UHLC Nota Bene

Over spring break, I received an email from my school's Account Executive, as did all of my colleagues and, presumably, all of the students. This email discussed how a person could easily become " certified " on Lexis Advance over spring break, because, clearly, law school students don't have anything better to do at this time of the year. [By the way, this post should not be considered a criticism of the Account Executives; I recognize that they are just doing their jobs, which, unfortunately, includes sending out these emails. They are not responsible for the content of the email nor the linked videos.] According to the email, the process for "certification" is easy and the rewards potentially great. To become "certified", all one has to do is watch six short videos on the LexisNexis Law Schools channel on Youtube , completing short quizzes after each one, and then ask one's Account Executive for "the link to the Lexis Advance national ...

Sadly for those of us who do legislative history not all bills become laws. Bills that become laws are memorialized in books with copious annotations and references to their histories which make them easy to locate. That is not the fate of most bills. Most bills simply die and accumulate very little if any legislative baggage. Bills that do not become laws die and are forgotten and their burial places are hard to find. Finding bills online can be easy as in the case of recently filed bills. The Library of Congress’ website THOMAS has full text of all bills filed back to the 101 st Congress (1989-1990). There are multiple ways to search for these bills, including by sponsor, number, and keyword. The harder bills to find are those that died before the invention of THOMAS. Trying to find the full text of older bills in electronic format is more difficult and the researcher must get creative. If you are looking for really old bills the Library of Congress has a website for you. A C...

On Friday, March 16, 2012 GPO Access passed away, off to meet its maker in whatever spot in Internet Heaven that is reserved for federal government websites. GPO Access was born on June 8, 1993 when President Clinton signed Public Law 103-40, the “Government Printing Office Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act of 1993” and went live on June 8, 1993. GPO Access’ mission was to maintain a directory of electronic information, provide online access to the Congressional Record, the Federal Register and other publications, and operate an electronic storage facility for electronic government information. GPO Access completed its mission gloriously and can now rest. GPO Access was the gateway to federal information in electronic format, and often time that format was PDF. While we take it for granted now, GPO Access used to charge subscription fees! The fees were eliminated on December 1, 1995 and usage shot up. At the time of the 1997 biennial report searches were up 1187% and...

OpenCourt is a pilot project that broadcasts the proceedings of the Quincy District Court in Massachusetts via the internet. The project is run by WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, in cooperation with the Quincy District Court and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Video can be streamed live or accessed through the daily archive. The goals of the project are to increase public awareness of how the courts function and to serve as an example to courts around the country who may want to adopt this technology. The Quincy District Court, one of the busiest courtrooms in the state, handles both criminal and civil cases. More information about OpenCourt can be found on the project’s FAQ page. To view the proceedings, go to the OpenCourt Live page or view the Livestream Schedule .

For those of you researching in the area of health law, it is often necessary to search in medical literature for information related to your topic. One great source to consult for this is PubMed . PubMed is a free resource from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the National Library of Medicine that contains over 21 million citations to journal articles and books related to medicine, health care, and similar topics. In some instances, PubMed may also provide a link to the full-text of an article. Citations in PubMed generally span from 1946 to the present. Each article in the database is assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) such as “health care reform” or “genetic testing” depending on the topics covered in the article. These MeSH terms can be used to search for highly relevant articles on your specific topic. For more information about how to conduct searches in PubMed, including subject searches using the MeSH terms, see the PubMed Online Training websi...

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) , formerly known as the General Accounting Office, is the independent, nonpartisan congressional agency that under the authority of the Comptroller General is charged with auditing agencies to ensure public funds are spent properly and investigating illegal or improper activity by the agencies. According to a recent press release , the agency has now released an app for the iPhone and iPad that will provide access to the GAO reports and congressional testimony along with videos and podcasts. A similar Android app is expected to be launched in a few months.

The law library has recently acquired Tax Amnesties published by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business deals with an emerging topic in the international taxation field. Tax amnesty is granted by countries to lift the tax liability on individuals in exchange for the disclosure of the offender's hidden assets whether it be in the form of real property, bank accounts, or investments in foreign corporations, and pay the tax owed. The conditions and benefits vary ranging from allowing the taxpayer to avoid criminal prosecution to lifting penalties or lowering the tax liability. Tax Amnesties looks at this issue from an international standpoint investigating what tax amnesty entails. First, it begins with the collapse of secrecy by the banks that historically allowed taxpayers to hide assets from their home countries and then provides a thorough survey of approaches taken by select nations throughout the globe. The legal impact of tax amnesties and their compatibility with international ...

This week's Legal Oxymoron of the Week is: Intellectual Property See, e.g ., John Lienhard, Reflections on Information, Biology, and Community , 32 HOUS. L. REV. 303, 314(1995).