Thomson Reuters SDC Platinum 3.0 is now available for download and installation.
Thomson Reuters encourages users of versions 2.3b and earlier to upgrade to take advantage of the many new features and enhancements offered by version 3.0. See the HLSL SDC Platinum download & installation page for detailed instructions. (HLS email username and password required)
Thomson Reuters SDC Platinum is a software-based tool for analyzing corporate finance and capital markets transaction information. We have subscribed to the SDC Platinum Global New Issues and Mergers & Acquisitions databases. Interested in finding out more about data resources available to you? See HLSL Data Resources for a listing of data resources useful for legal research.
Yes, according to Goodwin, Proctor’s Litigation Knowledge Manager David Hobbie. PreCydent is a free (for now, anyway) law search engine that aims to offer “google-like” access to case law (more details here).
Hobbie did several case law searches, as described on his blog, Caselines, and in his view, PreCydent consistently provided the best results. Despite this, Hobbie doesn’t recommend giving up Westlaw or Lexis, at least not for now. PreCydent “only covers a limited amount of federal appellate caselaw—in most cases, that after 1950 and up to July 2007,” and has a few other disadvantages, as Hobbie explains in his article Nevertheless, you may want to get a free preview of what might turn out to be the next major law search engine.
The coverage for state legal encyclopedias on Westlaw and LexisNexis has recently changed, in terms of which encyclopedias are available on which systems.
Click here (and scroll down to State Legal Encyclopedias) to see which encyclopedias are on the shelf, which ones are on Westlaw, and which ones are on LexisNexis. Direct links are included.
A new website has been launched.
Knowing your legal rights and responsibilities is important for anyone who publishes online. The CMLP’s legal guide addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in.
The American Lawyer has posted details of 124 corporate fraud investigations involving 440 indicted defendants in its “Corporate Fraud Data Base” on Law.com.
The information was collected from publicly available documents and from cases identified as “important” by the Justice Dept. at the Corporate Fraud Task Force website.
The database includes “information about when and where these 440 cases were brought, the lawyers on both sides, and how the cases turned out.” The American Lawyer offers the site as “a historic portrait of corporate fraud prosecution in the post-Enron age.”
There is a dizzying array of electronic resources available to members of the HLS community.
You all know about Westlaw and Lexis, and indeed, these databases will be ones you use over and over in your research. However, there are hundreds of other databases to help with all aspects of your research. Starting at the HLS Library Page, click on Electronic Resources in the left-hand column. The librarians have placed resources into four categories: Legal, Academic Discipline, Historical, and Newspaper Collections. Even these sources, which have been culled to help you, are not the only ones to which you have access. Go to the Harvard Libraries Page and select E-Research at the top. Now click Find E-Resources and there is a listing of resources in alphabetical order, searching by keyword, and browsing by academic discipline. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all these resources, remember you can always ask a reference librarian.
Westlaw is rapidly expanding its collection of model documents and eforms.
Westlaw Model Documents includes agreements, contracts, and other documents submitted as exhibits to SEC filings from 2000 to present. Template search mode allows you locate model documents by combings one or more fields, including Free Text Search, Document Title, Clause Title, Defined Terms, Governing Law, Attorney or Law Firm, Company Name, and Ticker Symbol. Westlaw Model Documents topical databases include:
Westlaw eforms provides an extensive collection of Federal and State Courts and Agencies forms. The forms are available in pdf “fill-in” format which can be completed and printed for filing.
Massachusetts ranks 11th among U.S. states in annual apparel manufacturing payroll. This statistic and thousands of others are available at StateMaster, a web site that provides detailed comparative state statistics in the areas of background, crime, economy, education, energy, geography, government, health, housing, identification, immigration, industry, labor, lifestyle, military, people, presidential elections, sports, trade, and transportation.
StateMaster also has maps and flags of the U.S. states, and it is a sister site of NationMaster, which provides similar comparative statistical information on an international level.
