Special Collections is pleased to announce the digitization of the library’s collection of course catalogs.  An ongoing project, the digitization of the catalogs from 1835/36–1868/69 and 1970/71-2005/06 is complete and the images are available online through the HOLLIS catalog. 

The Law School’s collection of catalogs dates from 1835/1836 – a time when there were only two members of the faculty (Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf) and 52 students.  Many of the changes at the school that occurred over the next 170 years are documented in the catalogs.  Offering information on faculty, courses, policies, and student lists, the catalogs are a rich source of information for researchers interested in anything from genealogy to the history of Harvard Law School and legal education.  In addition, catalogs printed from 1970/1971–2005/06 showcase portraits from the School’s Art Collection on the cover, and many of the catalogs printed between 1878 and 1970 have maps featuring the campus and surrounding areas in Cambridge – a useful tool to follow physical changes to the university and city. 

Due to the fact the catalog has gone through three name changes since 1835, the catalogs are accessible through three different HOLLIS records.

A catalogue of the Law School in Harvard University (1835/36–1868/69):  HOLLIS 11365376

The Law School of Harvard University (1878/89–1970/71):  HOLLIS 374288

Harvard Law School Catalog (1970/71–2005/06):  HOLLIS 374287

Beginning in the academic year 2006/2007, the course catalog is only available online through the Law School’s website.

Much credit for this project goes to Senior Serials Cataloger Sandra Hopkins and Special Collections Access Services Coordinator Lesley Schoenfeld who researched the Law School’s holdings and corrected often confusing catalog records.  Completed and ongoing imaging services are supplied by the Harvard College Library’s Digital Imaging Group.

Post contributed by:
Edwin Moloy
Curator of Modern Manuscripts & Archives

Due Process, the Georgetown Law Blog, notes that HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library is now searchable in Google Scholar.

If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to download LibX from the Harvard Libraries.  This plugin tool ties you into the Harvard system for all the databases that we buy and for which you have access.  If you search Google Scholar and find articles in HeinOnline, JSTOR, Oxford University Press, Sage Press, PubMed, or other such paid databases, you will find that you can only see a citation and it will prompt you for access information.  After installing LibX, just right click on your mouse and choose Reload Library via Harvard Access, and this will tie you back into Harvard and allow you to the full article in whichever database we’ve already purchased.

If you are not sure that Harvard has access to the database, this is a great way to find out! 

... as Harvard President Jared Sparks observed in 1849, the year that Boston Brahmin George Parkman was murdered by Harvard Medical School Professor John Webster.  Want to read about Harvard’s most sensational crime and the ensuing trial—one that remains a leading case on the value of circumstantial evidence? 

A new e-resource, Making of Modern Law—Trials 1620-1926, contains the full text of more than a dozen contemporary accounts.

Comprising more than 10,000 titles--and almost two million fully searchable pages, Making of Modern Law: Trials contains digital images of books and pamphlets, official and unofficial trial documents and materials, legal transcripts, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations from the early seventeenth century to 1926.  Drawn from the law libraries at Harvard and Yale, as well as from the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the materials include not only published trial transcripts, but also popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, adultery and other crimes.  Almost all of the works reproduced are English language and published in Great Britain or the United States.

JD Supra was launched last week and is generating a lot of interest. 

According to this ABA Journal write up, the free site is “intended to help lawyers share filed pleadings, research memoranda and other materials that allow them to build on each other’s prior work, rather than start every project on a clean slate.”

The site was developed by San Francisco litigator Aviva Cuyler and a “team of Internet and legal marketing professionals.” A search page allows users to find relevant material by jurisdiction, subject matter and document type.  As the number of documents grows, the site could become an important tool for legal researchers.  Top contributors currently include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Morrison & Foerster, the Cato Institute, and Mintz, Levin.  Reportedly, Justia will be uploading a large number of “higher quality briefs and filings” pulled from the federal government’s PACER electronic court filing system. 

Will there prove to be a free rider problem with the site, as lawyers freely download the work product of other lawyers?  Maybe not, when you consider that much of this work product is in fact already shared, just more inefficiently, via contacts between individual lawyers, firm websites, and searches for briefs and other filings on Westlaw, Lexis and PACER.  Will clients complain if lawyers don’t save client money by downloading relevant documents from the site?  We’ll have to wait and see.

The site also provides an opportunity for networking and marketing of lawyers’ services by allowing individuals, firms and organizations to create profiles.

Hat Tip: WisBlawg

The Atlantic has just made its online articles and archives free.  This includes a March 1927 article by Felix Frankfurter on the Sacco and Vanzetti case.  Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was considered to be the most prominent and respectable critic of the trial. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939.

BigThink.com is a new website, currently in beta, with a mission to “move discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you.”

According to BigThink, the site provides access to

hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with todays leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy’s views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar’s assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring.

Big Think’s site is divided into seventeen major categories - some designated “meta” and others “physical.” Included in the “meta” division is a category on “Truth and Justice” currently featuring videos of such leading lights as Supreme Court Justice Breyer, HLS’s own Professor Alan Dershowitz, Professor Stephen Carter of Yale Law School, and Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit. 

