This Week in the Law Library

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Legal Research Sessions This Week

  • Tuesday, April 1, 10:40 a.m. — 12:05 p.m.
    • Professor Smith’s section 3
    • Administrative Law with Susan Boland
    • Room 100B
  • Wednesday, April 2, 12:15 p.m. — 1:15 p.m.
    • UC Law Library and Lexis Lunch & Learn
    • Lexis Advance Research Tips with Ashley Russell
    • 50 State Research with Shannon Kemen
    • Room 302
    • Prior registration was required. See below for next week’s Law Library & Lexis 1L Brunch


UC Law Library & Lexis 1L Brunch

  • Worried about researching on the job? You are invited to join the UC Law Library and Lexis for a legal research brunch aimed specifically at helping first year law students prepare to complete research assignments as summer associates. This session will cover the research process generally and will walk you through a practice research assignment from beginning to end using print and electronic resources.
  • Each attendee will receive a FREE Lunch + Lexis points.
  • Thursday, April 10, 12:15 p.m. — 1:15 p.m.
  • Room 114
  • To reserve your seat, RSVP at Surveymonkey® by Friday, April 4th.


Featured Research Guide

Review the ins and outs of Administrative Law Research with the guide by Susan Boland.

Returning May 19th and 20th, our annual Summer Research Boot Camp

This annual event, presented jointly with Chase Law School, will help you perform terrific legal research during your summer months. Watch for more information soon!


Fair Use Week: Learn a Little About Copyright

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The doctrine of “fair use” was originally announced by the U.S. Supreme Court and was subsequently adopted by Congress in the 1976 revisions to copyright law. Today the meaning of fair use can be found at 17 U.S.C. § 107. This week many academic libraries are honoring fair use to point out its crucial role in scholarly writing. The Law Library has a guide to fair use (and the T.E.A.C.H. Act) for faculty and students. Kevin Smith of Duke University, one of the country’s first scholarly communications officers, provides information and links to several resources in his blog post. So the next time you quote someone’s article or enjoy a parody, give a little thanks to “fair use.”

Veterans Day

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November 11, is Veterans Day, a public holiday in the United States. Veterans Day was originally celebrated as Armistice Day, and the historians among you will recall that the armistice ending World War I went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. Congress acted to rename the holiday, “To honor veterans on the 11th day of November of each year, a day dedicated to world peace.” Ch. 250, 68 Stat. 168 (1954). In the late 1960’s, when Congress adopted legislation to create more three-day weekends on public holidays, Veterans day was moved to the fourth Monday in October. This lasted only a few years, and with popular sentiment favoring the traditional date of November 11, it was returned to that date in 1978. Pub. L. 94-97, 89 Stat. 479 (1975).

The law library has a special connection to Veterans Day. The library’s namesake, Robert S. Marx, a Hamilton County judge, was a founder of the Disabled American Veterans. The organization’s mission statement reads, “We are dedicated to a single purpose: empowering veterans to lead high-quality lives with respect and dignity. We accomplish this by ensuring that veterans and their families can access the full range of benefits available to them; fighting for the interests of America’s injured heroes on Capitol Hill; and educating the public about the great sacrifices and needs of veterans transitioning back to civilian life.” You can read of the DAV’s founding and the role played by Robert S. Marx on its website.

We in the law library join our fellow citizens in expressing our gratitude for the service and sacrifice made on behalf of our country by U.S. veterans.

 

Marx Law Library Celebrates First-Year Student Common Reading Program

Marx Law Library is happy to support the First-Year Student Common Reading Program by collaborating with Langsam Library on their display, Human Rights and Human Wrongs. The display features the College of Law’s Human Rights Quarterly and the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights. Both are edited by Bert Lockwood, Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Director, Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights. It’s located in the entryway to Langsam Library. The First-Year Student Common Reading Program chose Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? as this year’s book. The book will be read both in and out of class by students, faculty, librarians, residence hall staff, and others. The purpose of the Common Reading Program is to “provide an opportunity for an integrated experience for all members of the University of Cincinnati community and will demonstrate the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated disciplines to our students.” ( UC First-Year Student Common Reading Program)

The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights occupies the center of the display because it was the first statement (1948) that defined and declared support for human rights by nearly all nations. The right side of the display describes the Urban Morgan Human Rights Institute, the Human Rights Quarterly, and the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights and includes samples of those publications. The right side includes photographs and captions from recent, egregious violations of human rights from all over the world.

Please take a few minutes to go to Langsam Library to witness a celebration of one of the great strengths of our College.

View the Exhibit Poster

Submitted for Your Consideration: Two Classes That Will Help Distinguish You in a Crowd

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As spring semester registration opens, we’d like to tell you about two classes taught by librarian faculty. These classes, Advanced Legal Research and Technology in the Law Practice, offer skills training and substantive knowledge in areas that will benefit you, whether you practice in a firm or strike out on your own.

Advanced Legal Research delves deeply into learning how to find the information you need. We begin with the strategy of constructing your research: identifying issues and concepts, selecting appropriate resources, and constructing a good search syntax. We follow up with hands-on exercises in every class. You’ll work in teams, letting you appreciate your teammates’ particular talents. You’ll work hard for your three credit hours. At the end of the semester, you may echo what past participants have said: “This was an awesome course that will help me practice law. In that sense, I think it is one of the most valuable upper level courses.” “I think this course should be mandatory for upper-class students.” Take this class and you will NOT be one of the new associates about whom so many partners say, “I wish our new associates knew how to research a simple problem.” Susan Boland, Ron Jones, and Ken Hirsh invite you to be a crackerjack legal researcher.

Technology in the Law Practice introduces you to the professional side of technology. You may already be a social network maven, but did you know that your tweets and posts could create disciplinary problems? Can you keep your client communications confidential using email? How do you manage your cases with your computer? How has electronic record-keeping changed discovery? Shannon Kemen and Ken Hirsh will move technology from the background to front and center in your academic and professional thinking.


It’s Open Access Week

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The Open Access movement celebrates its efforts each year with International Open Access Week. “Open Access” to information is, quoting from the Open Access Week’s About page, “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need.” There is strong representation in the Open Access movement within the legal information community. CALI is offering a webinar all about open access in the legal information community on Tuesday, October 22, at 12:00 noon Eastern Time, and again on Friday, October 25, at 3:00 P.M. Eastern Time.

The Marx Law Library is a strong proponent of Open Access to legal information. Our director has signed the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, which calls on all law schools to move their journals to electronic publication with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats. The Marx Law Library operates the college’s digital repository, which includes the online site for the University of Cincinnati Law Review and our faculty scholarly works.

The Open Access movement is all about making scholarship more widely available. You can make your own work more friendly to re-use by protecting it with one of the licenses available at Creative Commons. There you will find licenses that you can fine tune to provide the level of protection you wish while making easier for others to build on your work.

“You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone!”

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The refrain from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi may echo in your head when you realize that this is “Banned Books Week.” Sponsored by several organizations including the American Library Association and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, the week serves to draw attention to intellectual freedom and efforts that challenge freedom of expression. The library display screen has some interesting statistics on the numbers of book bannings and challenges to those bannings in the U.S. over the past decade. While the mass burning of books as in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is not a reality in this country, in many communities strong efforts are made to restrict what children and even older individuals may find on bookshelves. Banned Books Week is a reminder that we must remain vigilant in our support of unfettered access to information.