Service Hours Today, Monday, 9/28

Due to a staff illness, the McKusick Law Library will not be offering extended service hours to law students this evening.  The Law Library will close to the public at 5:00 p.m. and circulation and reference services will not be offered after 5:00 p.m.  Thank you for your understanding.

The "Happy Birthday" Song was Copyrighted . . .Until Now

On September 22, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that very specific piano arrangements of "Happy Birthday" is copyrighted, but the lyrics and melody are not. The copyright owners, Warner/Chappell, have been earning around $2 million on the song each year. 

The song (originally "Good Morning to All" with the melody later also being used for "Happy Birthday To You") was written for kindergartners by sisters Mildred and Patty Hill in 1893.

Because "Happy Birthday" had been under copyright, the public had to get creative with its celebratory singsong in movies, plays, and restaurants - hence the improvised birthday ditty you got embarrassed by at Chi-Chi's when you were 13.

Free Legal Research CLE on October 2

The School of Law will be offering a free CLE session during Dakota Days, on Conducting Free, Low Cost, and Other Electronic Legal Research.  The session will be held Friday, October 2, 2015 2:00-4:00PM at the USD Law School, Vermillion, in Room 101.

The session is free to all interested in updating their legal research skills.

Registration requested but not required for attendance. Registration will help ensure you receive copies of the handouts to accompany the training. To register please forward your name, firm or practice affiliation, and email address to Sarah.Kammer@usd.edu or Darla.Jackson@usd.edu by September 28, 2015. Please include Dakota Days Legal Research CLE in the subject line.

Topics include: · Finding Free Case Law, Using Google · Finding Case Law and Related Secondary Materials using Fastcase and Hein Online · Free First Step Case Updating using Fastcase and Case Updating Using Lexis Academic at local universities · Federal Docket Searching Using Bloomberg Law · Finding Statutes, Codes (including Tribal Codes) and Legislative History Materials · Finding Free Administrative Materials and Local Municipal Codes

If you are a person with a disability and need a special accommodation to fully participate, please contact Disability Services 48 hours before the event at 605-677-6389.

Happy Punctuation Day!

Today, September 24, is National Punctuation Day!  To celebrate, the Law Library is featuring a display offering punctuation "profiles" of all your favorite punctuation marks.  The display also includes many of the Law Library's titles regarding citation, style, and legal writing, in general. 

Two especially NPD-worthy titles on display are:

Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation / by Lynne Truss

Comma Sense: A Fundamental Guide to Punctuation / by Richard Lederer and John Shore (Illustrations by James McLean)

Come stop by and check it out!  The Fundamental Legal Skills team and Law Review are also celebrating National Punctuation Day in the Student Commons with contests, prizes and treats. 

Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15 - October 15. This month long celebration is not picked arbitrarily - September 15th marks the anniversary of independence for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, Mexico celebrates their independence on the 16th, and Chile celebrates theirs on the 18th. For a brief history on the proclamation of Hispanic Heritage Week/Month, and to view Executive and Legislative documents, see the Law Library of Congress' National Hispanic Heritage Month site.

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have also teamed up to provide us with this special collection celebrating Hispanic Americans (I thought "The Red that Colored the World," was especially neat).

So, if you find you have a little time, change gears for a bit and learn yourself something cool about the heritage of some 50 million fellow Americans.

Happy Constitution Day!

Meet the Class of 1787, the signers of the United States Constitution.

Also, there's this sweet digital collection on the United States Constitution, brought to you by the Library of Congress.

Ralph Nader Built a Law Museum, and there is a Corvair

Image credit: The American Museum of Tort Law

Dedicated to Tort Law, America has its first law museum. At first this "tort museum" idea seems like a flop of an idea, but, they have some interesting exhibit ideas and are working with Eisterhold Associates (the people who brought you "FOOD: How America Eats, at the National Museum of American History" and "Jurassic Park Discovery Center at Universal Islands of Adventure.") It will feature precedent-setting cases and artifacts from them and other landmark cases. Basically, a museum of disaster.

So, if you are in the Winsted, Connecticut area on September 26, you could attend the convocation ceremony.

 For more info, check out their website: tortmuseum.org, and their Twitter feed at twitter.com/TortMuseum.