Friday, January 30, 2015

Super Bowl Sunday is Almost Here... Law Library Sports Law Display and Resources

This Sunday marks Super Bowl XLIX, an AFC/NFC showdown between the Patriots and the Seahawks.  With the controversy over "deflate-gate", the biggest football game of the year has been put in the spotlight more than ever.

In the spirit of the event, the Law Library is putting a spotlight on Sports Law in its new display.  The display features many of the Law Library's print and electronic resources on Sports Law.  Electronically available Sports Law treatises are featured, as well as sports law journals available via HeinOnline.  Also included are many of the Law Library's print titles (as well as e-book titles) covering Sports Law issues, ranging from antitrust and intellectual property issues in professional sports, to Title IX requirements in collegiate sports, to the laws governing athletes and agents and Sports Law as a career.

The featured e-book titles, available directly below for authenticated law users (or by searching the EBL database through the Law Library's Research Databases page) include:


Sports Justice: The Law and Business of Sports / by Roger I. Abrams

Supreme Court Stays Executions of Three Oklahoma Inmates

The U.S. Supreme Court on January 28 placed a stay on the execution of three Oklahoma death row inmates whose case is currently pending before the Court.  The Court is expected to hear argument on the case in April, which centers on the issue of whether Oklahoma's lethal injection procedure (which utilizes the sedative midazolam) violates the U.S. Constitution as cruel and unusual punishment.

The sedative was involved in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on April 2014, in which Lockett died of a heart attack nearly 45 minutes after the drug administration. 

The Supreme Court case is Glossip v. Gross, No. 14-7955.  Additional information on the case is available through SCOTUSblog here.  For those seeking additional news coverage, articles are available from NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, among others.

The McKusick Law Library has also updated its Capital Punishment LibGuide with information about the Supreme Court case.  The LibGuide also serves as a resource for those interested in pursuing additional research in this area.  Links to print titles in the Law Library's collection are included in the LibGuide, such as:

Death Penalty in a Nutshell / Victor Streib

Capital Punishment / Paul G. Connors (Editor)

The LibGuide also provides detailed information about the death penalty in South Dakota.

Drones in the News - Drone Law Resources

Prominent in the news this week was the report of a Washington D.C. man who accidentally crashed a drone on the White House lawn, after losing control of the device outside his apartment window.  (See a recent news article on the crash here from the New York Times.)

And just last week, a drone loaded with methamphetamine crashed in a supermarket parking lot in Tijuana, Mexico (news coverage from the Washington Post available here).  The U.S. use of drone strikes overseas in Yemen has also been a recent news item (article here from Reuters). 

These stories highlight the many legal issues regarding the use of unmanned drone craft, both in the civilian and military context.  From FAA regulation to privacy issues, to use by law enforcement and potential use by private companies (such as Amazon), the drone legal "airspace" has numerous obstacles to navigate. 

For law students or faculty looking for a brief introduction to the legal issues surrounding drone use, CALI recently released a lesson, Drones: Unmanned Aircraft Systems, authored by Wendy Davis of the University of Massachusetts School of Law at Dartmouth.  The lesson, which is estimated to take 45-60 minutes to complete, explores the legal aspects of drones in both military and civilian settings.  (Consider it a "crash" course in drone law!)

If you haven't yet signed up for a CALI account, please contact one of the law librarians to receive the CALI authentication code for the USD School of Law.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Author Profiles Now Available in HeinOnline

HeinOnline has recently added a new feature that may be of interest to both law faculty and students. Author profile pages are now available through HeinOnline.  Author profiles can be accessed by clicking on the author's name from any particular entry in search results obtained in the Law Journal Library.  (To find a particular author, use an author search.) 

HeinOnline automatically creates a "basic" author profile page for each author, which lists the author's name and listing of his/her articles, the number of times the author's articles have been cited by other articles and cases, and the number of times the articles have been accessed by other HeinOnline users within a rolling 12-month period.  This author information can be very helpful to researchers in evaluating a particular article.

