For information regarding your summer or post-graduation access to Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg, and the library’s other databases, check out this page on the Library website. It also identifies various free resources that will help you with your legal research needs this summer.
Author Archives: Hilary Hardcastle
Prepare to Practice: Crash Course on Legal Research
Have a job? Need to brush up on your legal research skills? The Law Library is offering a Crash Course on Legal Research focused on the practice skills you need to get you started on your first assignments. Come by after work for handy tips, expert advice, and useful handouts. 1Ls, 2Ls and recent graduates welcome. May 15, 5:30 – 7:00 PM in Classroom K of the 198 Building.
Unlimited Summer Access to Lexis Advance
LexisNexis has announced that law students will be allowed unlimited use of their Lexis Advance ID this summer. For the months of June, July and August, students will be able to use Lexis Advance whether working in a firm, government agency, court, or non-profit organization. If you’re already a registered Lexis Advance user, you don’t need to do anything else to get summer access. Your current ID is all you need. If you aren’t a registered Lexis Advance user yet (or aren’t sure), contact our Lexis representative, Alicia Luchetti, at alicia.luchetti@lexisnexis.com.
New and Improved California Legislative History Website
Leginfo.ca.gov has long been a go-to source for free California legislative information, including the legislative calendar, legislative history information, bill updates, as-enacted statutes, and up-to-date California codes. A new version of the website is now available at http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. The new site includes some great new features, including a “Today’s Law as Amended” feature that identifies textual differences between existing law and proposed law, new search functionality for bill and code searches, cross-referencing between code sections and chaptered bills, and an improved bill subscription service that allows you to track bills throughout the legislative session. To date, it only includes bill information since 1999, so to find legislative history information for bills going back to 1993, you’ll need to use the old site.
Bill Tracking
Want to keep track of the status of a bill as it progresses through the California and federal legislatures? For California bills, you can view the current status of a bill at http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. Let’s say, for example, that you want to track the status of Assembly Bill 48, which, among other things, would ban conversion kits for creating large-capacity ammunition magazines. To track this bill, you would click on the “Bill Information” link at the top of the homepage, then enter the bill number (48), select the session year (2013-2014), and then select the legislative house (Assembly). Your search takes you to a page with tabs for the full text of the bill, the voting record, the bill history, analyses, a mark-up showing how the bill would affect current law, and status information. If you click on the status information tab, it lists the last 5 actions related to the bill. If you want to be notified whenever there’s a new action, just click on the “Track Bill” link at the top of the page. Login with your email and password (registration is free), and choose the “notification points” you’d like to track – when the measure is referred to committee, when it’s amended, when it’s enrolled, etc.
Want to track a federal bill such as H.R. 138, which would also ban large-capacity ammunition magazines? Use www.govtrack.us. Enter “H.R. 138” in the search box, then click on the link for H.R. 13: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act. The site includes a link to the bill text, lists the bill’s latest cosponsors, and lists the latest action on the bill. To receive email updates, select how often you want to track this bill (daily or weekly) and click the “save” button. Again, registration is quick, easy, and free.
Learn How to Compile a Federal Legislative History
What’s a committee print? How do I find one?
Join the librarians in classroom 640 on Tuesday, March 5th, from noon to 12:45 PM, as they demonstrate how to compile a federal legislative history. They’ll explain which documents are important in determining legislative intent and show you how to locate them. RSVP to hardcast@uchastings.edu.
Librarian Grace Takatani is Retiring!
After 36 years at UC Hastings, Grace Takatani is retiring! Grace has worn a number of hats at UC Hastings, serving as U.S. Government Documents Assistant, California Documents Assistant, Special Collections Cataloger, Catalog Librarian, and Reference and Archives Reference Librarian during her long tenure here. A celebration of Grace’s contribution to the law school community will be hosted by the Library on January 31st from 3:00 to 5:00 PM in the Library staff lounge. Staff and faculty are welcome!
Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court
Afraid of mispronouncing Supreme Court case names in your Con Law class? Fear no more – a group of Yale Law School students, working in conjunction with the Yale Linguistics Department, has created a free online pronouncing dictionary of Supreme Court case names. The purpose of the dictionary is to “help conscientious lawyers, judges, teachers, students, and journalists correctly pronounce often-perplexing case names.” The list is organized alphabetically by case name and includes both an audio file as well as the phonetic symbols. Check it out – you’ll never mispronounce fawlks-vah-gən-vairk ahk-tee-en-gə-zel-shah again!
CRS Tax Report Withdrawn After GOP Protest
According to a recent New York Times article, “the Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republications raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.”
The Congressional Research Service is a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress that works exclusively for the U.S. Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members. You can find other CRS reports at http://www.cq.com/crs.0 (on-campus) and http://0-www.cq.com.hopac.uchastings.edu/crs.0 (off-campus). You can browse reports by category (abortion, agriculture, animals, etc.) or use the advanced search option to search for reports by keyword.
Please ask at the Reference Desk if you have any questions!
New Database for Researching Case Law in Francophone Countries
Juricaf is a free, searchable, francophone database of primarily Supreme Court decision from over 40 countries. Developed with the support of the International Organisation de la Francophonie and the French Ministry of Justice, its objective is to make supreme court decisions, particularly those of African countries, freely available. Coverage varies country to country. The database includes over 700,000 French court decisions, over 4,000 decisions of the Canadian Supreme Court, and a handful of decisions from a number of African countries. You can browse case law by country or search across multiple jurisdictions.
