Wisblawg

In a recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (2004 WI 58), Chief Justice Abrahamson has produced an excellent overview of extrinsic sources, including legislative history, used by the court in statutory interpretation cases. From her concurrence (paragraph 68): I write to alert the reader to the numerous forms of “history” this court has …

The April 2005 edition of the Wisconsin Lawyer is now available on the WisBar site. Two articles are particularly interesting: Don’t be a Copycat: Reproducing Copyrighted Works by Bev Butula, president of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin. “This article explores the “fair use” doctrine in the context of a law firm environment and also …

The folks at TechnoLawyer are now blogging about legal technology and practice management issues, products, and services. According to blogger, Neil Squillante, here’s what you can expect to see: Coming Attractions Member News Quips, TechnoEditorials, and Industry News The Best Ads You may already be familiar with TechnoLawyer’s collection of free newsletters which are listed …

The National Center for State Courts has recently released their Survey of Judicial Salaries featuring judicial salary comparisons to other professionals and judicial compensation commissions.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be automatically alerted when articles about your clients or practice areas appear in Wisconsin’s newspapers. . . and receive a link to the full text articles. . . for free? Good news: this service is available via Badgerlink. Badgerlink, a collection of popular and academic databases from the …

Last week HeinOnline released the first 100 titles in its new Legal Classics Library. The library, which contains more than 300,000 pages, contains landmark legal works from the late 18th through the mid 20th centuries. Titles include Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803), Cardozo’s Growth of the Law (1924), and Story’s first edition of Commentaries on the Constitution …

Annotated New York Times from blogrunner is a new resource that tracks blog posts discussing articles that appear in the New York Times. It also offers a hundreds of topical RSS feeds for NYT articles – many more than those provided by the main NYT site. Here’s a sampling from the “L’s” – Law and …

Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an article about a new book called, “Weird Wisconsin,” co-written by Madison law librarian and “student of weirdology,” Richard Hendricks. According to Hendricks: “We are the weirdest state,” he says. “We’re outside the mainstream. The early settlers here were a motley crew running away from somewhere else. Malcontents came here for …

Readers of WisBlawg know that last week was National Library Week. At the UW Law Library we held a number of events, including daily contests, workshop and displays. On Wednesday we held our first ever Stump the Law Library Staff contest. We received 9 questions, a combination of faculty, staff, and students. I’m happy to …

As part of our National Library Week celebration at the UW Law Library, today I presented a workshop for our students, faculty and staff on Staying Current in Less Time: Blogs, RSS & Alert Services. Because I thought that others might find it useful also – and because I’ve been anxious to try out podcasting, …