Authors can "enhance" their profiles by adding a photo, biographical information,  university/affiliation, and links to author web pages and social media accounts. The form to set up an enhanced profile is available here.  Once a page has been enhanced, it can be shared with colleagues though email and web link options.  

Below is an example of an enhanced author profile for Darla Jackson, Law Library Director:


More information with screenshots is available from HeinOnline here.  (H/t to the WisBlawg at the University of Wisconsin Law Library.) 

Thursday, January 15, 2015

News About the Law Library's E-Books Program

The Law Library has launched a new e-books program this semester for law students and faculty. The e-books are available to law users via the Law Library’s Research Databases page and the collection includes over 5,000 legal titles (varies slightly each month), all of which can be “checked out” for a 7-day period.

The Law Library has prepared an E-Books LibGuide to assist users in searching for and reading/downloading e-books. We are also offering informal, drop-in demonstrations and training on the e-books program and the Law Library's new mobile devices during the week of January 19. More information is available below. Of course, the Law Library staff is also happy to answer any questions about the e-books program at the Circulation/Reference Desk as well as by email or phone.




Check Them Out: iPads, Kindles, Nooks, and Laptops


The Law Library is pleased to announce that several mobile devices and laptop computers are now available for checkout. The Law Library has acquired 4 iPad Airs, 2 Kindle Fire tablets, 2 NookHD tablets, and 4 Dell laptop computers. An Apple TV is also available to check out and can be used to display the iPads (or other Apple devices) to the monitors at the Technology Learning Centers. (Display adapters for the Kindles and Nooks are forthcoming.)

All of these devices can be checked out by law students for single day use, provided they are returned by the end of the service day (by 9:00 p.m. Monday, Wednesdays, and Sundays; by 6:00 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays). The devices are all configured for download of the Law Library’s e-books and also have several legal research apps loaded on them. Other downloads on the devices are currently limited. A complete equipment use and checkout policy is available on the McKusick Law Library LibGuide, at the lower left, along with other library-related law school policies. 

The Law Library is offering informal, drop-in demonstrations and training sessions for the mobile devices (as well as our new e-books program) during the week of January 19.  Two sessions will be available for law students, staff and faculty -- one on Wednesday, January 21, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., the other on Thursday, January 22, from 10:00 a.m. to noon.  The sessions will be held at the Technology Learning Centers on the main floor of the Law Library.  Free coffee will also be provided.  Please join us! 

Extended Service Hours for Law Students This Semester

The Law Library is pleased to announce that we will be extending our service hours to law students this semester.  Two of our student workers, Ryan VanVugt and Warren Berry, will be staffing the Circulation/Reference Desk on Monday and Wednesday nights, and Sunday afternoons/evenings.  Mondays and Wednesdays the Desk will be staffed from 6:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., as well as on Sundays from 12:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.  These hours are in addition to our normal hours of staffing at the Circulation/Reference Desk of 7:45 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays and 7:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Fridays. 

Ryan and Warren are both trained to provide circulation assistance (check-in/check-out) as well as ready reference help.  They can also contact a member of the full-time Law Library staff with more in-depth or detailed questions.

We hope that law students will take advantage of these extended service hours.  The Law Library will continue to remain open to the public 7:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. only.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  There will NOT be Sunday hours this Sunday, January 18, due to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday on Monday, January 19.

Ryan Van Vugt (pictured left). Ryan has been a Law Library student worker for almost 2 years, joining the Law Library in Fall 2013. Ryan is a senior at USD, majoring in Health Services Administration. Ryan is originally from Northwest Iowa.







Warren Berry (pictured left). Warren joined the Law Library as a student worker in Fall 2014 and is a graduate student in Political Science at USD. Warren previously taught high school, and served as an intern for Senator John Thune and the State Legislature. Warren graduated from Northern State and is from Kadoka, SD.


