Libraries are bridges to information and knowledge.

Register Citations from 8-1-07 to 6-11-08 (Cumulative)

The following citator compiled by James R. Sahlem, Principal Law Librarian of the New York Supreme Court at Buffalo, is intended to “fill the gap” in NYCRR, both print and electronic format. It covers the most recent ten-month period. It is designed to be printed and stapled and left at the end of your NYCRR or retained in e-format as a back-up to electronic research. Hopefully, this will demonstrate that the long-standing NYCRR gap problem can be cured. I will be providing twice-monthly cumulative updates. Those familiar with the CFR- LSA will have a good analogy.

PROCEDURE

Bonnie Shucha has asked us to “spead the word” about the exciting Web 2.0 Challenge that is being sponsored by the Computer Services Special Interest Group of the American Association of Law Libraries. We are happy to do so. Here is part of Bonnie’s announcement:

Are you interested in learning about applications like blogs, wikis, and Second Life, but don’t have a lot of time?

Take the Computing Services-SIS Web 2.0 Challenge!

From Goro Toshima:

I wanted to alert you to my award-winning documentary, A Hard Straight, which shows what it’s really like to make the radical transition from prison life to society, by following the post-release stories of three people in close and unflinching detail …

…One spent his childhood in foster homes, juvenile detention, and the gang life before his adult convictions. Now, the one thing he knows for sure is that he is a 2-striker and another conviction will land him in prison for the rest of his life… The second had logged more time in prison for parole violations than for his original sentence. “My friends are few, and my world is cold,” he confides, waiting on a street corner notorious for drug deals… The third, a mother whose oldest daughter had taken in the two younger children during her prison term. Life becomes very complicated very quickly once she gains her freedom. Increasing friction with her daughter comes to a head over her struggle with methamphetamine addiction.

” Let’s face it, during the reign of Bill Gates, Microsoft hasn’t exactly been Xerox Parc when it comes to inventing and creating new technologies. For the most part, Microsoft has been content to buy or copy new technologies and focus on incremental improvements to its products. But that doesn’t mean that Bill Gates and Microsoft weren’t innovative. In the areas of business strategies and cutthroat competition, Microsoft has used a combination of unique and very effective innovations to make itself the dominant tech company of the PC era.”

Microsoft”s Top Ten “Innovations”

Self-Represented Litigation Network Leadership Package Launch Conference Baltimore MD, September 8-10, 2008

In September 2008, the Self-Represented Litigation Network will be launching its leadership package entitled: Court Leadership and Self-Represented Litigation Solutions for Access, Effectiveness, and Efficiency.

Following the model of last years successful judicial conference at Harvard, the launch, to be held at the Court Solutions Conference sponsored by the National Center for State Courts, held in Baltimore on September 8-10 will provide an opportunity for groups of leaders to come together and learn about, and practice the use of leadership tools for innovation for the self-represented.

From the Introduction:

“On the Record, the report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, describes a new technological environment in which libraries have exciting opportunities for making information resources available and useful to new and demanding audiences. The Working Group has spent a year studying how best to exercise bibliographic control within this environment. The opening sentence of the report’s introduction sums up conclusions with which the Library of Congress agrees: ‘The future of bivbliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based.”

This Response to the report was prepared under the supervision of Deanna B. Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.

[From an article in the March 17, 2008 The National Law Journal by Tony Mauro of the Legal Times]

There’s a video out there you may want to see – a web site called “LawProse Inc” on which 8 of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices speak about answering questions, writing briefs, arguing before the Court, and their own relationships with written words. For instance, Chief Justice Roberts thinks “lengthy citations to Web sites that are now common in briefs are an ‘obscene’ distraction ‘with all those letters strung together.’ ” Also he doesn’t like overly-long briefs, “I have yet to put down a brief and say ‘I wish that had been longer.'” Justice Breyer is bothered by the same thing, “If I see (a brief that is) 50 pages, it can be 50 pages, but I’m already going to groan,” but “If I see 30, I think, well, he thinks he has really got the law on his side because he only took up 30.”

“Justice Kennedy hates it when lawyers turn nouns into verbs by tacking on ‘-ize’ at the end, as in ‘incentivize.’ Such showy, made-up words, he sniffs, are ‘like wearing a very ugly cravat.”

Contact Information