Five federal courts—two district courts and three bankruptcy courts—will participate in a pilot program to post audio files of court proceedings on PACER beginning later this summer.
The participating courts are:
-U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska
-U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
-U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maine
-U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Alabama
-U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina
More about the pilot program at The Third Branch.
PACER ("Public Access to Court Electronic Records") has more than 600,000 subscribers who use it to access docket and case information from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts. PACER accounts are available to interested subscribers for a low per use fee. The Library’s Langdell Reference Department will retrieve PACER documents by request for members of the Harvard Law School community.
EconPapers and IDEAS provide access to research papers in economics including working papers, articles, books, chapters and software.
EconPapers and IDEAS may be searched and browsed. Browsing options include author, paper type and JEL (Journal of Economic Literature) classification code. EconPapers includes citation data and reference lists provided by the CitEc project. IDEAS provides ranking information including journal and article impact based on LogEc statistics. EconPapers and IDEAS are based on RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), a decentralized collaborative database dedicated to the dissemination of research in economics. RePEc currently contains searchable information on 484,863 items with 375,215 available for download.
Has the immigration reform bill piqued your interest in the nation’s current immigration policy? Noted on the excellent BeSpacific blog, a “new and well-documented view of the nation’s massive immigration enforcement program has been made possible as a result of a Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) analysis of millions of detailed records obtained from the Immigration Courts (EOIR) under the Freedom of Information Act.”
These administrative courts, part of the Justice Department, are a key part of the government’s program to deport or remove undocumented aliens as well as noncitizens who have been granted legal status to be in this country. The massive study of the administrative actions in the immigration courts has been supplemented by a separate examination of other records collected by the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA) that document criminal prosecutions in U.S. federal district courts.
The over 4 million EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] records that TRAC obtained stretch back for many decades. The work of classifying the charges into comparable immigration, criminal, national security and terrorism categories, however, has been completed for the fifteen year period from FY 1992 to date and is the primary focus of the accompanying report.
TRAC’s TRACFED database, which provides a wide range of information about federal enforcement activities as well as detailed information about federal staffing, federal funds, and the diverse characteristics of counties, federal districts, and states is available to Harvard law students and faculty through a Law Library subscription. For off-campus access, or more information, see the instructions here.
The Doing Business database, a service of the World Bank, provides information on business regulations and their enforcement in 175 economies from around the world. This includes a Doing Business Map that allows you to click on a particular country to find out how difficult or easy it is to do business there. The database also has a Law Library section that offers the largest online collection of full-text business laws and regulations from authoritative sources. The library can be browsed by either country or type of law.
Graduating RefWorks users, save your RefWorks data before June 30 while you still have access to your Harvard ID and PIN.
If you are graduating, you must backup or export your data or you will lose it. Read more...
This remarkable web site is, according to its creators:
“the only online resource that has consolidated, coded, and organized into a single searchable database:
*The Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Washington - Taft (1789-1913)
*The Public Papers of the Presidents: Hoover to Bush (1929-1993)
*The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents: Clinton - G.W. Bush (1993-2007)”
State of the Union addresses, inaugural addresses, radio addresses, debates, signing statements, and election results are but a small sampling of available materials, including many audio and video files.
CLJC is a free service that lets you set up RSS and/or email alerts to current tables of contents from over a thousand law journals, including Harvard Law Review and at least 14 other HLS publications.
CLJC also allows you to keyword search or browse recent tables of contents of the journals. Search results include links to the full article in Lexis or Westlaw (password required), but also free journal websites, and many other sources. If you’re a current Harvard student or faculty member, you can make full-text linking even easier: if you use the Firefox browser you can load the Libx plug-in to help you quickly link to the full text. Once you have added the plug-in, the “Find It” button will display next to each citation, and you can use that to locate any full-text options (other than Lexis and Westlaw) at Harvard (ID and PIN required when off campus).
HLS reference librarians at the 4th floor Reference Desk can help you with setting up alerts or using the LibX plug-in.
