Members of the Georgetown Law community can now read BNA Law Reports on your mobile device with the Bloomberg/BNA Law Reports mobile app in the iTunes store. Whether you're following the Daily Labor Report, the World Data Protection Report or any of the other BNA reports, you'll be able to access them on your mobile device, by following these easy steps.

1. In the iTunes store, search for Bloomberg Law Reports - you will see two apps.
2. Download the ORANGE app.                  
3. Sign On with your Georgetown Law School Bloomberg ID.
4. Read any of the BNA Law reports you have previously selected through your Bloomberg Law account.

Please feel free to ask a reference librarian if you need assistance!

On behalf of the Federal Judiciary, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts recently released the judicial caseload statistics for the fiscal year which ended September 30, 2012. The Federal Court Management Statistics system provides data for the 12 courts of appeals and the 94 district courts. Whether interviewing for a federal clerkship or researching the caseload of federal judges, these statistics detail the number of civil vs. criminal cases filed in each court, as well as the cases termintated on the merits vs. procedural terminations.

Archival statistics are available back to 1997 through the Federal Court Management Statistics system.

Speaking at the Law Library’s 125th anniversary symposium, Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information, on Wednesday, January 30th is Dr. Spiros Dimolitsas, Georgetown University’s Senior Vice President for Research and Chief Technology Officer.

He will be delivering the lunchtime keynote address Leveraging Georgetown University’s Strengths to Create Opportunities in Big Data.

Dr. Dimolitsas’ expertise in large-scale science and technology, high-tech/high-risk project management and technology commercialization has formed the basis for advice that has been provided on innovation and on complex-systems risk management to the U.S. Government and others. He also represents Georgetown University in a variety of fora on climate issues, including the World Economic Forum’s Global University Leadership Forum on Sustainability.

Dr. Dimolitsas has authored 60 papers and holds multiple patents. He holds a B.S. in Theoretical Physics, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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.

Law professors at Georgetown Law Center actively participate in online discussions of the law, justice and legal scholarship.  Important content of appear online in legal blogs, dispersed across the Internet.  Responding to an interest in discovering and promoting the breadth and depth of faculty online contributions, the Georgetown Law Library established a resource to automatically aggregate blog posts by Georgetown Law faculty members from a variety of sources. The faculty blog aggregator is a self-updating collection of posts that currently come from 14 Law Center faculty contributors across 14 blog sites. 

On the site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to track future contributions, and you can explore the profiles of faculty bloggers and the sources where they participate in online legal debates and discussions.

Here's a list of the faculty contributors and the sources included in the current automated feed: 

Randy Barnett
The Volokh Conspiracy

David Cole
NY Review of Books Blog
The Nation Blog
Foreign Policy

Dan Ernst
Legal History Blog

Mike Frisch
Legal Profession Blog

Nan Hunter
Hunter of Justice

Martin Lederman
Balkinization
SCOTUSblog

Adam Levitin
Credit Slips

David Luban
Balkinization

John Mikhail
Balkinization

Alicia Plerhoples
SOCENTLAW

Nicholas Rosenkranz
The Volokh Conspiracy

Larry Solum
Legal Theory Blog

Rebecca Tushnet
43(B)log

Brian Wolfman
Consumer Law and Policy Blog

Georgetown Law faculty are also active in more traditional areas of scholarship, publishing materials across many subject areas.  For a few years, the Law Library has provided free access to scholarly publications through our online institutional repository, the Scholarly Commons.  In an effort to expand the way people learn about new additions to this collection, the Law Library created the ?Georgetown Law Scholar Feed? on Twitter.  With this, each publication added to the collection appears as a separate post on Twitter, showing the author?s name, title and a link to the online content.

We are pleased to announce the availability of a room in the Williams library where we provide access to assistive technology.

• Do you learn better by listening or by reading? 
• Is it easier for you to dictate than to type? 
• Would it be easier to proofread your documents by listening to them read back to you?

What if you don’t know the answer to any of these questions?

The Law Library and the Office of the Dean of Students are launching a new service to let members of the law center community use two unique productivity tools:

• Dragon Naturally Speaking: A program that transcribes dictation, reads back your text, and allows users to control the computer using voice commands.
• Kurzweil Educational System: A web-based program which allows the user to listen to text, either electronic or scanned printed information.

