UHLC Nota Bene

For those interested in the taxation of estates and gifts, the library has access to a number of sources that are helpful for research in this area: Treatises/Practice Guides: Estate Planning Law and Taxation , 4th ed., Westfall ( KF6584.W47 4th )(available on Checkpoint and Westlaw Next ) Estate Planning and Taxation Coordinator , RIA ( KF6571.A8 E88 ) (available on Checkpoint and Westlaw Next ) Federal Estate and Gift Tax Reporter , CCH ( KF6571.A8 C65 ) Federal Estate and Gift Taxation , 8th ed., Stephens, WG&L ( KF6572.F42 8th )(available on Checkpoint and Westlaw Next ) Bloomberg BNA Portfolios: The library has access to several estate and gift tax BNA Tax Management Portfolios , such as Estate Planning, Portfolio No. 800.2d , authored by Professor William Streng ( KF6289.A1T35 ). These mini-treatises are available in print and are also accessible through the Bloomberg BNA Tax and Accounting Center database and Bloomberg Law .  The following are other...

The library has access to several oil and gas law treatises and practice guides for those who are interested in in this area of law. These are multi-volume sets that are updated regularly and contain subject indexes as well as various tables and charts. Some titles even have sample forms. The following are multi-volume titles that the library currently has: Brown, The Law of Oil and Gas Leases ( KF1865.B72 2d ) (available on Lexis Advance ) Kramer, The Law of Pooling & Unitization ( KF1853.M9 ) (available on Lexis Advance ) Kuntz, A Treatise on the Law of Oil and Gas ( KF1849.K8 ) (available on Lexis Advance ) Summers, The Law of Oil and Gas, with forms ( KF1849.S93 ) (available on Westlaw Next ) Smith & Weaver, Texas Law of Oil and Gas ( KFT1458.A1 S642 Reserve ) Williams & Meyers, Oil and Gas Law ( KF1846.S.W5 ) (available on Lexis Advance ) The titles listed below are other sources useful for those interested in oil & gas law: Hemingway, Oil ...

Today, June 14, is Flag Day .   Flag Day was first celebrated in Connecticut in 1861, nationally recognized by President Wilson in 1916 and finally established by Congress as a national holiday in 1949 ( 36 U.S.C. § 110 ). Although Flag Day is not a federal holiday, the Federal government encourages Americans to celebrate the occasion: “Americans are encouraged to display the flag outside their homes and businesses on this day to honor the history and heritage the American flag represents.”   For those who wish to do so, the proper manner of displaying the flag is laid out in 4 U.S.C. §§ 1-10 , known as the Federal Flag Code.   This report and FAQ by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reviews the Flag Code and answers a few popular questions about them. But don’t let fear of an accidental code violation keep you from displaying a flag: there is no statutory penalty for a private citizen in violation of the Flag Code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that viol...

Due to widespread news reports that an alleged secret leaker has fled the U.S. for Hong Kong, the topic of extradition has received a great deal of public attention this past week.   The United States Code addresses extradition in 18 U.S.C. Chapter 209 , which primarily discusses the extradition of persons out of the U.S.   Extraditing persons from foreign countries to the U.S. is generally a matter of treaty law, although some nations occasionally provide extradition in the absence of a treaty; nations that have signed extradition treaties with the U.S. will generally extradite persons here.   Extraditable offenses may be listed in an extradition treaty, or the parties to the treaty may agree to a ‘dual criminality’ arrangement in which any act illegal in both nations is considered an extraditable offense.   Standard extradition treaties also address grounds for refusing extradition. Anyone interested in a more thorough analysis of U.S. extradition law mi...

When I was in law school, one of the cases I hated the most was Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757 (1966) . I hated Schmerber for many reasons, but primarily because of its (in my opinion) conflated analysis of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and its unabashedly obvious, pro-law enforcement bias resulting in a flawed Fourth Amendment analysis. At that time, I thought the Court was wrong, and I still do. It's been over 20 years since the US Supreme Court last gave more than a simple citation or two to Schmerber , and now, the Court gives us two decisions that implicate Schmerber in one term! And it's interesting (or at least I find it interesting) the differing ways the Court dealt with Schmerber in those two cases. Much like the view of the arresting officer (and the dissenting aspects of the Chief Justice's opinion) in the first of these two cases, Missouri v. McNeely, 133 S. Ct. 1552 (2013) , my understanding of Schmerber from law school was that, in instances of...

One of my favorite websites lately (and I hate to admit that I only discovered it several months ago) is the National Constitution Center 's blog, Constitution Daily . The NCC's website has a lot of great, helpful, and fascinating information, but the blog is what usually grabs my attention. The writers of the blog tackle constitutional issues, but they focus on the issues making news at the time, tackling everything from the use of drones to same-sex marriage, from the tension between a free press and a government's claim of national security to the proper place in our system for bureaucratic agencies. If you see or hear a news story about some aspect of how our government works (or should work), chances are that a blog entry explaining some of the nuances or identifying unanswered questions regarding that topic is in the works. For example, since the US Supreme Court's controversial decision in Maryland v. King (upholding the warrantless collection and testing of a...

There is a new player in the electronic legal research world; its name is Ravel and it wants to do for legal research what television did for radio: make it visual. Ravel is the brain-child of a group of recent Stanford Law graduates who wanted to come up with a new way of doing legal research that would be “radically easier, faster, and more intuitive.”   While the platform is more visually striking than the text heavy appearances of the more traditional platforms Ravel may not yet be a complete game-changer.   Let’s take a look.    The site has the familiar Google minimalist aesthetic look and right away lets you know that the cool kids who use Google Chrome are preferred, although it seemed to work fine with my stodgy old Firefox browser worked fine. Coverage is limited to only U.S. Supreme Court and all Federal Circuit court cases included. There are no Federal District court or any state court cases.   The developers state that “we are aggress...