As state legislatures reconvene in 2013, many bills relating to the Affordable Health Care Act will be introduced and debated at the state level. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) maintains a Federal Health Reform: State Legislative Tracking database allowing you to monitor this hot topic. It will be updated every Tuesday, beginning January 14th, to include newly introduced legislation. Currently, all legislation on this topic from the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions can be searched by state, year, keyword, status and/or primary sponsor.

This is only one of the "Hot Topics" databases maintained by NCSL. These resources allow you to monitor such issues as immigration, education and labor and unemployment across all 50 states.

Last night the Friends of the Law Library, the Georgetown chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Georgetown Criminal Law Association, Georgetown Human Rights Action–Amnesty International, and Human Rights First hosted a screening of the film The House I Live In along with lively a Q & A with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki.

As a follow-up, here is a bibliography of related resources.

Reviews for The House I Live In:

• Miami Herald
• Boston Globe
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Los Angeles Times

Films:

• The War on Drugs (Parallel Universe 2007).
• Traffic (USA Films 2000).

News Articles:

• Eugene Jarecki, Voting Out the Drug War, The Nation, Dec. 3, 2012.
• Jack Leonard & Maura Dolan, Softer 3-strikes Law Has Defense Lawyers Preparing Case Reviews, L.A. Times, Nov. 8, 2012.
• John Schwartz, Thousands of Prison Terms in Crack Cases Could Be Eased, N.Y. Times, June 30, 2011.

Law Review Articles & Book Chapters:

• (GULC) Sara Sun Beale, The Story of Ewing v. California: Three Strikes Laws and the Limits of the Eighth Amendment Proportionality Review, in Criminal Law Stories (Donna Coker & Robert Weisburg, eds., 2012).
• Nancy Gertner, On Competence, Legitimacy, and Proportionality, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1585 (2012).
• Stephen Hunter et al., New Jersey’s Drug Courts: A Fundamental Shift from the War on Drugs to a Public Health Approach for Drug Addiction and Drug-Related Crime, 64 Rutgers L. Rev. 795 (2012).
• Jelani Jefferson Exum, Sentencing, Drugs, and Prisons: A Lesson from Ohio, 42 U. Toledo L. Rev. 881 (2011).
• Patrice A. Fulcher, Hustle and Flow: Prison Privatization Fueling the Prison Industrial Complex, 51 Washburn L.J. 589 (2012).

Non-Law Scholarship:

• Mona Lynch, Theorizing the Role of the ‘War on Drugs’ in US Punishment, 16(2) Theoretical Criminology 175 (2012).
• Elsa Y. Chen, Impacts of “Three Strikes and You’re Out” on Crime Trends in California and throughout the United States, 24(4) J. Contemp. Crim. Just. 345 (2008).
• John L. Worrall, The Effect of Three-Strikes Legislation on Serious Crime in California, 32(4) J. Crim. Just. 283 (2004).
• Jeffrey L. Johnson & Michelle A. Saint-Germain, Officer Down: Implications of Three Strikes for Public Safety, 16(4) Crim. Just. Pol’y Rev. 443 (2005).

Foreign Scholarship:

• (UK) Zena Smith & Judith Gowland, Drug Sentencing: What’s the Deal? The New Sentencing Regime for Drug Offences, 76(5) J. Crim. L. 389 (2012).
• (S. Korea) Lee Minsk et al, Drug Sentencing in South Korea: The Influence of Case-Processing and Social Status Factors in an Ethnically Homogeneous Context, 27(3) J. Contemp. Crim. Just. 347 (2011).
• (Canada) Benedikt Fischer et al, Compulsory Drug Treatment in Canada: Historical Origins and Recent Developments, 8(2) Eur. Addiction Research 61 (2002).
• (Australia) Catherine Spooner et al., An Overview of Diversion Strategies for Australian Drug-Related Offenders, 20(3) Drug & Alcohol Rev. 281 (2001).

Books:

• Douglas W. Kieso, Unjust Sentencing and the California Three Strikes Law (2005).
• Samuel Walker, Sense and Nonsense about Drugs, Crimes, and Communities (7th ed. 2011).
• Charles F. Levinthal, Drugs, Society, and Criminal Justice, (3d ed. 2012).
• Joan Petersilia & Kevin R. Reitz, The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections (2012).

As you begin to prepare for exams, supplement your assigned readings with study aids found in the library. Study aids can clarify confusing concepts and even provide practice questions for your review. A variety of study aids are available and the best one to use depends on your course and individual study habits. Most of these books can be found in the Williams Reading Room Reserve, with older editions in the stacks available for checkout.

• Examples & Explanations (practice questions and answers)
• Nutshells (a broad overview of a subject)
• Hornbooks (in-depth treatment with extensive citations)
• Understanding Series ("concise, yet comprehensive")
• Concepts and Insights (provides a basic theoretical foundation)
• Turning Point (a broad overview similar to Nutshells)

CALI lessons are another useful exam review option. Over 800 interactive lessons prepared by law professors and librarians cover over 30 practice areas of law. Georgetown students can register for immediate online access.

