Exams are almost upon us and the Law Library has various resources to assist you during finals! Below are several useful tidbits and tips to help you prepare for a successful exam period. Library Hours Library hours including Reference Desk Hours are available on the left-hand column of the Law Library Homepage. Exam Archive Past …
British Law Reports in PDF format on Westlaw
Westlaw has long provided access to most British caselaw, but it has not offered those cases in the PDF format needed by citecheckers. Recently, though, Westlaw has begun to include PDF versions of the two most-cited British case reporters, Law Reports and English Reports. The Law Reports is a series of the most significant U.K. …
Prep for Practice Workshops at the Law Library
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 …
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 …