UHLC Nota Bene

The ABA has recently published Anatomy of a Trial: A Handbook for Young Lawyers ( KF8915.S24 ) by Paul Mark Sandler . It examines the major stages of both civil and criminal trials, including the voire dire process, opening statements, witnesses, direct and cross examination, closing statements, and appeals. The author draws on his own experience in analyzing the process and uses excerpts from two of his cases- United States v. Rosen and Mary Jeanne Maffei v. Angela Smedley, M.D. et al , along with hypotheticals and commentary from trial judges. This book is more practice oriented than research-oriented but is very beneficial for those looking for an overview of the trial process. This book is now in the law library's new titles shelf.

The Legal Rights of the Convicted thoroughly covers the process and major issues pertaining to corrections law. The authors begin with an introduction discussing the prisoners' civil rights movement in the early part of the twentieth century, as well as expanding on the major sources of U.S. primary law and the concepts of due process relevant to those convicted. There is a chapter dedicated to sentencing issues such as the history and impact of sentencing reform as well as the consequences of a conviction or guilty plea. Other topics include probation, parole, use of force, and the applicability of first amendment protections, fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures, and eighth amendment cruel and unusual punishment to those convicted, particularly those incarcerated. This title is currently in the library's new titles shelf ( KF9731.B45 2010 ).

When you get to law school everything is different; even the pads of paper are different. As Professor Kingsfield famously said in The Paper Chase, “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” No one ever tells you that you are also going to “speak like a lawyer,” which you will. To many non-lawyers, the law is written and spoken in a different language, archaic and impenetrable, a jargon designed to keep the layman confused and off balance, maybe even susceptible to being swindled. In some respects all of this is true. A great many words uttered and written by lawyers are not of the English language at all. The language that lawyers work in, the language that makes them lawyers and separates the lawyers from the non-lawyers, is a foreign language, and the name of that language is Law French. Newer law students may now be saying to themselves, “we have to learn law and French? If I wanted to learn a foreign language I would have gone to busin...

With all this debate and concern about the US federal debt limit ceiling ( including the constitutionality of it ), I'm sure many of you would like to know more about it. Luckily, if you fall into that group, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a couple of reports that you may find interesting. The most recent report is The Debt Limit: History and Recent Increases ; the CRS has published several reports with this title in the past, but the most recent one, dated July 1, 2011, is piping-hot fresh. It explains how federal debt was dealt with before the institution of an overall aggregated debt limit, and details the tumultuous political wranglings over the debt limit that have occurred in the last decade. [Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog .] The second CRS report on the debt limit, dated April 27, 2011, is entitled Reaching the Debt Limit: Background and Potential Effects on Government Operations . This report details the "extraordinary measures" the Treasury has...

What piece of mail (sometimes via email) comes every month and can either make it a good day or a bad day? It’s your bank statement. Did you know the federal government has a bank statement and it’s available every day to view online. This daily bank statement is provided by the Financial Management Service , a bureau located in the Dept. of the Treasury. The job of the Financial Management Service is to “provide central payment services to Federal Program Agencies, to operate the federal government’s collections and deposit systems, to provide government-wide accounting and reporting services and to manage the collection of delinquent debt owed to the government.” This is the department that sends out the checks, makes the deposits, and collects on outstanding debts. At their web site you can see how much money the government has on hand, how much is coming, and how much is going out each day. Each day’s statement, which is only two pages long, makes fascinating reading...

In the Spring 2011 issue of Law Library Journal (Vol. 103, No. 2), an article by Horst Dippel, Professor Emeritus of British and American Studies at the University of Kassel in Germany, caught my eye. The Trap of Medium-Neutral Citation, or Why a Historical-Critical Edition of State Constitutions Is Necessary , 2011 Law Libr. J. 14, 103 Law Libr. J. 219 , is actually a very fascinating article that discusses the travails of researching historical state constitutions. However, there are two aspects of this article that bothered me. First was the misleading title: The Trap of Medium-Neutral Citation . Although I'm sure I would have read it eventually, the ominous title was what impelled me to read the article immediately upon receiving my copy. This title clearly implied that a main thesis (if not the main thesis) of the article was to be some kind of argument against medium-neutral citations, most likely emphasizing citations to state constitutions. Indeed, the abstract provided a...

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a Department of Energy program, was initially created in 1947, and its mission is to provide free, universal access to federal research and development information. In addition to information generated within the Department of Energy, its website also contains materials from other federal government agencies and links to international scientific sources. Several areas of its website pertain to energy-related research. The "Find Key DOE Resources and More" section leads to a wide variety of options, including: the Information Bridge (which currently contains over 279,000 documents and citations to energy research reports), DOE Green Energy (citations, reports, and patents for renewable energy sources), Energy Citations Database (nearly 2.5 million citations to energy research documents), and EnergyFiles (links to other online research resources that the Department considers useful).

FDSys is providing digital access to documents relating to coastal management that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library sent to the Government Printing Office. The collection currently spans from 1951-1999, and contains approximately 5,000 documents in PDF. Items range from reports, inventories and management plans to project catalogs and preservation programs. Part of NOAA's overall mission is to protect coastal resources from environmental damage and encourage sustainable development, and these documents help to provide further insight into how NOAA accomplishes these goals.

Public opinion surveys are conducted on a wide variety of topics such as the environment, education, health, and international affairs. If your research requires information about public opinion, there are a number of resources you can use to find this type of data. Many different types of organizations collect polling data. For instance, some news organizations such as ABC News , NPR , and the New York Times conduct polls and place the data on their websites. There are also polling organizations that make their survey results available to the public. The Harris Vault website provides data from The Harris Poll back to 1963 and the Pew Research Center website supplies data from their People & the Press surveys back to 1997. However, the library also offers access to subscription databases that pull together public opinion datasets from a number of different sources, some of which are discussed above. The first is the iPOLL Databank from the Roper Center for Public Opinion ...

One of the legal databases that can be accesses through the O’Quinn Law Library website is Columbia InternationalAffairs Online (CIAO) . The CIAO website is updated on a monthly basis and offers access to a vast collection of materials in the area of international affairs. These range from working papers from academic institutions around the globe and NGO’s, findings of research projects, conference proceedings, journals, books, and policy briefs to specially created course packs covering subject areas like free trade and NAFTA. Furthermore, an interactive atlas created by the Economist Intelligence Unit, providing global intelligence as well as analysis, can be accessed. In addition a constantly updated collection of videos on news topics like Japan’s nuclear crisis, the consequences of Bin Laden’s death and the tapings of the highly acclaimed Columbia University World Leaders Forum series are available.

Many people may not know that two websites often thought of as places to turn for entertainment, iTunes and YouTube, also provide access to educational content. iTunes U allows educational institutions to distribute content such as lectures, language lessons, and tours to students, and the general public, for free. Currently more than 800 universities, including the University of Houston, participate, with about half allowing public access to their content. More information about the University of Houston’s iTunes U website can be found here . YouTubeEDU is a section of the popular video site that contains educational videos from colleges and universities. You can search for videos by keyword or you can browse videos by educational institutions such as Harvard and Stanford or by subjects such as Law, Health & Medicine, or Business. The University of Houston YouTube site can be accessed here .