Library Blog: The Gothic Column

Super Lawyers recently released its first annual ranking of U.S. law schools. Super Lawyers is an annual listing of outstanding lawyers who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. It is published as a special supplement in leading newspapers and city and regional magazines across the country and has been rating lawyers for almost 20 years.

Unlike most rankings which look at things like bar passage rates and student/faculty ratios, these rankings are based on the total number of graduates named to the state and regional Super Lawyers lists. Here are the full rankings for 2010 (the University of Connecticut came in at #63). The Connecticut page also provides separate lists of the Top 10 Connecticut Super Lawyers and the Top 25 Women Connecticut Super Lawyers for 2010. For more about the rankings, click here.

Have you used Hein Online lately? If not, you may not know that a new digital collection has recently been added. The Bar Journals collection provides access to over 60 national, state, and local bar association journals, including the Connecticut Bar Journal. Coverage goes back to the first issue. Articles can be retrieved by BlueBook citation or by searching by article title, author, description, date, or across the full text of the journals. As with all resources on Hein, all documents are scanned images of the originals.

Other recent additions to Hein Online are:

• National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws collection, which includes the full text of all uniform laws and model acts drafted, recommended, or endorsed by the Conference; and

• Selden Society Publications collection, which includes early English legal materials, including the Society’s Annual Series.

In an interesting, if not completely unanticipated development, Google Scholar has added the capability to search patents, case law, and legal journals.  The advanced search allows further tailoring of your search to only federal courts, or specific state courts.  The "How Cited" tab gives some citation information for the selected case, but nothing that compares to Shepards or KeyCite (yet). 

This addition to the free legal web is sure to cause a stir, and hopefully generate ever improving access to our nation's legal information (a basic human right, according to President Obama).

And on the subject of Google, some lawyers love it for workflow issues.  

The 2006 documentary The U.S. vs John Lennon has just been added to the library’s DVD collection. The film chronicles former Beatle John Lennon’s years as an anti-war activist and the Nixon administration’s efforts to have him deported. The story is told through archival footage and interviews, and Lennon’s recordings provide the soundtrack.

You can view the trailer for the film or read some reviews (here and here). Some of the documents pertaining to the FBI’s surveillance of Lennon are also available.

All DVD’s are located on Reserve and can be checked out for 3 days.

The U. S. Supreme Court has just scheduled oral argument for January 13^th in the case of American Needle, Inc. v. NFL. The court will be deciding whether the NFL is a "single entity" organization and therefore exempt from Sec. 1 of the Sherman Act. The decision has the potential to transform the business of professional sports and is widely considered to be the most significant sports law case in recent memory.

The SCOTUS Wiki provides merit and amicus briefs as well as pre-argument articles. For additional commentary and analysis, including opposing points of view on the potential ramifications of the court’s decision, see the following:

• Why the "Single Entity" Defense Can Never Apply to NFL Clubs: A Primer on Property Rights Theory in Professional Sports by Marc Edelman, Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal (2008)

• American Needle v. NFL: An Opportunity to Reshape Sports Law by Michael McCann, Yale Law Journal (2009)

• Antitrust Case Could Be Armageddon by Lester Munson, ESPN.com (2009)

• The (Un)Importance of American Needle by Jeffrey Standen, The Sports Law Professor (2009)

• The Puzzling Persistence of the Single Entity Argument for Sports Leagues: American Needle and the Supreme Court’s Opportunity to Reject a Flawed Defense by Gabe Feldman, Wisconsin Law Review (2009)

Monday, November 9^th, marks the 20^th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. The wall was erected by the East German government in 1961 to keep its citizens from fleeing to the West, and it became the defining symbol of the Cold War that existed between the USSR and the United States after WWII.

You can read and listen to President Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech of June 12, 1987 here.  You can also read and listen to or watch President John F. Kennedy's "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech of June 26, 1963. 

The following books from our collection cover some of the legal and political issues involved in the subsequent unification of East and West Germany:

• Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification by Elizabeth Pond

• The Imperfect Union: Constitutional Structures of German Unification by Peter E. Quint

• The Unification of Germany in International and Domestic Law by Ryszard W. Piotrowicz and Sam K. N. Blay

• Imperfect Justice: An East-West German Diary by Inga Markovits

• Dimensions of German Unification: Economic, Social, and Legal Analyses edited by A. Bradley Shingleton et al

The long and difficult struggle for women’s suffrage formally began with the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY in 1848 and continued throughout the 19th and early 20^th centuries. After numerous court challenges and one very famous criminal trial, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified in 1920, giving women the right to vote.

For an in-depth look at the subject, take a look at some of the online images and documents from the Library of Congress, or check out one of the following books from our collection:

• The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Traditions by Sue Davis

• History of Woman Suffrage edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony et al

• How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 by Rebecca J. Mead

• The Trial of Susan B. Anthony by Susan B. Anthony

• Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited edited by Jean H. Baker

• The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement by Aileen S. Kraditor

Westlaw, for security purposes, is changing the way you must log-in.  They are requiring that all users create a "strong" username and password.  They are calling this your OnePass, despite the fact that you are actually creating two new codes to log-in.

Some of you may already have a OnePass.  Some of you may have previously created a self-chosen username and password which is insufficiently "strong" by OnePass criteria.  Some of you are using your Westlaw issued alphanumeric password.  Many of you have instructed your computer to remember your log-in credentials and don't know into which category you fall.  We recognize that this will create some confusion, and we are here to help. 

The Westlaw rules for creating "strong" usernames and passwords are:

• The OnePass Username must be between 8 - 70 characters and contain at least two of the following:   uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols (e.g., @ ^ * $)
• The OnePass Password must be between 8 - 16 characters and contain at least three of the following: uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols (e.g., @ ^ * $)

Please do not hesitate to contact the HelpDesk (x5158) with any questions or issues that you encounter.  [Note: We are already receiving many reports of problems, so these are to be expected.  Please contact us for help.]

For assistance during evening and weekend hours, you can call Westlaw directly at 1-800-WESTLAW (1-800-937-8529), selecting the "Are you calling for OnePass assistance?" option.  They are also providing online help.

The Westlaw campaign to make this change launched on November 1st.  All OnePass usernames and passwords must be created by January 31, 2010.  Beginning on February 1, 2010, you will not be able to access Westlaw without creating your personal OnePass.  We are encouraging everyone in the community to make this change sooner rather than later to avoid potential problems next year.

We look forward to making this transition as painless as possible!   

A new column by attorney and UConn Law adjunct professor Daniel Klau has just been added to the online version of the Connecticut Law Tribune. Called Appealingly Brief!, it’s a series of humorous 2 to 3 minute videos that present a tip or commentary on appellate law, practice, and procedure. The first in the series can be viewed here. Also included in the series are occasional short video debates between Klau and one of his colleagues presenting the liberal vs. conservative points of view on a variety of legal topics. The first debate can be viewed here.

To access articles or other features that require a subscription (those that have a key icon next to the title), be sure to access the Tribune from the library’s research databases page. If you are off campus, you will have to enter your net ID and password.

Thanks to all the students, faculty, and staff who helped make the Welcome Back to the Law Library Party a rousing success!  We had a great time, and hope you did, too. 

If you didn't get a chance to check out the 25 year retrospective photo exhibit highlighting the campus from 1984 - 2009, now on display just inside the library entrance, be sure to take a look.  Lea Wallenius and Janis Fusaris did a great job putting it together.

And if you missed the slide show of pictures and statistics of our epic [re]construction project, check it out...

(photos by Jessica Randall and Donna Gionfriddo, statistics compiled by Jessica Randall, powerpoint by Julie Jones)