Welcome to the nearly 200 LL.M. students who will be attending Harvard Law School this academic year!
Please visit the law library’s research services homepage to learn about all of the services the library’s research services team offers to the Harvard Law School community.
We are providing special library tours for LL.M. students over the next two weeks, and you can sign up for a tour on this page as well (under Upcoming Events).
Highlighting New Comparative Law Books in the Law Library’s Collection
Research librarians here in the law library spend a lot of time talking to LL.M. students about their paper topics every year. Because so many students decide to write their LL.M. papers on comparative law topics, I like to write posts for our library blog about comparative law titles that I find in our collection that might be of interest to them.
In this post, I am highlighting one of our newest books on comparative company law.
International Handbook on Shareholders’ Agreements: Regulation, Practice, and Comparative Analysis
Editors: Sebastian Mock, Kristian Csach, and Bohnmil Havel
Published by DeGruyter, 2018
ISBN 9783110501568
View this book’s record in Harvard’s HOLLIS library catalog
According to the editors of this volume, shareholder agreements are “an integral part of company law and especially its legal practice.” They are “traditionally dominated by contract law and not by company law”; however, it is sometimes the case that contract law lacks the depth to provide sufficient legal regulation of what can be complex legal situations and relationships, especially “in the case of cross-border shareholders’ agreements including shareholders from several jurisdictions.”
This volume attempts to fill that gap. It begins with introductory chapters covering the differences between contract law and corporate law when it comes to shareholders’ agreements, the impact of shareholders’ agreements on how a company is managed, and as issues related to conflict of laws (private international law), corporate insolvency, and competition law.
The bulk of the book, however, is dedicated to reports on the relevant legal framework for shareholders’ agreements in the following jurisdictions: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, England/Wales, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United States. Some of these country reports include English-language excerpts of applicable statutory provisions.
Harvard Library Collection
This book is part of the DeGruyter Handbook series. Almost all of the other titles in this series that are in the Harvard Library collection are in German (DeGruyter is a German publishing company), and cover legal topics.
However, Harvard does have one other English-language title from this series. It is held by the Widener Library, Harvard’s flagship library. All LL.M. students have access and borrowing privileges at Widener, along with the other libraries at Harvard.
This other book actually has nothing to do with law at all:
Sign Languages of the World: A Comparative Handbook
Edited by Julie Bakken Jepsen, Goedele De Clerck, Sam Lutalo-Kiingi, William B. McGregor
Published by De Gruyter, 2015
ISBN 9781614517962
View this book’s record in Harvard’s HOLLIS library catalog
I am a member of the law library’s Accessibility Design team, so one of my interests is learning more about how we can make the library accessible and accommodating to people with all kinds of disabilities. So I am actually really interested in having a look at this book sometime!
Using HeinOnline for Accessing Legal Journals
I am curious to learn more about how the various sign languages around the world have developed their legal terminology throughout history. In fact, just thinking about that led me to wonder about how issues related to deafness have been explored in the legal literature.
One of the best options for this kind of research is our HeinOnline subscription legal database. HeinOnline contains a very comprehensive collections of U.S. and foreign legal journals. I find this database to be an invaluable part of any legal research project that I am working on.
So I decided to try a proximity search in HeinOnline for articles about sign language and legal terms. Here is the search query I used:
“sign language legal terms”~50
This search query uses HeinOnline’s unique syntax for finding those four words within 50 words of each other.
When I did that search and limited the search results to articles from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library, I got 77 results, covering various topics such as professional challenges faced by deaf lawyers, the representation of deaf clients in legal matters, the fitness of deaf defendants for trial, accommodating law faculty with disabilities, and more.
Perhaps one day an LL.M. student will write on deafness and law as well. Whatever our newest LL.M.s decide to write about this year, the law library’s research services team is eager to help them navigate our resources and research their papers.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in the law library!
Like this:
Like Loading...
Administrative Law Research: The Department of Education’s Proposed Title IX Rule
Filed under: Announcements, Government Information, Legal Research & Research Skills
On November 16, 2018, a press release was issued by the U.S. Department of Education announcing a proposed new rule related to Title IX. The press release includes links to the proposed rule in its entirety, as well as a one-page summary and a section-by-section summary.
Title IX is a federal law under which sex-based discrimination is prohibited in educational institutions that receive federal funding. This law is codified under 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681-1688. Any federal agency that “extend(s) Federal financial assistance to any education program or activity” is authorized to promulgate rues and regulations related to Title IX enforcement (20 U.S.C. § 1682).
The new rule has been crafted to incorporate what the Department of Education views as additional due process and fairness protections for parties who are involved in Title IX complaints in schools. These include the introduction of hearings in which people who testify can be subject to cross-examination. It also seeks to clarify the definition of sexual harassment in a Title IX context, and to specify when a school is and is not required to investigate alleged incidents of sexual harassment.
The federal Administrative Procedure Act requires, with certain exceptions, that federal agencies use a notice and comment rulemaking process when creating new federal rules and regulations. This section of that federal statute has been codified at 5 U.S.C. § 553. In accordance with this requirement, the Department of Education issued a notice in the Federal Register of its intent to promulgate its new Title IX rule, and invited the public to make comments on it. This notice was published on November 29, 2018, and can be found at 83 Fed. Reg. 61432.
The online venue for submitting public comments for many federal regulations is the government’s regulations.gov website. Since this proposed rule was posted to this site, under the document number ED-2018-OCR-0064-0001, there have been nearly 100,000 comments submitted. Today, on the final day of the comment period, three members of the Harvard Law School faculty, Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, Judge Nancy Gertner, and Professor Janet Halley added their voices to this conversation, and submitted a detailed comment on the proposed rule. They have made this comment available for public view at https://perma.cc/3F9K-PZSB.
In their comment, these faculty members, “who have researched, taught, and written, on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform,” outline the aspects of the proposed rule with which they agree and those with which they disagree. Among their concerns are the proposed cross-examination mechanism for Title IX hearings. They also object the proposed rule’s definition of the “deliberate indifference” standard used to determine a school’s legal obligation to respond to sexual harassment. Additionally, they believe that the rule should mandate that sexual harassment claim inquiries focus on the “threat of harm” and consider the interests of both complainants and respondents.
As they mentioned, all three authors of this comment have written on the topic before. Professor Halley published a 2015 article about Title IX in the Harvard Law Review Forum, Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement. Professor Suk Gersen published “Betsy DeVos, Title IX, and the ‘Both Sides’ Approach to Sexual Assault” in the New Yorker in 2017. A piece by Judge Gertner, “Sex, Lies and Justice: Can We Reconcile the Belated Attention to Rape on Campus with Due Process?” appeared in the American Prospect in 2015.
The collections of the Harvard Library include a number of books and journals about topics related to Title IX, such gender discrimination in educational settings (HOLLIS library catalog search) and sexual harassment in educational settings (HOLLIS library catalog search). For more information about the notice and comment rulemaking process, run this HOLLIS library catalog search to view a list of books that discuss the Administrative Procedure Act.
Like this: