Restricted Access - Fall 2009 is November 29 - December 18, 2009. 

The library extends hours but restricts access during the reading and exam periods.  During Restricted Access only Harvard Law School students, faculty and staff are allowed regular ID access to the library.  Others with a specific need to borrow or use materials in the collection must check in at the circulation desk for access.

Writing a paper sometime soon?  Then why not make your life a little easier by signing up for a Refworks workshop.  In this workshop we will get you started by setting up an account, showing you how to import references, as well as showing you how to use some of the other helpful features.

“RefWorks is a web-based bibliography and database manager that allows you to create your own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases and other various sources. You can use these references in writing papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds.”

The workshop is taking place Friday December 4 from 3:00 to 4:00pm in Areeda 524.

Please RSVP to gtaoultsides@law.harvard.edu as space is limited.

To learn more about Refworks click here. 

The HLS Library now offers Empirical Research Services to support faculty and students working on quantitative research.  These services include providing ongoing guidance in executing data analysis, offering suggestions of appropriate methods to use when testing various hypotheses, and providing research assistants with tutorials on statistical topics and software such as Stata and SPSS.  For more information about these services please visit: http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/faculty/empirical.html

In what is certain to be a noisy development, Google has quietly added state and federal case law and patent searching to its Google Scholar search service. Also included is the How Cited citator service.

The Google Scholar welcome screen presents three new radio buttons allowing you to search either Articles, Articles and Patents or Legal Opinions and Journals. Bizarrely for Google, you have to choose and can’t search all at once. Go to Google Scholar Advanced Search (and scroll to the bottom) to further limit case law searching.

See ResourceShelf and Internet for Lawyers for a more in-depth look at this new service.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports provide useful information on a variety of topics, including analyses of key federal statutes or significant legislative proposals under consideration by Congress and compilations of legislative histories.  Drafted by staff members at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress for the use of members of Congress, these reports have been the subject of much attention in the government documents community because they are not routinely made accessible to the public online like other types of government information.  Although the Congressional Research Service is taxpayer-funded, commercial vendors actually sell access to these reports.  For example, the libraries at Harvard have actually paid for online access through LexisNexis Congressional. (There is a also a competing product produced by Gallery Watch/Penny Hill Press.) Members of the public may ask their representatives in Congress to provide them with copies, and various projects have developed over the years to open up these reports and place them on the Internet, including Open CRS and University of North Texas Libraries.  See LLRX and our own Legislative History Research Guide for a list of other projects and more information about the reports in general.

Two bills are currently pending in Congress seeking to make CRS reports open to the public, S. Res. 118 and H.R. 3762.
(Senator Lieberman, sponsor of S. Res. 118 is actually making some CRS document available on his website.) There have been other attempts to pass similar legislation in the past.  Hopefully, this time will be the charm!

Looking for Dean Griswold’s ABA Journal article, Educating Lawyers for a Changing World?

Try Bar Journals, the newest digital collection from HeinOnline.

The HeinOnline Bar Journals collection provides online, full-text access to national, state and local bar association journals. Coverage begins with a bar journal’s first volume but does not usually include its most recent volumes. Locate articles by citation or search by article title, author, description, date, or across the full-text of the journals. Use the HeinOnline ScholarCheck citator to locate bar journals and law reviews that cite your article. Questions? Please contact the Reference Desk.

By the way, Dean Griswold’s article appeared in 37 A.B.A. J. 805 (1951).

When you are doing serious legislative history on Massachusetts law, or need an obscure Massachusetts government document, there is one place to go: the State Library of Massachusetts. Since 1826, the State Library has collected a wide variety of legal and historical documents, and holds the most world’s comprehensive collection of Massachusetts government documents. Yes, even better than Harvard’s! The library is an invaluable resource not just to lawyers, but to historians, scholars, and citizens as well.

This is why it was worrying to read that Governor Patrick last week included the possibility of closing the State Library in his attempt to close the state’s budget gap.

If you agree that closing the State Library is a bad idea, please sign the petition to support keeping it open. For even more impact, take a few minutes to contact Governor Patrick directly to remind him what an important resource the library is.

Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami School of Law has launched a new online journal called Jotwell, where academics and practitioners will comment on recent scholarship.  According to the website:

"Jotwell is a cross between a law review and a blog: like a blog we invite your comments, and hope that some of our reviews will spark a conversation. Unlike a blog, however, on the Jotwell main page you should expect new content only once or twice a week, although as we add more sections contributions may become more frequent. The subject-specific sections may have new content only once a month, although some will be more active. In any case, every time a new review appears in any of the subject-specific sections, an excerpt with a link to the full text will also appear on our front page at http://www.jotwell.com.”

The website has sections on Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Corporate Law, Cyberlaw, Intellectual Property Law, Legal Profession and Tax Law.

Hat tip, Persuasive Authorities.

More interesting experiments in law school law reviews…

The Faculty Lounge blog recently posted about a Florida Law Review article that included audio clips from Oyez.  An increasing number of multimedia formats/files are being published with traditional journal articles (such as embedded multimedia files in electronic journals) in other disciplines such as the sciences and humanities.  It will be interesting to see if this type of publishing will be become a trend in law journals, especially with so many journals experimenting with new formats.

