For the holiday break, the entire Georgetown Law Library will be closed December 24 and 25 as well as December 29 through January 1.  We open again for normal hours on Wednesday, January 2.

View the calendar page on our website for complete operating hours information.

There will be no reference services from December 24 until January 1.  Happy Holidays and safe travels.

On January 30th the law library will host a conference entitled Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information.  By bringing together academics, governmental staff, policy advocates, and librarians, the day-long program will examine how to use data for the public good while protecting personal privacy. 

This is the first in a series of blog postings on the topic of big data.

Jer Thorp is an artist in residence at NYTLabs and is an adjunct professor in New York University’s ITP program. He is also the co-founder of the Office For Creative Research. 

In an interview with Lauren Drell and in the embedded video below, Thorp demonstrates how designers can use data to create beautiful and meaningful tools for historians and anthropologists to study society.

His projects create poignant narratives specifically by using data which is intentionally personal and yet publicly available.  In his video, Thorp offers an especially thought-provoking statement about the crossroads of art, history, data, and by implication, privacy.

For over 10 years, Science.gov has provided access to federal government scientific research searching “over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies”.

 As legal scholars and practitioners research across multiple disciplines, this web portal is an excellent starting point for the student working on a space law paper, a practitioner researching the environmental consequences of pesticides or a legal consultant on energy conservation.  The portal even searches the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office databases for those researching applied science and technology issues. Some of the other federal agencies searched include:

•  NASA
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Energy
• Department of Agriculture

 The results of a simple search on the home page can be narrowed by topic and date, as well as by text or multimedia. Feel free to ask a reference librarian if you have any questions about researching on the Science.gov web portal.

Forget soda cans, noisy snacks, and aromatic carryout in the library – how about a late-night study buddy lighting up a stogie in the carrel behind you?

In 2012, it would be pretty much unthinkable (not to mention illegal*) to allow smoking anywhere inside the Georgetown Law Library. However, a new exhibit in the Williams Library highlights a time when cigarettes, pipes, and other types of tobacco were actually welcome within the library and Law Center, as elsewhere throughout society.

Stop by the Williams atrium display cases for some photos and facts that just might “blow” your mind. And remember, the only smoking allowed (and encouraged!) around here nowadays is of your exams – best of luck!

*D.C. Code § 7-1703(4) (2001).

In celebration of 125 years, the Georgetown Law Library looks to the future with a symposium of the academic, advocacy, government, and library communities on Wednesday, January 30 at Georgetown Law.

“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, it’s the changes in society that are growing along with our ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data.

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

Registration is free and open to all. A complimentary lunch will be provided for registered attendees, however space is limited. Register now to reserve your place and view additional information at www.law.georgetown.edu/library/about/125/symposium.

During the upcoming Winter Break the Library will operate on a reduced hours schedule. These hours are in effect Saturday Dec. 22, 2012 through Friday Jan. 11, 2013. Below you'll find Williams and Wolff Library Building hours and Circulation Desk Hours. For Reference Hours, please visit the Library Hours Calendar.

Bloomberg Law is a legal database that provides access to statutes, cases, regulations, a case citator, and secondary source materials. Particular strengths of and unique materials available on Bloomberg Law include:

• BNA treatises, practice manuals, and portfolios;
• Practice Areas organizing common primary and secondary materials for several specialized fields including bankruptcy, finance, and securities law;
• Corporate and financial news and information, including EDGAR access and Bloomberg financial analyses;
• Exclusive access to PLI treatises;
• Transactional law-specific resources, such as example documents for M&A and contracts; and
• News searching with well-designed and indexed metadata, which minimizes the need to for complicated "terms and connectors" searching.

In addition, Bloomberg Law provides Georgetown Law students and faculty free access to real-time-updated federal PACER dockets and to many state and some foreign dockets. All court documents available through these dockets (such as pleadings, motions, briefs, and orders) can be downloaded through Bloomberg Law.

Students and faculty interested in requesting an account on Bloomberg Law may obtain one by following the instructions available in the Library's catalog.

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).