This week in the Law Library we’re teaching Advanced Legal Research, teaching first year students about low cost and free legal research, continuing to celebrate Women’s History Month, and previewing oral arguments for the U.S. Supreme Court and Ohio Supreme Court.
This Week’s Research Sessions
Monday, March 25, 2024
Advanced Legal Research Criminal Law
Associate Dean Michael Whiteman and Instructional & Reference Services Librarian Ashley Russell
Room 107
2:00pm – 2:55pm
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Advanced Legal Research Civil Litigation
Associate Director Susan Boland & Instructional & Reference Services Librarian Laura Dixon-Caldwell
Room 135
2:00pm – 2:55pm
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Advocacy, Lawyering II, Cohort 3
Associate Director Susan Boland
Room 230
10:40am – 12:05pm
Low Cost and Free Legal Research
Advocacy, Lawyering II, Cohort 4
Electronic Resources Instructional Services Librarian Ron Jones
Room 245
10:40am – 12:05pm
Advanced Legal Research Ohio
Electronic Resources Instructional Services Librarian Ron Jones
Room 107
2:00pm – 2:55pm
Featured Study Aids
Available via the West Academic study aid subscription, this study aid provides a dual benefit to law students who, to become licensed lawyers, have to pass both a law school exam in a Legal Ethics course as well as the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE). To prepare for the law school examination, there are pages of text, numerous outlines, bullet points, sample essay questions and answers, and mini-checklists to learn the basics and fine points of Professional Responsibility. In addition, this book discusses all recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinions. The Acing book also enables students to quickly recall and pass the MPRE.
Available via the CALI subscription, there are many interactive exercises for Ethics and Professional Responsibility. You will need to set up a password to use CALI online. To set up a username and password, you will be asked to enter UC Law’s authorization code. You can get this code from any reference librarian or at the Circulation Desk.
Available via the Aspen Learning Library subscription, this text covers the whole field of professional responsibility, focusing not only on the ABA Model Rules, but on the often-complex relationship between the rules and doctrines of agency, tort, contract, evidence, and constitutional law. Beginning with the formation of the attorney-client relationship, the book proceeds through topics including attorneys’ fees, malpractice and ineffective assistance of counsel, confidentiality and privilege rules, conflicts of interest, witness perjury and litigation misconduct, advertising and solicitation, admission to practice, and the organization of the legal profession. Coverage includes all subjects that are tested on the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE), including: A chapter on judicial ethics, a subject tested on the MPRE and not often covered thoroughly, if at all, in law school professional responsibility courses. Updated discussion and examples based on recent developments in the law, including the ABA’s simplification of the rules on advertising and solicitation, new Model Rule 8.4(g) on discrimination in the practice of law, the California Supreme Court’s Sheppard Mullin opinion on advance waivers of conflicts, and continuing developments in the impact of technology on the practice of law. A series of problems at the end of each section or chapter assist you in testing your understanding. Answers are provided for these problems. More MPRE-style multiple-choice questions in the Examples.
Available via the LexisNexis Digital Library study aid subscription, this book is a tool for students to test their understanding of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the Model Code of Judicial Conduct, and other doctrines of the Law of Lawyering such as malpractice, breach of fiduciary duty, and disqualification. Its 208 questions are organized to track the topics and the emphasis of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE) and thus can be used productively for bar exam preparation as well as for review of material covered in a student’s required professional responsibility course. The book provides detailed explanations why the right answers are correct and why the wrong answers are wrong, including citations to the rules or other authorities that the students should rely upon.
Featured Database
Available on Bloomberg Law, this is the ABA’s flagship publication on legal ethics. The Lawyer’s Manual’s mission is to provide authoritative guidance on professional responsibility law and malpractice to all practitioners. The publication offers over 130 chapters of in-depth analysis; full text of ABA ethics opinions, Model Rules, and Standards; summaries of ethics opinions issued by more than 60 state and local jurisdictions; and a current developments component providing the latest news and analysis of issues in the field of legal ethics.
Featured Guide
The Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE) is a 60-question, two-hour-and-five-minute, multiple-choice examination administered three times each year. It is required for admission to the bars of all but four U.S. jurisdictions (Ohio is a jurisdiction that requires it). This page within the Bar Exam Resources guide provides you with resources to help you study for it.
Featured Treatise
Available on Westlaw, this provides the rules accompanied by commentary and annotations.
