New Issue of the South Dakotan Lawyer

The Winter 2013/14 issue of the South Dakotan Lawyer is now available here.  Information about the McKusick Law Library is available at pages 12 and 14 of the issue.

The Law Library also has past issues of the South Dakotan Lawyer in print, which are available in the South Dakota Collection on the main floor of the Law Library. 

Enhancements to Congress.gov and Lexis Advance

Last week, two legal resources unveiled new enhancements.  The Library of Congress announced that new features have been added to Congress.gov, including an Advanced Search function, a Browse function, and the Appropriations Table that has previously been available only via THOMAS.  Click here for the announcement from the In Custodia Legis blog from the Law Librarians of Congress. 

For more information about the transition from THOMAS to Congress.gov, see the Prairie Law Blog's Nov. 5, 2013 post on this topic here. 

In its most recent release (last week) Lexis also made several updates to its Lexis Advance platform.  Information from Lexis on the new features and content is available here.  Reviews of the new content and updates have varied.  See here for an post from Robert Ambrogi's LawSites blog on the new content in Practice Advisor, as well as a post here from the RIPS-SIS Law Librarian Blog.

The Law Library staff is available to explain and demonstrate the new features of these databases, as well as other electronic resources.  Please do not hesitate to contact a member of the Law Library staff with questions.

Putting a "Spotlight" on Entertainment Law For This Year's Oscars - Library Display

This Sunday, March 2, the 86th annual Academy Awards will be held in Beverly Hills.  The star-studded event honors the accomplishments of many talented professionals in the motion picture and entertainment industry.

To coincide with this event, the Law Library is featuring an Oscars display which highlights many of the Law Library's resources that discuss law and motion pictures, representation of legal themes in film, as well as entertainment law, generally.

Included in the display are the following titles:
Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts / edited by John Denvir
The Celluloid Courtroom: A History of Legal Cinema / by Ross D. Levi
Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry / by Kerry Segrave
The Independent Filmmaker’s Law and Business Guide: Financing, Shooting, and Distributing Independent and Digital Films / by Jon M. Garon
Changing Images of Law in Film & Television Crime Stories / by Timothy O. Lenz
Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies / by Paul Bergman and Michael Asimow
Truth and Lives on Film: The Legal Problems of Depicting Real Persons and Events in a Fictional Medium / by John T. Aquino
The Biz: The Basic Business, Legal and Financial Aspects of the Film Industry / by Schuyler M. Moore
How to Build and Manage an Entertainment Law Practice / by Gary Greenberg
Law on the Screen / edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Entertainment Law: Legal Concepts and Business Practices / by Thomas D. Selz et al.

The display also highlights some of the Law Library's electronic resources, including treatises available via WestlawNext and Lexis Advance. Also, copies of the following articles, available via HeinOnline, are included in the display:

Rebecca Shaw, Show Me the Money: Movie Quotes as Intellectual Property, 4 Intell. Prop. Brief 36 (2012-2013)

Richard W. Rappaport, et al., Inside Hollywood: The Reel Path to Success in the Motion Picture Industry, 28 Ent. & Sports Law. 3 (2010-2011)

Richard Brust, The 25 Greatest Legal Movies, 94 A.B.A. J. 38 (2008)

QR: Quick Response: Locating Electronic Resources When the Print Is No Longer Being Updated

If you have been browsing the stacks on the lower level of the Law Library, you may have noticed that the Law Library has been undertaking an effort to label materials that are no longer being updated in print. The goal is to clearly notify all of our patrons as to whether a particular print resource is being kept current.   Items that are no longer being updated in print are being labeled with a yellow sticker stating: "No Longer Being Updated by Library."

In addition, in an effort to connect our students and faculty to the current and updated electronic version of these resources, the Law Library is also placing labels on the inside cover of these items which contain a QR code that links directly to the electronic equivalent of the resource (if available), using a smart phone or tablet.  Currently, the Law Library is providing links to resources that are available via WestlawNext and Bloomberg Law, with plans to link to resources in Lexis Advance in the future.  Following the link embedded in the QR code, once the user has entered her user name and password, she will be directed to the electronic resource.

The Law Library appreciates your patience as we complete this project.  In the interim, some print resources that are not being kept current may not have yet been labeled.  If you have any questions as to whether a resource is being updated in print by the Law Library or whether an electronic version of a resource is available, please do not hesitate to ask a member of the Law Library staff.

Did You Say Mediation or Meditation?

The ABA Journal recently posted an article about Charles Halpern, who teaches a class at the University of California - Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school titled "Effective and Sustainable Law Practice: The Meditative Perspective."  Halpern also offers periodic meditation retreats for legal professionals. 

While at first glance one might think that "Meditation" would be a typo on the course schedule, there is a significant amount of scholarship that explores the value of meditation in the lives of law students and lawyers and the potential benefits to their careers, clients, and overall well-being. 

