Georgetown Law Center graduate Nathaniel Burney (L '97) recently published The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law, which is available from Jones McClure Publishing.  Started as as a series of online comics to debunk popular myths about criminal law, the collection of writings and illustrations now covers seventeen chapters across more than 300 pages.

The five parts in the book cover an introduction, purposes of punishment, guilt, inchoate crimes, defenses and a summary of related topics.

Here's an example illustration from a series of comics relating to questions of police entrapment: 

Stop by the library to check out a copy, read the Tumblr site where this all began, or pick up a copy online.

During this past summer, Georgetown Law reference librarians worked in tandem with the electronic services librarian to update the library’s Legal Research & Writing tutorials. The LRW tutorials, which are designed for first-year students, focus on:

• Statutory Research
• Case Law Research
• Secondary Sources Research
• Administrative Law Research

It’s also believed that upper-level students and non-U.S. trained LLM students will find these tutorials a useful review of the basics of legal research.

The newly released tutorials are found on the library’s website as embedded HTML5 videos that can be viewed by students on any computer or mobile device. Narration was also added to the tutorials, broadening their appeal to auditory, as well as visual learners.

As Lexis & Westlaw continue to introduce new research platforms, librarians worked to incorporate both WestlawNext and Lexis Advance demonstrations throughout the tutorials to familiarize students with the design of these new legal research platforms.

The LRW tutorials have been well received by students, faculty and fellow librarians. They have set a new standard for legal research tutorials. Librarians from other law schools have contacted the Georgetown Law Library reference department requesting advice on how to incorporate tools such as these in their law school community.

The Bluebook is now available for iPad and iPhone users for $40 to download for use in the app called rulebook, from Ready Reference Apps. This contains the full text of the entire 19th edition of the book, which is fully searchable.  You can bookmark sections, add notes and highligt sections. There's been an online version of the Bluebook for a while, but this is the first time this content is available in a native mobile app.  You can't get it on an Android or Windows Phone device, but if you own an iPhone and an iPad, you can get it on both devices with a single purchase, as long as they share the same iTunes account.

Because it's available as an app, this version of the Bluebook gets you easy access to the book's contents.  Searches are quick, and it should be easy to get to find what you need. Following is a view of the search results for "parallel citation" with the iPhone and iPad results shown together. Text in the iPhone display is understandably truncated, but it shows rule number or bluepage reference.  By comparison, the web-based version of the Bluebook lets you sort search results by table, rules, bluepages and personal notes.  Both are pretty easy to scan.

In terms of pricing, the Bluebook app cost is comparable to the other electronic version.  For $40, you get the 19th edition to keep. By comparison, current price for the other version is: $32 for 1 year, $42 for 2 and $50 for 3 years. On that system, you get access to the 18th and 19th edition, and there are differences to the way materials are browsed and searched. In print, it costs around $34.

The app version is very useful, but there are a few small features not yet fully implemeted. Though you can highlight text, you cannot copy and paste it yet.  The app designer says that this feature is expected in an update soon. This will be especially helpful if you use this app platform for other content, such as court rules.

 

One quirk to the rulebook app is that moving from section to section isn't a smooth reading experience, like you find in a Kindle or iBooks.  Sometimes it works to browse from one section to the next, but the app is a bit finicky right now. Admittedly, the Bluebook isn't exactly a "pager turner" kind of publication, so this is probably okay.   Also, this might be something addressed in a future update to the rulebook app.

If you use an iPhone or iPad and have to reference the Bluebook, consider this app as an option.  To explore the rulebook app platform before buying, you can dowload the free app and get a version of the Federal Rules of Evidence for free to try the platform.

Georgetown Law students are reminded that we've got a comprehensive Bluebook Guide to help understand many of the features of this citation resource.

 

 

 

Many leading European universities offer the Ph.D. in law; now Yale, another one of the leading world institutions in legal scholarship, announces that it is offering the United States' first Ph.D. in law.