Featured Videos
Researching Legal Ethics video series
Featured Website
You, Me, and the MPRE
Written by Scot Goins, Director of Academic Achievement and Bar Success at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, this four part series provides advice for studying and taking the MPRE. In Part 1, they review what the MPRE is and what score is required for your jurisdiction (they focus on Georgia, which is where AJMLS is located). Next, in Part 2, they breakdown the different areas of professional responsibility that are tested on the exam, in order to help you understand where to spend the majority of your study time. Then, in Part 3, they discuss resources for your MPRE preparation, including free MPRE courses. Finally, in Part 4, they review an appropriate timeline and review strategies for your studies (although individuals vary a great deal, so you may have to adjust your timeline according to your own progress).
March Is Women’s History Month
This month is Women’s History Month and the Law Library will be celebrating all month with our display, candy, and blog postings. Women’s History Month had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as “Women’s History Week.” Throughout the next five years, Congress continued to pass joint resolutions designating a week in March as “Women’s History Week.” In 1987 after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9 which designated the month of March 1987 as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, Presidents have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.”
The 2024 Women’s History theme is “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” According to the National Women’s History Alliance, “During 2024, we recognize the example of women who are committed to embracing everyone and excluding no one in our common quest for freedom and opportunity. They know that people change with the help of families, teachers and friends, and that young people in particular need to learn the value of hearing from different voices with different points of view as they grow up.”
UC Events Celebrating Women’s History Month
Law Library Women’s History Month Display
Stop by in the next few weeks to view our exhibit, curated by Rhonda Wiseman, spotlighting alumni, women leaders, and monographs from our collection that focus on the history and journey of women’s rights and women’s contributions to the legal community and beyond. Of particular note is the special section of the display honoring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who visited UC Law to dedicate the refurbished Taft Hall and delivered the fourth William Howard Taft Lecture on Constitutional Law.
This year’s selections highlight the 2024 theme for Women’s History Month – “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.”
Co-curated by Christopher Platts, UC DAAP assistant professor of art history, Elizabeth Meyer, head of the DAAP Library and Mike Ruzga, an independent art conservator, the exhibition focuses on Hemessen, the most famous woman artist of the Northern Renaissance, her signed painting of Christ’s Passion from 1556 and her patron, Mary Hungary, Governor of the Netherlands.
Ever since Winona Lee Hawthorne became the first female to earn a degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1878, women have built an impressive legacy as Bearcat students and alumnae. Today, women constitute the majority of each graduating class, and their achievements continue to elevate the institution, their communities and their chosen fields. For these reasons, the UC Alumni Association proudly marks Women’s History Month — celebrating the excellence of the past and present while eagerly anticipating the greatness that lies ahead.
Smash the PLATE-riarchy
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
12:00pm – 2:00pm
Bearcat Commons
What makes you mad? What represents a part of the patriarchy you want to smash? Write it down in a plate, suit up with some safety goggles and gloves, and choose a bat or hammer before you go to town(they’ll also have other objects to smash or you can bring your own). Surprisingly cathartic, they hope to start a conversation about ways women are often discouraged from expressing anger (especially in public), how they channel anger into action and change, and have a little fun while doing it.
Women’s History Month Speaker/ BSU Visit
Friday, March 29, 2024
12:30pm – 2:00pm
UCBA Muntz Hall 328
Miss Elshaddai Melaku will be a speaker for Women’s History month for Black Student Union. Elshaddai is a third-year student from Louisville, KY majoring in Computer Science and pursuing her MBA through the Accelerated Degree Program. She is a Darwin T. Turner Scholar, MLT Career Prep Fellow, and member of Sigma Phi Women’s Honorary. Elshaddai serves as a mentor through the African American Cultural Resource Center and Turner, an ambassador for the AACRC, University Honors Program, and College of Engineering, and Miss Kuamka 2024.
5 Resources to Learn More about Women’s History
At the beginning of the month we focused on women in the legal profession. Next, we focused on more general media and archival resources on women’s history. Last week we looked at databases that will help you learn more about women’s history. This week we look at selected books.
Feminist Legal History represents feminist legal historians’ efforts to define their field, by showcasing historical research and analysis that demonstrates how women were denied legal rights, how women used the law proactively to gain rights, and how, empowered by law, women worked to alter the law to try to change gendered realities. Encompassing two centuries of American history, thirteen original essays expose the many ways in which legal decisions have hinged upon ideas about women or gender as well as the ways women themselves have intervened in the law, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s notion of a legal class of gender to the deeply embedded inequities involved in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a 2007 Supreme Court pay discrimination case.
Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions answers that question in the affirmative by re-writing seminal opinions that implicate critical dimensions of criminal law jurisprudence, from the sexual assault law to provocation to cultural defences to the death penalty. Right now, one in three Americans has a criminal record, mass incarceration and over-criminalization are the norm, and our jails cycle through about ten million people each year. At the same time, sexual assaults are rarely prosecuted at all, domestic violence remains pervasive, and the distribution of punishment, and by extension justice, seems not only raced and classed, but also gendered. We have had #MeToo campaigns and #SayHerName campaigns, and yet not enough has changed. How might all of justice look different through a feminist lens. This book answers that question.
Feminist Judgments: Health Law Rewritten (Seema Mohapatra & Lindsay F. Wiley eds., 2022) (e-Book)
This volume provides an alternate history of health law by rewriting key judicial opinions from a feminist perspective. Each chapter includes a rewritten opinion penned by a leading scholar relying exclusively on court precedents and scientific understanding available at the time of the original decision accompanied by commentary from an expert placing the case in historical context and explaining how the feminist judgment might have shaped a different path for subsequent developments. It provides a map of the health law field-where paternalism, individualism, gender stereotypes, and tensions over the public-private divide shape decisions about informed consent, medical and nursing malpractice, the relationships among health care professionals and the institutions where they work, end-of-life care, reproductive health care, biomedical research, ownership of human tissues and cells, the influence of religious directives on health care standards, health care discrimination, long-term care, private health insurance, Medicaid coverage, the Affordable Care Act, and more.
What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? Feminist Judgments brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant US Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions reveal that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice. Feminist Judgments opens a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact of judicial diversity on the law as well as the influence of perspective on judging.
By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.
March Oral Arguments at the United States Supreme Court
From SCOTUS Blog:
Monday, Mar. 25, 2024
Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe – whether the Indian Health Service must pay “contract support costs” not only to support IHS-funded activities, but also to support the tribe’s expenditure of income collected from third parties.
Harrow v. Dep’t. of Def. – whether the 60-day deadline in 5 U.S.C. § 7703(b)(1)(A) for a federal employee to petition the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review a final decision of the Merit Systems Protection Board is jurisdictional.
Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2024
Food and Drug Admin. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Med. – (1) whether respondents have Article III standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s 2016 and 2021 actions with respect to mifepristone’s approved conditions of use; (2) whether the FDA’s 2016 and 2021 actions were arbitrary and capricious; and (3) whether the district court properly granted preliminary relief.
Wednesday, Mar. 27, 2024
Erlinger v. United States – whether the Constitution requires a jury trial and proof beyond a reasonable doubt to find that a defendant’s prior convictions were “committed on occasions different from one another,” as is necessary to impose an enhanced sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act.
Connelly v. Internal Revenue Serv. – whether the proceeds of a life-insurance policy taken out by a closely held corporation on a shareholder in order to facilitate the redemption of the shareholder’s stock should be considered a corporate asset when calculating the value of the shareholder’s shares for purposes of the federal estate tax.
March Arguments at the Ohio Supreme Court
You can view the live stream of oral arguments on the Court’s website or see them after the arguments take place in the Ohio Channel archives.
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
State of Ohio, ex rel. City of Obetz v. Stinziano – whether the Franklin County auditor and treasurer have a legal duty to disburse property taxes to the city of Obetz and to refund payments made from a special fund for property improvements. Court News Ohio Oral Argument Preview
Marysville Exempted Vill. Sch. Bd. of Ed. v. Union Cnty. Bd. of Revision – whether a board of education can contest a county property valuation that occurred before a state law change and file an appeal with the Board of Tax Appeals after the law took effect. Court News Ohio Oral Argument Preview
In re Nat’l Prescription Opiate Litig. – (1) whether the Ohio Product Liability Act eliminates the ability to use other legal theories to claim the sale of a legal product is a public nuisance; and (2) whether the Ohio Product Liability Act prevents county governments from seeking funds to abate the nuisance. Court News Ohio Oral Argument Preview
State v. Gasper – whether a permanent mental condition falls under the definition of “substantial impairment” as in the Supreme Court of Ohio decision State v. Zeh, 31 Ohio St. 3d 99 (1987) in a prosecution for rape. Court News Ohio Oral Argument Preview