Friday, January 9, 2015

FEATURE POST: Professor Sean Kammer Reviews New Title, Mississippi River Tragedies

Professor Sean Kammer is contributing to the collection development effort of the USD Law Library. Under this program, professors make recommendations for titles to be added to the Law Library's collection. Consistent with the Collection Development Policy of the Law Library, titles recommended for acquisition by the faculty are given priority consideration. If the recommended title is acquired, the faculty member provides a brief review of the title for publication on the Law Library Blog. Below Professor Kammer provides a review of a title acquired under the program. Thank you Professor Kammer!

Review of Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (NY: New York University Press, 2014)

With this work, water law scholars Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer offer a fresh perspective on over a century of so-called “natural disasters” that have impacted (if not devastated) lives in the Mississippi River basin. In short, they contend that there is nothing “natural” about them at all. Rather, while some “natural” weather event may have precipitated each of the events, their damage to human lives resulted from a pattern of failed water development policies and shortsighted land-use planning.

Employing a largely chronological organization, the authors recount the great flood events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from a decade of immense flooding beginning in 1903 to the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After each incident, the government’s response was akin to a gambler doubling down after a loss. The government began early in the century by implementing a program of levee construction. When that proved ineffective in the following decades, it supplemented levees with a system of floodways to direct floodwaters and reservoirs to store them. As flooding disasters have continued, the government has repeatedly attempted to alleviate some of the suffering through disaster relief, while providing protection against future tragedies through public flood insurance. In addition to the short-sightedness of federal water development policies, the major theme running through all of the events and the responses to them is the repeated subsidization of urban and agricultural development in the Mississippi floodplain. 

Klein and Zellmer hint at a paradox at the heart of American society’s relationship with nature. In one important sense, American notions of progress have always been intertwined with a sense of dominion over nature. It was this hubris—one perhaps at its apex in the first decades of the twentieth century—that underlay the mission of controlling floods through feats of human engineering in the first place. In another sense, however, Americans seem to recognize at some level their powerlessness against nature. Unfortunately, this humility tends to reach expression only following extreme “natural” events—be they hurricanes or tornadoes, floods or wildfires, or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions—rather than in managing for and protecting against such events in the first place. This has fostered a socio-legal culture whereby humans can place themselves and others at risk from natural events under the belief of nature having been subdued, all the while escaping accountability when nature inevitably proclaims its independence. After all, it’s not our fault.

In their conclusion, Klein and Zellmer present three axioms that they argue should serve as the foundation for federal river development policies, each of which have largely been ignored up to now. First, there will be floods. Second, there will be levee failures. And third, there will be development in floodplains absent government intervention. Accordingly, they propose a series of sensible legal reforms aimed at doing two things: (1) keeping people away from water rather than vice versa, and (2) providing rivers the opportunity to flood without it being a disaster. Given our experiences over the last century, this doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

NOTE:  Law Professor Emeritus John Davidson has also published a review of this title on the Water for Food Blog of the Robert B. Daugherty Institute at the University of Nebraska.  His review can be accessed here via his USD Law Selected Works author page.  

Thursday, January 8, 2015

January 19 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day - Law Library Hours and Display

Monday, January 19 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a state and federal holiday.  The McKusick Law Library will be closed to the public and circulation and reference services will not be available.  (Law students will continue to have 24/7 access using their University ID cards.)

In commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Law Library is currently featuring a display which highlights Law Library resources that discuss the life, work, and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Several law review articles (available via the Library's subscription to HeinOnline) that discuss Dr. King's legacy on civil rights, justice, and the American legal system are included, as well as the following print titles:

He Had a Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement / by Flip Schulk; designed by Robert S. Nemser




 
Information is also available on the MLK Day of Service, which is a part of United We Serve, the President's national call to service initiative.  Information on MLK Day of Service and other activities in the USD and Vermillion community is available here from the University's press release, including an online registration form for community service projects, as well as details of the Jan. 20 keynote address by Negin Farsad, a filmmaker and comedienne who uses humor to bridge racial, religious, and other gaps.