is the lack of acknowledgment that there is great value in being able to print materials where and when one needs them. Even if the electronic resources get committed to paper the ability for two different attorneys, in different parts of town or different states, working in the same firm to be able to simultaneously access materials, if only to commit them to atoms, has great value. The need to keep multiple copies and have attorneys travel with bound volumes are costly and unfavorable alternatives.

While arguing that many law firm libraries can be reduced in size and supplemented with electronic resources Todd suggests that all-electronic doesn't work when the materials need deeper consideration. "The electronic library is not an effective delivery mechanism where researchers would benefit from the juxtaposition of sections or when they might want to browse," Todd writes.

The argument goes on to suggest that the inability to browse through electronic resources and to look at the table of contents and go to a section are big downsides of electronic resources. More than indictments of electronic research it speaks more to the types of materials being used. There are plenty of electronic resources, in the legal community and elsewhere, that have just these functions. What is necessary is a well-versed librarian who can help the patrons of the library get information in the way they need. Increasingly this is electronically and as there are more digital natives in the ranks of colleges and the workforce the once preference for print will fade. Even the digital immigrant that I am I find I now exclusively use on-screen resources to a much greater extent when once upon a time I printed nearly everything. Rather than dispensing with the goal of an all-electronic library we need to focus on the needs of users in an ever more electronic, connected world and workforce and make it easier for everyone to be successful in the information age.

In my Advanced Legal Research class, on the assignment covering statutory research, I always include a question designed to take my students to attorney Thomas E. Martin, Jr.'s repository of Pennsylvania Statutes. Why? Because, though it is maintained by a private citizen, it is the most complete version of the state's statutes available for free on the internet. All 49 other state governments make their state statutory codes freely available online. Pennsylvania does not.

Until now, perhaps. The state House passed a bill last week that would finally post the complete statutes online. The measure is now being considered by the Senate.

[PhillyBlurbs.com] Pa. House votes to post state statutes in cyberspace (via ZiefBrief)

Beginning with the October 2006 term the Supreme Court of the United States will make transcripts of oral arguments available on their website. Until this term those who wanted access to a transcript within a couple of weeks of the oral arguments had to obtain them from the court's transcription service.

As a former Electronic Services Librarian, and as someone whose job title still places a heavy emphasis on electronic services, I may be playing with fire here, but I think the time has come for academic law libraries to eliminate their Electronic Services Librarian (ESL) positions.

Traditionally speaking, an ESL is a library's in-house specialist for Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALR). This means they are the go-to person at the law school for all questions dealing with Lexis, Westlaw, Hein Online, LegalTrac, etc., etc. In addition, an ESL usually does a lot of the collection development work involving electronic resources. This means researching potential electronic acquisitions and ironing out licensing agreements for these resources. (In some cases, the ESL may also be the webmaster for the law library, but this varies from library to library.)

Obviously, CALR and electronic acquisitions aren't going anywhere. So why do I say the ESL position should be eliminated?

Because this shouldn't be a specialized position anymore.

In this day and age, all reference librarians should be well-versed in CALR. Most legal research is now performed using electronic resources, thus every reference librarian at a law school must know the ins and outs of these systems just to do the bare minimum required by their job descriptions. Those who aren't are courting obsolescence. So the idea that only one librarian in an institution should master these tools is outdated. This is now every reference librarian's job.

As for electronic collection development, is there any good reason that this duty shouldn't fall on the shoulders of the librarian(s) already performing traditional collection development duties? Not only does this provide for a consistent application of an institution's collection development policies, regardless of medium, but forces collection development librarians to stay up-to-date on all legal resources, not just those published in paper. Why should the medium matter? Content is king.

The ESL model reflects a time when electronic services were a novelty. But those services are now a vital part of our institutions, and being an ESL should now be a core competency for every law librarian.

Two of the biggest perks of being a law student are the passwords you receive to use LexisNexis and Westlaw. These two passwords, for most students (for better or worse), pretty much eliminate student demand for any other law library resource or service for the next three years of their lives.

But public patrons who visit a law school library don't get access to those massive databases. Instead, reference librarians have to make choices about what particular collection of cases or statutes or regs or whatever else to show the patron. Do we take them to the print? Do we sit them down at a computer to use LexisNexis Academic (or, where available, Westlaw Patron Access)? Or do we show them a free web resource that they can access from anywhere (but which usually has a questionable interface, a less than optimal search engine, and extremely limited coverage)?

The other option is the dreaded CD-ROM. Most of us thought (and hoped and prayed) that these products had died in the late 1990s, but they still seem to hang around for some reason. In our library we have one machine that has all our CD-ROMs loaded onto it. Some reference librarians continuously lead patrons to this computer for access to Nevada case law, statutes, et cetera, believing it to be the best one-stop-shopping solution for Nevada research. Others, like me, would just as soon try the patron's case ourselves than to force anyone to use one of these clunky, outdated contraptions. I have to admit, that while I almost always prefer electronic resources over print ones, I find books far easier to use than the interfaces provided by our CD-ROM vendors.

