Developing Legal Information Literate Law Students: “That Dog Will Hunt”

The legal profession has been adamant about the need for law schools to more adequately prepare law students for legal practice. Criticisms concerning a student's practical legal skills, such as the ability to conduct legal research, are prevalent. As the legal profession continues to transform, the need for law students and new attorneys to be “legal information literate” prior to being hired is quite evident. In order to instill competent legal research skills, legal research instruction must focus both on incorporating legal information literacy skills and on understanding how students learn. For this reason, teachers of legal research should rethink teaching strategies and explore different teaching methodologies.     

Experiential Learning: Context and Connections for Legal Research–A Case Study

The American Bar Association requires that all law students receive “substantial instruction” in legal research. This article discusses a unique legal research program that meets this requirement by focusing on experiential learning. Two components of experiential learning, context and connections, are explained pedagogically and specifically as to legal research curriculum.     

Bankruptcy: A Legal Research Course

Several aspects of the subject matter and practice of bankruptcy law lend themselves to use as the underlying subject matter for a course in advanced legal research. Although the unique institutions and procedure in bankruptcy cases call for specialized instruction, the structure of the substantive field around an integrated, codified statute and the intersections of state and federal jurisdiction provide plentiful jumping-off points to reinforce important general concepts of strategic and thoughtful legal research practice. The first half of this article presents an introduction to the field as a basic substantive grounding necessary to any law librarian pondering a legal research course grounded in bankruptcy law. The article also familiarizes the prospective research instructor with the major sources of law in the field and assesses numerous secondary sources and research tools covering the field with an eye to which print and online sources will be of the best anticipated value to today's legal research students. Model syllabi are proposed for either a larger, three-credit course or for a one-credit minicourse in specialized research that might either stand alone or serve as a supplement to a substantive course or seminar in the field.     

Ever Onward: Expanding the Use of Perma.cc

Authors, law journal staff members, and courts can create permanent citations to online resources with Perma.cc, a free library-sponsored service. This article explores expanding the use of Perma.cc to capture material otherwise inaccessible behind “paywalls” and to material the Bluebook requires authors to cite in print. These expansions would be simple to implement and would enhance the utility of legal citations. The author suggests three areas in which Perma.cc might expand: using Perma.cc to capture images of print-only materials, using Perma.cc as a legal blog repository, and expanding Perma.cc beyond legal citations.     

Using Competitive Intelligence Instruction to Develop Practice-Ready Legal Professionals

Competitive intelligence is the identification and use of internal and external information to inform business decisions. Integrating competitive intelligence instruction into the law school curriculum is another option to use when preparing “practice-ready” legal professionals. First, it broadens the curriculum experience beyond the courtroom with its introduction of basic corporate, regulatory, and transactional documents, and second, introduces students to the critical decision-making and business-development skills lawyers use to identify, investigate, and develop business leads necessary for a financially viable legal practice.     

Influences of the Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company's American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West's digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring's scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were created and became essential research tools for American lawyers.     

Music Reference Sources: Analog in a Digital World

ABSTRACT

Do we need print reference collections at all? In the case of music reference materials, the answer is definitely “yes.” At the University of Memphis, reference titles in the music library are used at about three times the rate of reference materials in the main library. This paper leverages local reference and reserve book usage to investigate how print reference sources support music research of various kinds, how music faculty integrate reference sources into their courses, and how librarians can make finding and using these resources easier for users accustomed to accessing materials online without an intermediary.     

Research Analysis and Planning: The Undervalued Skill in Legal Research Instruction

This article describes a method of research analysis and planning for legal problems. It introduces the framework of research plan, log, and product and provides a detailed research plan and log that students can use as a template for learning research. The article suggests how to teach the method in legal research classes, shares some of the author's experiences in teaching the method, and addresses some possible criticisms of this approach.     

A Methodical Approach to Legal Research: The Legal Research Plan,an Essential Tool for Today's Law Student and New Attorney

This article lays out an approach to teaching legal research through an examination of historical and contemporary approaches to legal research and research instruction. It discusses creating a research plan and reviews the most commonly used legal research texts. It concludes with sample research assignments and assessment tools.     

Electronic Legal Deposit in the United Kingdom

The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 introduced for the first time in the United Kingdom a statutory basis for the collection by the legal deposit libraries of non-print, principally electronic, publications. Since the establishment of the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel in 2005, progress has been made in starting to turn this enabling act into reality, through a mixture of voluntary codes and statutory regulation. Work so far has concentrated on three categories of materials, offline, “free Web,” and electronic periodicals, and on the conceptual division of the remainder of the universe of electronic publications. Electronic deposit introduces several issues not present in print deposit and new dimensions to more familiar issues, including detailed involvement of the publisher in setting up the deposit process, “territoriality” (the place of publication), electronic user access, digital rights management, digital preservation, and data protection.     

