UHLC Nota Bene

It's that time of year again...time for two to three days of squeezing out all the material that hopeful lawyers have been pounding into their heads over several months - the bar exam. To mark the occasion, here is a brief history of the exam itself, as well as a taste of what is required to become an attorney elsewhere. Prior to the mid-1800s, there were no written bar exams. Instead, the path to becoming a lawyer led hopefuls through "apprenticeships, self-directed reading, and oral examinations." The next phase made use of a diploma privilege, which remained until the ABA began requiring exams in the 1920s. (A diploma privilege does still exist in Wisconsin, however.) The first state to employ a written version of the bar exam was Massachusetts, in 1855. (See Riebe, A Bar Review for Law Schools: Getting Students on Board to Pass Their Bar Exams , 45 Brandeis L. J. 269 (2007) for quoted material and historical information.) Bar exams consisted only of essays until...

The 103rd American Association of Law Libraries saw the UH flag displayed in a big way: three librarians from the O'Quinn Law Library gave three different presentations separately. Dan Baker presented his paper, “Citations to Wikipedia in Law Reviews” during a program called “The Librarian as Author: AALL/LexisNexis® Call for Papers” on July 12 in Denver. His paper won the award for the New Member Division and has also been accepted for publication in I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. We now have the solid proof that Dan not only writes well but also speaks well. As the sole speaker of her session, Lauren Schroeder delivered a talk on researching oil and gas law at the AALL Annual Meeting in Denver on July 13, with Dan moderating the session. Although her session was scheduled at the end of the annual meeting, Lauren entertained a very sizable audience. Last and most, Spencer Simons spoke for a lengthy 75 minutes on accounting and budgeting in the var...

This week the Washington Post released the results of a two-year investigative study on the U.S. national security program. The information comes from hundreds of thousands of public records from both government organizations and the private sector. The newspaper identified 45 government organizations, with 1,271 sub-units, that engage in top-secret work. It also identified another 1,931 companies engaging in top-secret work for the government. From this data, they compiled a Top Secret America database, which aims to depict the scope and complexity of the national security program and provides descriptions of the organizations and companies involved. More information about this project and the data collected can be found at the Top Secret America website .

The Office of the Federal Register recently announced the launch of a Web 2.0 version of the daily Federal Register. This new website will be released on July 26, 2010, which marks the 75th anniversary of the Federal Register Act. The new FR 2.0 website will provide news sections organized by broad topics such as Environment and Health & Public Welfare as well as agency pages listing recent agency activity and a calendar of events for rules, public meetings and comment dates. It will also provide links directly to the Regulations.gov docket for comments, RSS feeds, and the official PDF versions of the Federal Register for authentication. For more information about this new resource, see the FR 2.0 handout .

When the National Archives celebrated their 75 anniversary last year, they unlocked quite a few remarkable records. The Archive, which is the nation’s record keeper, assures that documents that are deemed invaluable for legal and historical reasons are kept forever and they continue to expand their collection. As not all the information is available online, one has to scan the checklist on the web site to determine, in what format the desired documents are accessible. Among others Bankruptcy files for the years 1940 to 1998 are available from all states, and Congressional Records, and the 9/11 Commission Records are retrievable.