IN THIS ISSUE:
A few weeks ago, the Law Library conducted its annual Student Summer Research Survey, and the results are interesting. The respondents, 53% of whom are 2Ls, worked in a variety of settings. A little less than half worked for firms, one-fifth clerked for judges, and a full 17% did public interest work. The subjects researched ran the gamut from administrative law to capital punishment, with significant numbers of respondents working in criminal law, employment, and social security. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents spent at least half of their work time doing research. Like last year, both online and print materials were used with print sources being used more than one may expect. One third of the respondents spent at least 20% of their research time in print materials. Interestingly, a very significant use of print sources was for researching statutes. A positive note was that more than 8 out of 10 respondents felt prepared for their summer research duties. We asked what should be done to help folks become better prepared for their research work, and a clear majority indicated that improving the research component of Lawyering would be best. All of the data and useful comments provided will help the Law Library in assessing the legal research curriculum. And, on a special note, Daniel Forester (2L) was the lucky winner of two Cornell v Dartmouth Men’s Hockey tickets. Sounds like it was a good game with Cornell winning 5-1!
To succeed on final exams, you have to know more than the material covered in class - you have to know how to write essays and answer multiple-choice questions. Preparing for essay examination is especially important because writing in the law is different than writing in other fields. CALI has resources to help you prepare:
- Top 10 Tips for Successfully Writing a Law School Essay by Professor Jennifer Martin
- Exam Taking Skills, Outlines, and Advice for Law Students: Panel 1 Podcast by Professors Ron Eades, John Farago, and Patrick Wiseman
- Exam Taking Skills, Outlines, and Advice for Law Students: Panel 2 Podcast by Professors Ron Brown and Joe Grohman
- Writing Better Law School Exams: The Importance of Structure by Professor William Andersen
- Tips for Multiple Choice Exams in Law School Podcast by Professor Scott Burnham
Contact Iantha Haight if you do not already have an account with CALI.
On October 7, Judge Charles Michael Dennis Byron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), spoke at the Cornell Club in NYC on the Role of the Courts in Protecting and Preserving Human Rights. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Workplace Studies at ILR and the Law School, the event gave Sir Byron the opportunity to speak to the larger Cornell Community on the legal, moral, and social issues involved in the human rights abuses in Rwanda, including the role of the ICTR in addressing sexual violence and prohibitions on freedom of speech. The Library’s relationship with the ICTR began last year when Professor Germain was contacted as a result of the ICTR finding our Nuremberg trials archive online, and resulted in the invitation to visit Tanzania in June of this year to assist and advise on best practices for preserving the records of their court. Professor Claire Germain and Research Attorney Thomas Mills spent an intensive two weeks in Tanzania consulting with Sir Byron and the tribunal.
New online research tools for Japanese law are now available for case law and statutes. LexisNexis Japan provides more than 206,000 judgments dating from 1862, 42,000 case commentaries as published in prestigious law journals, and all of the current 7,200 Japanese statutes, codes, and laws. The text is exclusively in Japanese. For access to these legal materials, contact a librarian at the Reference Desk for assistance. For English translations of Japanese laws, use Japanese Law Translation. You can search by keyword, title, document number, legal category, and organization, with the Japanese text appearing right next to the English translation. These online services may be of particular interest to the students in the East Asian Law and Culture Seminar this semester but are accessible to all law students.
Research Attorneys and Lawyering Faculty joined forces at a recent conference at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee. At the Central Region Legal Writing Conference, Thomas Mills and Ursula Weigold presented a program on "Effective Collaborations Between Legal Writing Instructors and Law Librarians," based on their shared experience teaching a section of Lawyering together for the last several years. Associate Law Librarian Pat Court presented a program on "Evaluating Web Sites for Publication," reporting on her work with LL.M. students in Leslie Knight's writing course, where students evaluate a law-related web site from their home country for publication in the Law Library's current awareness service, InSITE. The group brought back new ideas on social networking which were featured prominently at the conference.
InSITE is a current awareness service offered by Cornell Law Library that highlights law-related web sites in a bi-weekly publication. Created in 1996 by the Library's Head of Information Management, Jean Pajerek, it has become the premier resource for potentially useful law web sites. When you Google for law information, you get a large set of undifferentiated results, but when you do the same search in InSITE, everything you get is Law-specific and your sites have already been evaluated. InSITE is available as a searchable database, an email subscription, and as an RSS feed. The InSITE database may be accessed here. To subscribe to the email version of InSITE, write the following request in the body of the message: join INSITE-L "your name" and send it to lyris@cornell.edu - where "your name" (include the quotation marks) is the name you want to be available to the list's administrator. You must send this message from the email address where you want to receive the e-list's messages. Leave the Subject line blank.
Westlaw is changing their password requirements to something they call OnePass. Essentially, they are following what is now common practice on the web and will require users to have a custom username and password. Lexis already requires this. So, the alpha-numeric password that you have will no longer be used to sign on to Westlaw. The change-over began this month and we all have until the end of January to switch to OnePass. OnePass Guide is a resource that may be useful to you as you convert your signon.
To begin the process of setting up OnePass, you will want to go to: http://www.westlaw.com. You will see the OnePass Username and Password link in small white lettering. Click this and then look for the Register/Edit link on the left side of the blue box. Click this link and now you can create a OnePass. Be aware that if you already have a OnePass username and password, you may have to edit them to bring them into compliance with standard security measures. The username and password must be at least 8 characters in length and use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numerals, and special characters. Again, see the Guide above for more details or contact Matt Morrison if you need help.
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- Thanksgiving Break (Nov. 25 – Nov. 29):
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- Thursday (Thanksgiving): Closed
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- End of Semester / Finals (Nov. 30 – Dec. 18):
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- Friday: 8 am - 8 pm
- Saturday: 8 am - 8 pm
- Sunday: Noon - 8 pm
- Saturday December 19: Closed
- Sunday December 20: Closed
- Holiday Break (Dec. 21 – Jan. 3):
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- Friday December 25, 2009 – Sunday January 3, 2010: University is Closed
- January Schedule (Jan. 4 – Jan. 23):
- Monday – Friday: 8 am – 5 pm
- Saturday & Sunday: Closed
- Regular hours resume on Sunday January 24
- GOOD LUCK ON EXAMS AND HAVE A TERRIFIC WINTER BREAK!
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