Good luck with your studies!

A new "Big Data" resource of tax material has recently been made available. On October 30, Public.Resource.Org made available 10 years' worth -- nearly 6.5 million -- Exempt Organization Form 990 returns filed by exempt organizations and private foundations as well as unrelated business income (UBIT) returns filed by these organizations. The data set contains returns from January 2002 through September 2012, and will be updated monthly.

At this time, these returns are only available in pdf format, but Public.Resource.Org plan to extract the underlying data from these returns to make them more amenable for data analysis.

These records and more information about the data set are available at https://bulk.resource.org/irs.gov/eo/readme.html.

Georgetown Law Library – A Symposium in Celebration of 125 Years

Monday, October 29, 2012 (8:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.)
Georgetown University Law Center - Gewirz 12th Floor

"Big data" is a term perhaps too narrow for the topic: the size of data sets is not the key to big data issues. Rather, society is changing because of our growing ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across multiple, often unrelated, sources. When thinking of quantitative decision making, big data may include "small data," but lots of it.

This conference will examine the public good and collective harms that follow from the large-scale aggregation of information from public and private sources. During the course of the day, panelists will also examine how scholars, researchers, and information professionals manage very large or complex data sets to distill meaning and develop public policy.

If you'd like to attend the symposium, please register here to reserve a place as attendance is limited. You may also view the symposium agenda online.

Recent changes to interface and sorting options make it easier to find and evaluate documents in Google Scholar’s ever-growing free database of court opinions and legal materials.

Earlier this month, Google Scholar added the option to sort legal search results by date, with the most recently published cases and articles appearing first. The new sorting option can be used in combination with jurisdiction and date restrictions, so you can view only results from specific time ranges or courts.

And in case you missed it, since March, Google Scholar has included graphical indicators in the “Cited by” list of subsequent opinions citing a case – from zero to three bars, depending on the depth of treatment – and like the general results list, the “Cited by” list can now be limited by date and jurisdiction. As before, the “How cited” feature also displays excerpts from the most relevant parts of the citing cases.

Longtime Google Scholar users may have also noticed enhancements since May to display and print options, including a cleaner, streamlined look and improved browser-based printing for legal opinions.

Not new but worth noting is the “Create email alert” link at the bottom of any Google Scholar search results page – click it to set up notifications for newly added documents citing any case or article, or corresponding to a specific search you’ve run.

You can access Google Scholar through the Law Library catalog. To get the most out of your searches, remember to log in to your Library Account before using Google Scholar off campus – this allows direct access to article results from Georgetown’s subscription databases.

The screenshot below highlights useful features on the “Cited by” page for Ferguson v. Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, 69 P. 3d 965.

On June 26 the Landgericht Köln (Cologne Regional Court) ruled that a medically unnecessary circumcision violated a 4 year old boy's "best interests." The circumcision was competently performed and there was parental consent. The circumcision was performed because of the parents' religious beliefs. The case is a criminal prosecution of the performing physician.

In the opinion the court stated:

Nor was the defendant's act justified by consent. There was no consent by the child, who was four years old at the time, and since the child was not old enough to understand the situation, there was no question of such consent being given. There was consent by the parents, but this was not capable of justifying the commission of the elements of bodily harm.

The opinion is available in German. There is also a partial and unofficial English translation. Additional background information as well as some coverage of related developments in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden is available from Library of Congress’ blog Global Legal Monitor.

The month of July sees New York and the UN host a global arms treaty negotiation, which could result in the first binding treaty to regulate the global arms market. While there is a general consensus that some global controls are needed, there is disagreement about specifics. One major issue is that the major weapons producers, which include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Russia, China, Britain, and France) plus Germany, have an economic interest in a robust global arms trade.

Armstreaty.org brings us a database which provides information about countries' positions on the specific issues addressed in the treaty. Especially helpful are the maps, which for any specific issue (e.g. ammunitions) show which countries strongly support, mildly support, or oppose the inclusion of that issue in the treaty. Information can also be viewed by country.

The Supreme Court has posted its opinion in which it upheld nearly all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including the individual mandate. The opinion is available here.

In the “blood diamond” case, former Liberian president Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison. His was the first conviction of a head of state by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials that followed WWII. He was found guilty by the joint Sierra Leone and UN Special Court for Sierra Leone last month of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court is located in The Hague.

Taylor is 64, and if his entire sentence is carried out, he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. The court is required to set a specific sentence; it cannot prescribe the death penalty or life imprisonment. Taylor is expected to appeal the sentence.

Justice Lussick who read the judgment in court noted that while Taylor’s convictions were for aiding and abetting the commission of crimes and that jurisprudence of the Special Court and related tribunals “holds that aiding and abetting as a mode of liability generally warrants a lesser sentence than that imposed for more direct forms of participation,” Taylor’s leadership role “puts him in a class of his own.” Two rebel commanders tried earlier were sentenced to 50 and 52 years respectively.

In their sentencing, the judges took in to account his good behavior while in detention, while apparently ignoring other mitigating factors proposed by the defense such as his age and health.