Each year, UNC law librarians host Prep for Practice – a series of lunchtime workshops to help students hone their legal research skills as they prepare for internships, extra-curricular work, and jobs. These sessions focus on practical research skills that law students will need on their first day of work, whether at a firm, government …
New Features and Content on Govinfo
Govinfo.gov is the GPO’s new site that is currently in beta.The site launched in February 2016. In July, some new features and additional content were added. In their July 2016 Release Notes, Govinfo highlights these new features. Users can browse the collection by Government Author. The authors are separated into the Legislative Branch, Executive Branch, …
An Update on SSRN – Ownership and Copyright Policies
SSRN, founded in 1994, has become one of the primary tools that legal scholars use to communicate their ideas to the world. UNC Law faculty are heavy users. As of August 2016, UNC Law faculty have posted over 600 articles to SSRN, and have received over 143,000 downloads. By “total number of new downloads” (downloads …
New Report on Legal Strategies for Digitizing Orphan Works
We are excited today about the release of a significant report on legal strategies for libraries to enable open access to orphan works (copyrighted works for which owners cannot be identified or located), authored by UNC Law Library’s Dave Hansen. For all cultural heritage institutions, including law libraries like ours, orphan works pose a major …
Glitch Left Out Words from 600 Cases Since 2014
On Friday, April 15 Westlaw informed users across the nation that various hard-copy reporters and their online counterparts contained errors. Some 600 cases published since November 2014 erroneously omitted small portions of case text. In March, Thomson Reuters became aware that small portions of text were missing in a number of new cases posted to …
Free Access to Foreign Law
A campaign to make all the world’s legal information more widely available is gathering steam. The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is an ambitious program devoted to making legal information available online at no cost. In its Declaration on Free Access to Law, the group holds that legal information “is part of the common …
Criminal Law and Comics
Are you struggling to make heads or tails of criminal law or criminal procedure? Or perhaps you’re looking for a different, nontraditional way to engage with the material? Well, have we got the books for you! The Kathrine R. Everett Law Library has recently acquired two comic book paperbacks written and drawn by defense attorney …
English Case Conversion Table
There’s a useful tool now in HeinOnline that helps researchers locate difficult-to-find, older English cases. Because English cases were historically published in scores of “nominate” reporters – few of which are available to American researchers – it is often difficult to find them. To make them more available to practitioners, significant cases decided between 1220 …
Organize Your Research and Writing with Reference Management Tools
Students: Writing a paper for a WE or RWE course? Planning to participate in the joint journal competition after classes end? In your writing you will be citing to scholarly sources as well as primary law. Depending on how robust your footnotes are you may feel overwhelmed with managing all your references. As you probably …
Litigation Analytics Tool Offered by Bloomberg Law
Bloomberg Law’s Litigation Analytics, which is currently in beta testing, provides law students and practitioners with the ability to research the federal litigation histories of major companies, identifies the law firms representing those companies in the majority of their federal litigation needs, and also provides researchers with another means for locating dockets when the only …