So if CD-ROMs are so horrible, why do we continue to keep them in our collections (and worse still, make our patrons use them)? As far as I can tell, it's mostly because patrons now expect electronic access to legal materials. Most of them have heard of Lexis and Westlaw and expect us to have those systems available for anyone. Unfortunately, that's just not possible.

West is slowly rolling out Patron Access, a scaled-down version of its database, to academic law libraries. Due to various considerations, a lot of libraries are opting not to purchase this product. For now, anyway. As for Lexis, there's LexisNexis Academic, which most major universities (and thus many law schools) already have. But it isn't much better than a CD-ROM. For instance, could someone please explain to me why it is that when I type in a precise citation on LexisNexis Academic, I get multiple results, all but one of which are nowhere close to my citation? (Actually, I know why that happens, and the explanation is inexcusable for a company that provides so many high-end electronic research solutions.) That said, the mere fact that the database is viewable in a web browser makes it infinitely better than the best CD-ROM products, all of which seem to use the dreaded Folio views. (I get a cold shudder just typing that F-word.) Another drawback to LexisNexis Academic, however, is the fact that the legal materials available in its database are hardly comprehensive. Lexis markets another database to universities called State Capitol that contains a lot of state legal resources, most of which aren't available on Academic. Presumably, Lexis wishes to force institutions to subscribe to both instead of offering one comprehensive solution.

So with no universal, workable research solutions for public patrons available from the major online players, that leaves us with print and CD-ROMs. And when patrons already expect electronic access, many of us are reluctant to burst their bubble by showing them a row of books. Thus, we steer them to the CD-ROMs.

You know who those CD-ROMs are designed for? Small law firms and prisons. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that law school libraries don't really fit into either of those categories. We should be offering a higher level of service. Many of the people who work in small law firms rely on nearby law school libraries to supplement the resources they have available to them in their offices. If we can't offer them something better than what they have in their one room library at work, we've failed at our jobs. Big time.

Forcing patrons to use a resource that was cutting edge in 1995 is an embarrassment to our profession. I actually die a little inside every time I see a patron using a CD-ROM.

So what do we do? Well, when books and microforms are superior to the best available electronic product, we need to suck it up and show the patron those materials. We also need to take a long hard look at why we aren't subscribing to better electronic products. If there is something wrong with the way West is marketing Patron Access, we need to tell our reps what those problems are. And if the problems with that solution or any others are minimal, maybe we should try to find a way to add them to our electronic collections. Just because our faculty and students already have access to superior electronic resources doesn't mean we've served our entire patron base well. At the very least, if our patrons expect something, maybe it's time to ask ourselves why we aren't already providing it to them. If we don't, somebody else eventually will. And then we'll have no patrons left to serve.

Legal Bibliography Management and Student Writing Programs
Don Zhou, William Mitchell College of Law

There are many citation computer programs used in academia, but when Zhou began working in a law library, he noticed immediately that no one in legal scholarship or education was using them. He decided to develop a system for law students to find, organize, and retrieve documents for legal research.

He decided to use CiteIT for a writing project in one of his class. It allows him to quickly and easily enter any kind of legal resource into his computer. In addition to saving the citation, the program will take a snapshot of the website containing the resource (e.g., a statute published online). The program also automatically preserves the URL for the web page so you can easily return to the page to view its updated content.

When entering a citation from a webpage, CiteIT can import the citation directly from your web browser. All you need to do is highlight the citation in the web page, and CiteIT does the rest.

CiteIT also provides space for adding your own notes to each resource.

By adding all cases, statutes, etc. to CiteIT, the full text of your complete research is now contained in one location. The program allows you to organize your documents by keyword to make it easier to find relevant material quickly. For creating hard copies of your research, you can pick and choose which pieces (full-text, citations, notes, etc.) you want in your printout.

Then, as you write your paper, CiteIT will automatically insert correct citations into your word processor and create a table of authorities.

In addition, Zhou notes that another useful program for citation purposes is LexisNexis Shepard's StyleCheck, which makes sure all your citations are in proper format.

Ian Best at 3L Epiphany has posted a collection of links to blog posts discussing Friday's "Bloggership" conference at Harvard. The symposium was a watershed event for legal scholarship, and it's only fitting that the best commentary about the day be found in the blogosphere.

Don't forget to check out all of the conference papers over at SSRN.

[3L Epiphany] Blogging the Harvard Bloggership Conference (via Law Librarian Blog)

Tomorrow (Friday) morning, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School will host a symposium titled "Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship." The all day event will feature presentations from some of the biggest names in the legal blogosphere, including Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds.

For those of you who, like me, won't be in Cambridge tomorrow, the Berkman Center is offering a live streaming audiocast of the event. In addition, the symposium papers are all available from SSRN on its special conference page.

For complete information, visit the Berkman Center's Bloggership Symposium webpage.