Issue assignment delay of early-view articles: Impact on subscribers through an aggregator database

Journal articles are often made available prior to assignment to an issue, using labels like “early view,” “advanced online publication,” “ahead of print,” “online first,” or “in press.” While making articles available before an issue can speed up the scholarly communications cycle, a negative effect can be observed when full text is delivered through aggregator databases like EBSCO, ProQuest, or Gale products. This study assessed issue assignment delays across 18 journals which have full text aggregated in EBSCO's CINAHL Ultimate. Results show that articles published first in an early-view state are only available in the aggregator after they have been assigned to an issue. Any database-specific full-text delays (“embargos”) are then calculated from issue date rather than online publication date, leading subscribers who access the journals via aggregators to experience extended delays ranging from months to years in length.     

Finding the Theory and Method for the Pedagogy of Teaching Legal Research: A Response to Callister's “Time to Blossom”

In his article “Time to Blossom,” Callister invites legal research experts to begin a discussion as to what theory and methodology would be most effective for teaching legal research. This article suggests that utilizing a tailored form of systems theory in conjunction with active learning methods would allow legal educators not only to teach students in an effective and understandable manner but also to adapt their teaching methods to correspond to changes in the legal research field.     

The Influence of the Congruence Between Brand and Consumer Personality on the Loyalty to Print and Online Issues of Magazine Brands

An important development in the theory of brands has been the concept of a brand personality as part of the brand image. The construct of congruence relates the personality of brands to the self-concept of consumers. It is assumed that congruence between the recipient's perception of his or her own personality and his or her perception of the brand personality leads to a higher degree of loyalty. The congruence construct has been proven to be a loyalty-promoting factor in various studies for consumer good brands. Whether the influence of congruence also exists with regard to media brands has, however, not yet been examined. As a step to close the gap, this research explores the effects of congruence on consumer loyalty in the media, taking the leading German news magazine brands— Focus, Spiegel, and Stern—which are published in print and online, as a case. The study uses a structural equation model, which is estimated by the partial least squares method, based on a questionnaire answered by 736 respondents. The model was tested for all respondents and those with print and online preference separately. As a result, the influence of congruence on loyalty could also be detected in our media case. Differences of the impact within the models for print and online give rise to the assumption that a differentiated approach to brand management in these two fields has to be taken into consideration.     

Legal Research Boot Camp: One Approach to Meeting the Research Needs of Law Students

This article describes the legal research boot camp offered at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. It is an intensive, one-week course offered the first week of the summer break to prepare students for their summer clerkships. It is also a vehicle to teach law librarianship students how to teach legal research.     

The Partisan Affect of News Seekers vs. Gatekeepers: Linguistic Differences in Online vs. Front-Page News in Campaign 2012

This article examines if patterns in online news seeking privilege stories featuring more linguistic markers of partisan affect than those positioned by traditional gatekeepers on the print front page. Online “most-read” and print front-page stories covering 8 weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign were submitted to computer-assisted text analysis (n = 302). Guided by research on online and partisan affect, this study hypothesizes that (a) “most-read” stories will feature more supportive language than stories placed on the front page by traditional gatekeepers when the news outlet has a reputation for supporting the incumbent party; and (b) “most-read” stories will feature more antagonistic language than those placed on the front page by traditional gatekeepers when the news outlet has a reputation for supporting the challenger party. The findings show how online audiences opted for stories that featured more linguistic markers of preferred partisan affect than journalists and editors placed on Page One.     

Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Have We Overemphasized Its Importance?

Surveys of law librarians show concern with the lack of cost-effective research skills of law students and new associates. Some commentators call for greater emphasis on the subject in legal research classes. To explore whether the subject merits increased instructional attention, the author surveyed second- and third-year law students at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law about their summer research experiences. The purpose of the survey was to find out how much importance summer employers placed on containing online research costs. The student survey results contradict the commonly expressed view that employers are greatly concerned with containing online research costs. The author posits that law library surveys generally reflect the experiences of large firm librarians, whereas the great majority of students and practicing attorneys do not work at these organizations. The concerns of these librarians might not be as relevant for students who work at smaller firms and government organizations. The author notes that the survey results suggest that there is no need for increased emphasis on cost-effective research at schools that do not have a large percentage of students who go on to work at large firms.     

Creating and Using Web Resources to Train Attorneys

Summary

The experience of producing a web-based CLE program is shared by two academic law librarians who teamed with a practicing attorney to deliver the training. The focus is on teaching lawyers to effectively find and use materials on the Internet using a hands-on web-based CLE. The insights gained from taking web-based legal instruction “on the road” are explored along with the challenges presented by well-intentioned administrators and those wishing to profit from CLEs who may thwart good planning and organization. Dependable technical support and control of the process and environment are not only desirable but necessary. Selected web site URLs used in training are included and future directions for this type of training are examined.