Should We Care If the Case Digest Disappears?: A Retrospective Analysis and the Future of Legal Research Instruction

ABSTRACT

This article begins with a brief history of the West key number digest system. Next, it reviews some of the prominent literature discussing the shift from case digests to full-text searching (including the sole user study on this topic). Then, this article examines how the paradigm shift is reflected in law library collections and current trends in legal research instruction. Finally, the author presents four lessons gleaned from this discussion that may help shape future legal research instruction and proposes a user study to better inform future discussion.     

Self-Help Legal Materials in the Law Library: Going a Step Further for the Public Patron

ABSTRACT

Service to pro se patrons continues to be one of the core issues facing law librarians. The current downturn in the economy makes this issue more critical than ever. This article provides one way to better meet the needs of this growing class of law library patrons.     

Cases and Case Lawyers

ABSTRACT

In the 19th century, the term “case lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about case lawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount of published law after private companies entered the legal publishing market. By the turn of the 20th century, it was generally acknowledged the number of cases had made it impossible for attorneys to not focus on locating precedents. In the 20th century most references to case lawyers were historical, even as the amount of published law facing lawyers continued to grow.     

Legal Publishing: Establishing Context through the Lens of Disruptive Innovation

ABSTRACT

As legal research tools come and go, an understanding of the continuing changes in legal publishing can provide a better understanding of those developments. One way in which law librarians can gain insight into the dynamic legal publishing world is by looking through the lens created by the innovative disruption model as proposed by Clayton Christensen almost 20 years ago. This article suggests that the Christensen model can provide valuable context to what is happening and may happen in legal publishing in the future.     

Bilingual and Multilingual Legal Dictionaries in the European Union: An Updated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography is intended to shed light on the availability and distribution of legal dictionaries that translate the twenty-seven European languages. The representative corpus consists of about 200 printed bilingual legal dictionaries (BLDs) with terms from two or more legal languages used in the European Union. This bibliography aims to illustrate the wide variation in the quality of these BLDs by the usage of three special headings and by referring to relevant professional reviews. In addition, the authors have commented upon noticeable BLDs that deserve serious criticism or special attention. This annotated bibliography updates the previous bibliography (Gerard-René de Groot & Conrad J. P. van Laer. The Quality of Legal Dictionaries: An Assessment [Maastricht Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2008/6, 2008]) and covers almost all recently published BLDs. However, this bibliography is not exhaustive because of the dispersion of publishing houses: Each publisher issues only two BLDs, on average.     

A Guide to Media Law Research

This article is designed to aid lawyers, students, journalists, and others who wish to research the body of law that deals with both the print and broadcast media. Specific subjects covered include first amendment constitutional law, defamation, privacy, obscenity, confidentiality of sources, access to information, and broadcasting law.     

The Pedagogical Value of an Integrated Approach to Legal Research Instruction: Overcoming Student Resistance to the Use of Print Sources and Striking a Balance That Instills an Appreciation of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Both Print and Online Sources

The ABA Legal Technology Survey Reports from 2006 to 2012 reported that, on average, 51% of attorneys “regularly” used print materials. Given the propensity of law students to default to online research, this article describes the results of a three-year longitudinal study of an integrated approach to teaching first-year legal research. This approach required students conduct legal research tasks both online and in print sources, and to evaluate their experience. The objective of this approach was to transform the legal research experience from a “treasure hunt” into a much higher level of engagement based on Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.     

Law School Firms and Incubators and the Role of the Academic Law Library

This article examines the recently developed postgraduate, law-school-supported programs intended to provide recent graduates with a continued experiential learning environment in order to bridge the gap between law school and law practice. Both law school firms and practice incubators are discussed. Specifically, this article looks at what, if any, role academic law libraries have within these programs. Lastly, ways in which these libraries might possibly add or improve services to the programs are explored.     

Access versus Ownership

SUMMARY

This paper discusses changes in the ownership models of intellectual property and how they are shifting the way libraries provide information. The author argues that the main change in intellectual property is the way that owners distribute information, not in the sense of new media, but in the sense of new legal constructs governing distribution. The article discusses the impact on libraries of a move toward viewing information as a service that must be licensed, not bought. The potential effects of protecting intellectual property with contract law instead of copyright and property law are detailed.     

Researching Initiatives and Referenda: A Guide for Oklahoma

SUMMARY

Researching initiatives and referendums in Oklahoma requires looking at Oklahoma history, becoming familiar with the constitutional and statutory requirements and procedures, and finding pertinent print and Web resources.