Dean Robert Post observes that "...increasing numbers of law professors now pursue Ph.D.’s in allied disciplines like economics, history, philosophy, or political science. Because such disciplines train students in standards and questions that are different from those of the law, the natural next step for the legal academy is to create our own Ph.D. program that can focus on the questions and practices of the law itself. "

The Chronicle of Higher Education released a major study on the education levels of members of state legislatures. The study looked at where state lawmakers reported going to school and produced an interactive map which highlights the highest level of education achieved by state.  A click on the "Law School" tab shows that 17.2% of state legislators have a law degree. The Texas legislature has the most lawyers and North Dakota has the lowest percentage of lawyers.

The Georgetown Law Library has a collection of resources on the bar exam and best practices for preparing for the bar exam. Our new research guide highlights these resources and provides access to selected web based resources on the bar exam. It also includes links to local bar associations.

The Library will be holding three RA orientation training sessions.

In the orientation, RAs will learn about library services and policies and will gain an introduction to our databases and to best research practices.

The sessions will be:

• Friday September 24, 2010 from 11 am to noon
• Friday September 24, 2010 from 4-5 pm
• Friday October 1, 2010 from 11 am to noon

All sessions will be held in EB Williams Room 320

Please RSVP to Thanh Nguyen with which session you plan to attend.

The Law Library is currently conducting a survey of all Georgetown law students. Please take about 10 minutes to give us your feedback about our reference services and research collections. We're also looking for your thoughts about our facilities and a few other library-related items. We promise to read every comment submitted, and we'll do what we can to act on and respond to your feedback. Take the 2010 Law Library Survey [Georgetown login required] One lucky student completing the survey will win a free Apple iPod touch (8 GB). We'll keep the survey open through April 12 and select the winner of the Apple iPod touch the following week. Please don't put off taking the survey until the last minute. We promise that it will only take a few minutes to complete the survey. Based on feedback from last year's survey, we created an online group study reservation system, relocated the reference desk in the Wolff Library, purchased new self-serve scanners, and purchased new chairs for the Williams Reading Room. In addition, we added several shortcut links to the homepage, and now maintain a single calendar of library hours featured in several places on our site. You can read a summary of last year's survey, together with our narrative responses. Here's a profile of the students who replied last year. We hope to you'll take the time to help us get at least this many responses this time around.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that as law school tuitions have increased, Hispanic and Asians/Pacific Islander  enrollment in law school has increased or stayed at about the same level, while African American enrollment has declined. Contributing to increased tuitions have been  increased emphasis on hands-on clinical experiences and smaller skills-based courses; increased diversity of course offerings, such as international law and environmental law; and increased student support, e.g., academic support, career services, and admissions support.

Amazon just announced a large-format version of their electronic book reader, called the Kindle DX, which you can see in action at engadget. The product doesn't launch until this summer, but it could be in the hands of many university students for a pilot coming to five schools this fall. Library Journal reports that these schools are: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  As of yet, there are no law schools who will try this out.  Because Kindle books are typically locked into a single device, this could mean the disappearance of a used book market.  That said, it means fewer dead trees and possibly more publishing options for content producers.  In law schools, where much of the raw source material is in the public domain, casebooks and case compilations could be done very economically, if not for free.

An interesting feature of the new device is that it supports native PDF documents, instead of forcing people to pay to convert them to a proprietary Kindle format. This means you could get class notes or reading materials in PDF format and read them directly.  It's not clear if this would support image-based formats like scanned law reviews from Hein Online or published reporter cases from Westlaw.  If so, this could be a boon for students willing to pay almost $500 for the device.

In the past, there has been some debate over whether libraries can lend Kindle readers to their users. One problem with having a Kindle in a library is that book purchasing is tied directly to the account on the device.  A library owning one to lend would have to disable purchasing options. Books purchased for the Kindle cannot be transferred to another device.

In advance of the latest Kindle announcement, the New York Times ran a story about large format e-book readers, exploring questions of whether these could save daily newspapers.  Media conglomerate Hearst Corporation is rumored to be launching a wireless e-book reader. They publish everything from Harper's Bazaar to Good Housekeeping to Popular Mechanics.  It will be exciting to see how electronic books develop over time.  They look like a possible life preserver for print media. Perhaps this Fall we'll see how they fare in the education sector.

Update: Additional coverage, including law school topics, is found here:

• Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?
• Case Western Reserve University students will use textbooks on Kindle electronic reader