Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
Last month the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that “the state Department of Natural Resources recently scrubbed language from an agency web page on the Great Lakes that said humans and greenhouse gases are the main cause of climate change. The DNR now says the subject is a matter of scientific debate.” The web page in …
A new study on SSRN examines whether law clerks exert any influence on voting by Supreme Court justices. According to authors Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton, Jacob Goldin, Kyle Rozema, & Maya Sen, there is indeed “strong evidence that clerk ideology does affect judicial voting behavior.” The authors examined political donations made by Supreme Court clerks …
In a ceremony on October 19, the Wisconsin State Law Library was officially named the David T. Prosser, Jr. State Law Library. From the State Law Library blog: The event, attended by a number of public officials, marked Prosser’s 40 years of public service on the Supreme Court, Tax Appeals Commission, and Legislature prior to …
There is a good piece on the latest in the Pacer litigation on Quartz. Several non-profits claim that fees charged by Pacer, an online database of papers filed by litigants in the US federal courts, exceed the cost of providing the records. While the 10 cents a page that most people are charged to view …
The UW Law Library invites applications for the position of Head of Reference. The Head of Reference is responsible for overseeing the reference and instructional service programs of the Law Library. The position directly supervises four reference librarians. A full position description with application instructions is available at http://www.ohr.wisc.edu/Weblisting/External/PVLSummaryApply.aspx?pvl_num=88230 Please contact Bonnie Shucha with any …
The Florida Supreme Court has approved a rule requiring state lawyers to take technology-related CLE courses. From Ambrogi’s LawSites: The rule change, ordered by the Supreme Court of Florida on Thursday, added a requirement that Florida lawyers must complete three hours of CLE every three years “in approved technology programs.” The rule raises the state’s …
A team from Texas Tech University School of Law has recently released a very interesting study entitled, Will I Pass the Bar Exam?: Predicting Student Success Using LSAT Scores and Law School Performance. Here’s the abstract: Texas Tech University School of Law has undertaken a statistical analysis of its recent alumni, comparing their performance in …
Professor Mathias Siems of Durham Law School in the UK has recently conducted an interesting analysis of which legal articles generate the most attention on SSRN. His article is entitled, Legal Research in Search of Attention: A Quantitative Assessment. From the abstract: Based on a sample of 1107 papers of SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network, this …
A collaborative group of librarians from the Library of Congress, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Internet Archive, and several other archives and universities have teamed up on a project to preserve public United States Government websites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. In this collaboration, the partners will structure and …
If you haven’t yet heard about Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project to digitize millions of pages of case law and make it freely available online, check out this story in Bostonomix. “We want the law, as expressed in court decisions, to be as widely distributed and as available as possible online to promote access to justice …