The Vanderbilt Law Review has added a new feature to its recently developed online companion EnBanc.  Its Roundtable “will host debates among legal academics and practitioners on notable cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.” The introductory essay is about Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.  See the Supreme Court website’s docket, SCOTUSWiki and the ABA’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases website for the latest activity and documents related to the case, such as the brief filed by the Respondent United States , by Solicitor General, former HLS Dean Elena Kagan.  Oral arguments are slated for December 7th.  Hat tip, PrawfsBlawg.

Please join us for our final Open Access Week event at the law school.  Three speakers will discuss the significance of open access to research from a variety of perspectives.

The Significance of Open Access to Research

Carolina Rossini, Berkman Center

John Wilbanks, Science Commons

Stefan Gruber, HLS Visiting Researcher

Friday, October 23rd, noon-1:30pm

Harvard Law School, Pound 108

RSVP requested, but not required:  http://tinyurl.com/yzp956o

The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review has launched a new online companion called Amicus.  The website will strive to “create a dynamic online forum for debate surrounding these important issues, and to develop a resource to which practitioners, policy makers, and scholars can both look and contribute.” There are currently three sections: Recent Developments (addressing recent significant legislation and judicial decisions); Policy Pieces (presenting current local and national civil rights and civil liberties issues and putting forth policy proposals to address them); and CR-CL Conversations (series of exchanges and dialogues between scholars and practitioners on certain pressing issues).

Among its inaugural articles is New Public Spaces by our own Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources John Palfrey!

Please join the journal tonight 7:30-10:30p.m. in Hark South for its launch party.

Carl Malamud recently announced the creation of Law.Gov ("a proposed registry and repository of all primary legal materials of the United States").  Co-convenors in the project include Harvard Law School’s own Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, former Harvard Law School Library Director Terry Martin and the Robert Crown Law Library of Stanford Law School.  See Law.Gov: America’s Operating System, Open Source for Carl’s announcement on O’Reilly Radar.

Four schools at Harvard University have adopted open access policies for their scholarly articles.  In celebration of Open Access Week (http://www.openaccessweek.org/), Stuart Shieber (Faculty Director of Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication), Peter Suber (Berkman Fellow and leader in the open access movement) and representatives from the schools with open access policies will be hosting a forum to answer questions you might have about Harvard’s current activities in implementing these policies and issues about open access generally. 

Monday, October 19th, 11:00am-12:30pm
Harvard Law School
Ropes Gray Room (Pound Hall)
RSVP required at http://bit.ly/2AbAfL or e-mail to mpearse@law.harvard.edu (As part of the RSVP form, we encourage you to submit questions before the event.)

A 1910 graduate of the Harvard Law School, Charles Davis received international praise for the relief work he oversaw as Director of the South Eastern Base of the American Red Cross from 1920-1922. Headquartered in Constantinople, the South Eastern Base coordinated humanitarian efforts for Russian refugees fleeing the Russian Revolution.  Another major effort occurred in September 1922 when Turkish armies assaulted the city of Smyrna on Turkey’s Aegean coast, which had been occupied by Greece since 1919.  The ensuing battle (and fire) destroyed the ancient city and left a large number of refugees. Davis received numerous citations for his work.

The collection includes: thank you letters written to Davis, newspaper clippings, a ledger, and American Red Cross Reports. Perhaps the highlights of the collection are the photo scrapbooks that document refugee camps. One of the scrapbooks is an album made by the children of Russian Towns Union Children’s home No. 1 thanking him for his help.

The collection should be of interest to researchers studying refugee camps, orphans, international relief work, and the American Red Cross among others.  Entry to the digital collection can be found here.

“Dining-room, lunch” From Scrapbook number 3, image sequence number 667.
Album is dedicated to Davis from the children of the Russian Towns Union Children’s Home No. 1

From Scrapbook number 6, image sequence number 759.
Scrapbook from the Russian Towns Union Children’s Home No. 1.

Dear Mr. Davis!

In our own land at home we were very happy and it was only from books that we knew about unhappy children who had no food and no clothes.

Then we were brought here and it was our turn to be unhappy children without food and without clothes, but found shelter, food and clothes, as our tutors tell us, from you Dear Mister Davis, and the generous, and kind Americans who took pity on us and once more we are happy.

We are very, very greatefull [sic] and pray you, dear and kind Americans, not to leave us.

Russian Towns Union Children’s Home No. 1

The Harvard Law School Library’s newest digital collection just went live.  Presenting: Digitized Scrolls from the Japanese Manuscript Collection, 1158-1591. 

The Japanese Manuscript Digital Collection is comprised of a set of twenty-two medieval legal manuscripts and annotated facsimiles in scroll form called komonjo. Komonjo—literally “old documents”—are remnants of day-to-day legal transactions. Spanning a nearly 450 year period, these documents frequently focus on land and property issues, though they can also represent edicts and judicial rulings. Part of a large donation presented to the Harvard Law Library in 1936, these komonjo represent one of the finest collections of their type outside Japan.