Both products are available in Room 111 of the E.B.Williams Law Library, and installed on a dedicated computer.

To try either system, simply reserve the room online and go to the Williams library circulation desk to borrow the headset and instruction sheet that will help you get started. When not being used for assistive technology, this room, EBW 111, is still available for group study purposes.

The Georgetown Law Library's 125th anniversary symposium, Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information, will explore a range of topics related to the applications of big data in legal scholarship, practice, and policy.

One of our panelists, Professor Paul Ohm, with academic credentials both in computer science and in law, will provide a fascinating introduction to his interdisciplinary approach to internet privacy issues. Companies soon will be able to collect personal information about us, but without ever receiving that information directly from us. Can and should privacy law respond to this challenge?

To learn more about Professor Ohm’s research and scholarship in this area, see his investigation of inadequate privacy protections revealed in Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review 1701 (2010) and his work on the potential intersection of internet privacy practices with trademark law in a forthcoming article, Branding Privacy, 97 Minnesota Law Review ___ (forthcoming 2013). Visit http://paulohm.com/ or look for his posts at the blog Freedom to Tinker. You may watch the symposium live online on Wednesday, January 30.

On January 30, the Georgetown Law Library's 125th anniversary symposium, Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information, will explore a range of topics related to the applications of big data in legal scholarship, practice, and policy.

Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, is among numerous panelists from academia, government service, and private practice set to speak at the conference. Professor Arroyo will present on how the Georgetown Law-based organization is using data and data platforms to strategically position itself as a “go to” resource for policy makers, consumers, and reporters on climate, energy, and transportation issues.

Professor Arroyo recently gained national attention with a high-profile TED Talk (watch below) on preparing for climate change in June 2012, which continues to draw views and spread ideas online. She teaches experiential environmental law courses to both law and public policy students at Georgetown, and has previously served as a vice president at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and in positions with several federal and state government organizations dealing with the research, policy, and economics of environmental issues.

Professor Arroyo will participate in the third panel of the symposium, Big Data Applications in Scholarship and Policy II, from 1:00 to 2:15 in Gewirz 12th floor. To find out more about the day’s events and watch the symposium live online, visit the symposium homepage.

What happens to a person's Facebook page after they die? What about other social media accounts and digital assets? In New Hampshire the House is considering a bill  that would give control over a decedent's social media accounts (e.g, Facebook, email, blogs) to the executor of the estate. Other states have addressed the issue via legislation as well, but not all. And the laws vary across the states.

The Uniform Law Commission (also known as the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL)) establishes uniform state legislation that states may adopt, providing some consistency across jurisdictions. In early 2012, NCCUSL established a Study Committee on Fiduciary Powers and Authority to Access Digital Information. The Committee's description states:

"A fiduciary who is administering a decedent's estate or the affairs of an incapacitated individual needs to be able to find, access, value, protect and transfer the individual's online accounts and digital property.  Because of the need to provide protection against fraud and identity theft, in recent years it has become increasingly difficult for fiduciaries to obtain the necessary access to digital information promptly and efficiently.  Beginning in 2005 a number of states have enacted legislation covering some of these issues, but the legislation varies greatly.  The study committee will consider and make recommendations concerning the authority and powers of a fiduciary to access digital information related to a decedent's estate or the affairs of an incapacitated individual."

The draft document the Drafting Committee reviewed at its first meeting (in the Fall of 2012) is posted online. According to the document, only five states have enacted legislation dealing with fiduciary access to digital assets but several are considering it. The work of the Committee should provide needed guidance to all states.

The Georgetown Law Library's symposium, Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information, will explore a range of topics related to the applications of big data in legal scholarship, practice, and policy.

One of our panelists, Professor Joshua Teitelbaum, will provide a fascinating introduction to risk preferences, and how data sets can illuminate why people choose certain insurance policies or 401(k) investment strategies over others. 

To learn more about Professor Teitelbaum's research and scholarship in this area, see Joshua C. Teitelbaum, et al., The Nature of Risk Preferences: Evidence from Insurance Choices, American Economic Review (forthcoming), and Joshua C. Teitelbaum, et al., Unlucky or Risky? Unobserved Heterogeneity and Experience Rating in Insurance Markets  (working paper),  and watch the symposium live online on Wednesday, January 30.