UHLC Nota Bene

It’s that time of year again. Law students across the country are poring over their class notes and supplements, putting the finishing touches on their outlines, and fueling their all-night study sessions with a combination of high-carb snacks and Java Monsters. This can mean only one thing: exam time is approaching. If you’re looking for a brief but effective guide to improving your exam performance, the O’Quinn Law Library has the book for you. Alex Schimel’s Law School Exams: A Guide to Better Grades , now in its second edition, provides a clear and concise strategy for mastering the issue-spotting exams that determine the majority of your grade in most law school classes. Schimel finished second in his class at the University Of Miami School Of Law, where he taught a wildly popular exam workshop in his 2L and 3L years, and later returned to become Associate Director of the Academic Achievement Program. The first edition of his book was written shortly after he finished law scho...

Perma.cc solves the problem of link rot for law schools, courts, and universities.  Link rot occurs when the hyperlinks cited in scholarly papers and court opinions no longer lead to the webpages they’re meant to reference. Perma.cc creates a permanent, archived version of a website and assigns a permanent URL to that version. The archived version of the cited content will then be permanently available—even if the website modifies, moves, or deletes the page’s originally cited content. Perma.cc was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America.   Here at the University of Houston Law Center, our law review and journals have been creating Perma links since the summer of 2016, and all are very satisfied with the user experienc...

The library has acquired the fifth edition of Winning an Appeal by Myron Moskovitz , which is published by Carolina Academic Press . This book is ideal for the attorney or law student interested in appellate advocacy at the state or federal level. The author provides tips on constructing an outline, with instructions on reading the court records filed and determining the issues. There is a chapter that focuses on the appellate brief, including the construction of the brief itself, advice on legal research, drafting the argument, and information regarding the respondent brief and appellant's reply brief. The last chapter covers the oral argument, addressing topics such as the opening statement, respondent's argument, appellant's rebuttal, answering questions, and the proper tone to use. Five sample briefs are included at the end. This book is now currently available on the library's new titles shelf under the call number KF9050.M63 2016 .

The Supreme Court Style Manual, an internal legal writing manual used by justices and law clerks of the Supreme Court, has been copied and for the first time made available for purchase .  A member of the Supreme Court Bar claims to have photocopied the manual in the private Supreme Court Library to create a text for publication. Reports note that the style manual is considered an internal document by the Supreme Court, not one for general use, and that this is an unauthorized publication: The manual, prepared by the office of the court’s Reporter of Decisions, states explicitly that it is “the property of the Supreme Court of the United States and is not for publication. It is intended solely for the use of the staff of the Court, and copies should not be distributed except to members of that staff.” Copies of the manual are numbered and assigned to specific recipients at the court, presumably to prevent it from being circulated outside the court. The Supreme Court has ...

The thirteenth edition of The Greenbook was published this fall and it has a few changes of note that Texas lawyers and law students may find useful. The Greenbook ’s editors remind us in the introduction to the new edition that it is neither a complete citation guide nor style guide, but rather a “lens through which Texas legal materials may be cited and understood.”  Or, perhaps, a Texas-sized supplement to the Bluebook , tailored to the Texas practitioner. Some of the more notable changes and additions include: Citation to Opinions on Court Websites:   Rules 2-4 have been supplemented to provide more guidance for citing Texas court opinions appearing on court websites. Acknowledging that recent cases are most reliably accessed through court websites, the rules provide suggestion for pin cites to unpaginated versions of opinions available online. Pet. Pending: You may be surprised to learn that a fourteenth citation form has been added for describing the status o...

The editors of The Bluebook are starting to think about revisions for the upcoming 20 th edition and they are looking for suggestions from you!  They are currently soliciting feedback through a survey that will remain open until November 8, 2013.  As a bonus, completing the survey will enter you for a chance to win a Kindle Paperwhite e-reader or a free copy of the 20 th edition of The Bluebook with a two year subscription to the online version. If you would like more information about the the survey, visit The Bluebook website .  Or go directly to the survey here .

Need a little help with your legal writing projects?   Try the iWrite Legal app!    This app, developed by a legal writing professor at Suffolk University Law School , is intended to help law students and legal professionals become better legal writers.   The app includes three different sections: Legal Writing Tips. Legal Writing Checklists, and Additional Resource.   The Legal Writing Tips section includes a number of short paragraphs about important aspects of legal writing such as sentence length, transitions, and surplus words.   The Legal Writing Checklists section of the app prompts authors to think about the important issues related to particular steps in the legal writing process.   The checklists cover the initial stages of writing, revising, editing, and proofreading. For instance, if you are at the revising stage, the checklist asks “Did you logically develop your ideas, going from general to specific?” and “Have you used headings and...