UHLC Nota Bene

The presidential election is almost here.   There is no escape from the news reports and the poll numbers.   With polls being conducted daily on the candidates’ support from the voters, far less attention has been paid to the Electoral College, the other election mechanism arguably as important as the general election.  The Electoral College website , maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, is a website worth exploring.   From the simple question “ What is the Electoral College? ” to the all-inclusive page U.S. Voting & Election Resources (covering federal and state elections), it has something useful for researchers of all levels.  And, just for the fun of it, next time after you read about at a president poll, why not also give the Electoral College Calculator a try?   And if you prefer some reading tying to the current presidential election, try this Associated Press article .  In case you forget, W became ...

As many of you probably know, the Supreme Court began its 2012 term this week. If you are interested in learning more about what is coming up this term and keeping up with all of the action, there are a number of resources that can help. In addition to the Supreme Court’s website , the ABA’s Preview site has information about upcoming cases including the questions presented as well as links to the merit briefs and amicus briefs. Or try the Oyez Project from Chicago-Kent College of Law. That website contains information about the facts of each case along with transcripts and audio of the oral arguments. And of course, SCOTUSblog is also following the cases with case previews, argument recaps, and news round-ups. If you are just interested in learning more about a few of the notable cases coming up this term, try the term preview from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute or recent articles from the New York Times and Washington Post .

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...