Let us know what you (big) think…

(Hat tip: Terry Martin)

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. recently announced that they will “release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. 

The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.” The project includes plans to integrate the archive into existing sites such as Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, “providing continuity of coverage into the future. Further announcements will be forthcoming on the availability of other case law, including Federal District and pre-1949 Appellate decisions.”

The Federal Trade Commission has digitized its decisions from 1969-2005, covering “virtually all administrative documents issued by the Commission, including Opinions, Final Orders, Complaints, and Consent Orders that result from negotiated consent agreements, as well as all Initial Decisions issued by Administrative Law Judges in administrative trial proceedings.”

The decisions are browsable by volume number and by party name, and they are also full-text searchable.

Starting in 2000, decisions include “detailed explanations—analyses to aid public comment—that the Commission issues whenever it accepts an administrative consent agreement for public comment… [published] in immediate proximity to the consent order documents they describe, in order to facilitate public access to all aspects of the Commission decision-making process.”

The FTC also plans to add its earlier decisions (1914-1968) to the site eventually. Coverage of FTC decisions on Lexis and Westlaw currently goes back to 1949.

TRAC has released a newly updated FBI Web Site. 

According to TRAC:

Data show that in the first 9 months of FY 2006, federal prosecutors have rejected 87% of the FBI’s referrals on international terrorism. The report also shows that despite across-the-board staffing increases in the last few years, FBI investigations of all kinds have consistently resulted in fewer federal prosecutions. Detailed graphs and tables reveal how FBI staffing and enforcement priorities have been constantly changing since 1986. District-by-district FBI enforcement counts are updated through the end of FY 2005. 

In addition, a new TRAC page on Terrorism Enforcement features a national map showing the location of recent federal convictions for all “individuals who have been categorized by the Justice Department as spies or terrorists, or those whose prosecution the government thought might prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats.” Links to TRACs various reports on post-9/11 terrorism enforcement are also available on the page.  The latest report,

based on detailed data obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), mostly focuses on the use of the nation’s criminal laws in the five years after 9/11/01 against over a thousand individuals who the government had categorized as international terrorists.

Did you know that six current and thirteen former U.S. Supreme Court Justices attended HLS, and that there has been at least one HLS grad on the Supreme Court in every year since 1882?

Martin recently put up a nice chronological list of all the former HLS students who went on to sit on the Supreme Court, complete with links to biographical sketches for each Justice.

CQ’s Moneyline has launched a new 2008 Presidential Candidates website offering quick access to information on every “major” presidential candidate (yes, that includes Ron Paul).

Information includes links to the candidates’ official campaign websites, their most recent FEC filings, and their CQ Moneyline profiles.  Hat Tip: BeSpacific.com

NEW!! The Harvard Law School Library has acquired access to the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) “Core Plus” titles. 

Among the popular titles available through this service are the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, the Criminal Law Reporter, the International Trade Reporter, U.S. Law Week, and the Labor Relations Reporter/Labor and Employment Law Library.  Click here for a full list of titles.  As part of the package, all of the “Core Plus” titles will also be made available via Lexis and Westlaw later this Fall. 

But, wait, there’s more!  We’ve also purchased subscriptions to the Environment and Safety Library and the WTO Reporter.  (These will not be available on Lexis or Westlaw.) For a short time, only on-campus accessis available for the BNA titles, but remote access is coming soon - check back here for updates!

Did you know that Julia Child lived around the corner from HLS for 40 years?

The Cambridge Women’s Heritage Project recently added to its web site a database of historically significant Cambridge women and women’s organizations from 1630 to present. Over 400 women and women’s organizations have been nominated for inclusion in the database. So far, biographical summaries for 116 of them are available, while the rest are currently being edited. Entries are listed both alphabetically and by topic.

If you’re interested, you can nominate someone for inclusion in the database.

The Nixon Library will open approximately 78,000 pages of previously withheld materials in paper and 165 audiotaped conversations on July 11 as it moves to the National Archives Presidential Library system. 

From the National Archives press release:

The legal transfer on July 11, 2007, of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace from the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation to the National Archives. The new Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum joins the existing 11 presidential libraries within the federal system, from President Hoover through President Clinton.

When the boss’ boss says, “Hey Josh, this should go on our blog,” well, guess what? It goes on the blog.

For those of you who wish that your casebooks were available as audiobooks, you’ll be pleased to know about a relatively new service called AudioCaseFiles that provides MP3s of several hundred court opinions that are in law school casebooks. You can search for cases by name or citation, or you can view cases organized by caseboook or by the following topics: Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Corporations, Criminal Law, Evidence, Property Law, and Torts.

Many cases are being added. At present, some of the links to audio say “Coming Soon” and provide an option to be notified by e-mail when the audio is made available.

For now, AudioCaseFiles is free, though it may not remain so. According to the fine folks at WisBlawg, the service works smoothly with iPods and seems to be generally well-received by law students.