UHLC Nota Bene

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business has recently published the second edition of International Tax Law , edited by Andrea Amatucci, which discusses international tax law from the global perspective. This book, which consists of chapters authored by different legal scholars, begins with a discussion of the application of economic analysis to tax law, then provides an overview of tax law in general and covers administrative provisions and procedures related to tax law. International taxation is mostly based upon bilateral tax treaties that are designed to avoid the threat of double taxation (where a citizen residing in a foreign country is taxed by both that country and the home nation) along with issues related to tax collection procedures and the avoidance of the tax evasion. The chapter on double taxation conventions focuses on these treaties as well as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) model tax conventi...

Each semester the law library presents a series of presentations on legal research topics. These presentations are held at 12 noon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in Room 4 BLB. We will be offering the following sessions during the Fall 2012 semester: 1. Federal Legislative History Research Tuesday, 9/25, Wednesday, 9/26, 12:00-12:45 P.M. Katy Stein, Reference and Research Librarian 2. Researching Federal Income Tax Law Tuesday, 10/2, Wednesday, 10/3, 12:00-12:45 P.M. Chris Dykes, Reference and Research Librarian  3. Federal Administrative Law Research Tuesday, 10/9, Wednesday, 10/10, 12:00-12:45 P.M. Matt Mantel, Reference and Research Librarian 4. Advanced Databases Search Strategies Tuesday, 10/16, Wednesday, 10/17, 12:00-12:45 P.M. Emily Lawson, Reference and Research Librarian 5. Power Searching on Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law Tuesday, 10/23, Wednesday, 10/24, 12:00-12:45 P.M. Dan Baker, Reference and Research Librarian Chris Dykes Chair, Law Library Br...

A couple of months ago, the good people at Lexis Advance finally added pre-search source selection functionality. And that's a good thing! I would like to applaud them for taking this step toward making Lexis Advance as good a legal research tool as lexis.com. Unfortunately, I don't believe they went far enough with this step, but to understand my criticism, you must first appreciate the different types of sources that LexisNexis has. Five Types of Sources Officially, there are only two types of sources available through the LexisNexis legal research systems: Individual Sources and Group Sources, the latter being merely a collection of the former. To prove this point, if you were to go to their Searchable Directory of Online Sources , you would notice that, at the bottom of the search form, it asks whether you want to "Display Individual Sources" or "Display Individual and Group Sources". However, unofficially, there are three other types of sources, and ...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and one lawyer tested that notion last week when he filed a five-page cartoon as his amicus brief in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.   The amicus brief was written by Bob Kohn , an expert in music licensing law and chairman of RoyaltyShare, Inc. The brief was filed in response to a proposed settlement offer in a lawsuit initiated by the U.S Justice Department, against Apple, Inc. and five additional publishers.   Apple and the other publishers were accused of illegally colluding to set prices for electronic books. Kohn’s brief argues (rather, illustrates) that since Amazon sold e-books below marginal cost, horizontal price fixing here is legal as it countervails Amazon’s predatory pricing, and creates a more efficient market. As Kohn believes the Justice Department’s conclusions are not reasonable, the court cannot hold the settlement to be in the public interest.   Kohn conceived of thi...

Law and high fashion met last week when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the French show designer Christian Louboutin has an enforceable trademark for the use of red outsoles when the shoe’s upper is a contrasting color.  For those unfamiliar with Louboutin’s creations, they have become the “it” shoe among celebrities from Sarah Jessica Parker (whose Carrie Bradshaw character made the shoes a household name on “Sex and the City”), to Jennifer Lopez, who released a single named after the designer shoes,“Louboutins,” in 2009. First popularized by Princess Caroline in Monaco in 1991, the shoes currently retail for between 500 to 6,000 dollars a pair. Louboutin is far from the first to popularize red heels and soles for high end shoes.   According to Phillip Mansel’s Dressed to Rule (available at the M.D. Anderson library, GT1754 .M36 2005 ), Louis XIV favored the color as well, even passing an edict forbidding all but the noble-bor...

As a new school year begins I would like to wish everyone a happy belated Siyum HaShas, a very important, if obscure, law related holiday. What is this holiday you may ask? It is the celebration of the end of the seven year cycle of the Daf Yomi which occurred on August 1, 2012. Still not ringing a bell? This is the celebration to mark the end of the cycle of studying one page of Talmud* every day for seven years. That is 2,711 pages of Babylonian Talmud. That’s a lot of law! The Talmud is the so called “oral law” (as opposed to the written law, i.e. the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The Talmud covers everyday subjects as well as ethics, philosophy, customs, and history. The text itself is written as discussions and arguments amongst a variety of learned rabbis who sometimes arrive at a solution, and sometimes do not. One page of Talmud is called a “daf”, but a page of Talmud is more than just rabbinical arguments. Each page also contains multiple commentaries (or glo...

The Cornell Law Library is a unique place; did you know it is part of Cornell’s main library? It is. It is also home to the Legal Research Institute which provides full text of the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, and other sources of primary law.   They also provide something that I just discovered and is now the newest tool in my research tool-box:   the Legal Research Engine .    The Legal Research Engine is a simple page with four search boxes; 1) Find Legal Research Guides, 2) Search the Legal Internet, 3) Search Academic Blawgs, and 4) I Want it All!. This is really an elegant lay- out by virtue of the search engine focusing the search before it has even commenced. The searches contemplated in the boxes for Legal Research Guides and Academic Blawgs are obvious, but they make interesting choices (my one caveat is that the Academic Blawgs do not include our own Nota Bene). If you are looking for a guide to researching a particular area of law...

Compagnie Générale Transatlantique v. Elting, 298 U.S. 217 (1936)?   Kawaauhau v. Geiger, 523 U.S. 57 (1998)?   Schuylkill Trust Co. v. Pennsylvania, 302 U.S. 506 (1938)?   Some Supreme Court cases are just difficult to pronounce.   To help, Yale Law School recently created the Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States .   This resource provides information about how to pronounce foreign and other difficult party names from hundreds of Supreme Court cases.   For each case, the dictionary has an Americanized pronunciation based on the Garner Pronunciation Guide from Black’s Law Dictionary as well as a pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.   Audio of each pronunciation is provided as well.    For more information about this resource, including the pronunciation notes, visit the dictionary’s website .