Faculty and students interested in the topic may want to consider the following articles available either remotely or on-campus via HeinOnline:

Leonard L. Riskin, The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Contributions of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers, and Their Clients, 7 Harv. Negot. L. Rev. 1 (2002)

David M. Zlotnick, Integrating Mindfulness Theory and Practice Into Trial Advocacy, 61 J. Legal Educ. 654 (2011-2012)

Douglas A. Codiga, Reflections on the Potential Growth of Mindfulness Meditation in the Law, 7 Harv. Negot. L. Rev. 109 (2002)

Charles Halpern, Mindful Lawyer: Why Contemporary Lawyers Are Practicing Meditation, 61 J. Legal. Educ. 641 (2011-2012)

Angela P. Harris, Toward Lawyering as Peacemaking: A Seminar on Mindfulness, Morality, and Professional Identity, 61 J. Legal Educ. 647 (2011-2012)

In addition, the law library has in its collection several titles which discuss meditation, work-life balance and other strategies for successful legal practice:

Bringing Peace Into the Room : How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution / Daniel Bowling, David Hoffman, editors (featuring a chapter on mindfulness meditation)

Coaching for Attorneys: Improving Productivity and Achieving Balance / by Cami McKaren and Stephanie J. Finelli (on order)

Excellence In the Workplace: Legal & Life Skills in a Nutshell / by Kay Kavanagh and Paula Nailon

The Lawyer’s Guide to Balancing Life and Work / by George W. Kaufman

FEATURE POST: Law Professor Tom Simmons Reviews New Title, History of the Common Law

Professor Tom Simmons is contributing to the collection development effort of the USD Law Library.  Under a recently adopted program, Professors make recommendations for titles to be added to the Law Library 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 Simmons provides the first review under the new program.  Thank you Professor Simmons!

Langbein, John H., Lerner, Renee L. and Smith, Bruce P., History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions, Copyright 2000 by Aspen Publishers.

Professor Langbein, Yale Law School’s Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, is best known for his influential work on trust, probate, pension and investment law, but he also written extensively on the development of criminal procedure and the common law, including Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancient Regime (1977). 

Professor Langbein, along with his co-author/editors, Professor Lerner and Dean Smith, authored and edited History of the Common Law as a textbook for an introductory law school course in Anglo-American legal history. Its authors made use of previously unpublished materials from Professors Langbein, Goebel, and Dawson as well as judicial decisions stretching back to the thirteenth century and recent scholarship as well.   It is a book with few competitors for law school classes on its subject and was, in fact, the first law school teaching book to be produced in full color.  The textbook makes use of gorgeous illustrations, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary photographs. 

The book underscores the emergence of the jury system, the conflict between law and equity, and the development of the legal profession, from serjeants and barristers in the medieval world, to twenty-first century transnational megafirms and other contemporary American legal institutions and doctrines. 

Its scope, if anything, despite its more than 1100 pages, may be over-ambitious.  The text assumes, for example, a working knowledge of English history which many students may lack.  The introduction acknowledges this choice by the authors: “To keep the book manageable for a one-semester course, we have had to exclude or provide only skeletal coverage of many strands of legal historical inquiry that are full of interest, such as the history of legal doctrine and legal theory, constitutional and political history, and many of the social and economic dimensions.” 

Thomas E. Simmons

Assistant Professor
University of South Dakota
School of Law

(This entry was originally posted by Darla Jackson on January 23, 2014)

February 15th is Susan B. Anthony Day

Today is Susan B. Anthony's birthday. The famous abolitionist, temperance supporter and women's voting rights advocate was born on this day in 1820. Her passionate involvement in social issues began with her Quaker family's participation in the abolitionist movement. While attending an anti-slavery conference in 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony and Stanton established the Women's New York State Temperance Society. They later turned to women's rights issues and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

On November 1, 1872, Anthony and her sisters demanded that Rochester, New York election inspectors register them as voters in advance of the presidential election. After an hour of argument, the inspectors registered the women, reasoning that the burden of the illegal act of voting would be put on the Anthony women. On November 5th, Anthony cast her vote and was arrested the next week. In June of 1873, Anthony was tried and Judge Ward Hunt directed the jury to find Anthony guilty of illegal voting. Judge Hunt declared: "The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law."

After Judge Hunt pronounced her sentence of a one hundred dollar fine, Anthony announced: "May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper - The Revolution - ... the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your manmade, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; ..."

(The above information is from Bio.com's Biography of Susan B. Anthony and The Trial of Susan B. Anthony for Illegal Voting from Doug O. Linder's Famous American Trial's project at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law.)

In honor of her birthday, the McKusick Law Library has displayed the following resources from its collection:

The Trial of Susan B. Anthony/BY Susan B. Anthony, Introduction by Lynn Scherr

Sixty Famous Cases: 29 English Cases-31 American Cases, From 1778 to the Present/BY Marshall Van Winkle (one of the famous cases is Ms. Anthony's trial for illegal voting)

The Teachings of Modern Protestantism on Law, Politics and Human Nature/Edited by John Witte. Original source materials include the following by Susan B. Anthony: A Temperance Speech: The Church and the Liquor Traffic (1852), Two Antislavery Speeches, Anthony's Speech at Her Trial for Voting (1873, and her Speech in the Woman's Bible Controversy (1896).