In The New York Times’ Opinionator blog, the always-interesting Linda Greenhouse has a new post on the shifting influence of Justice Kennedy on a more-conservative Supreme Court. According to Greenhouse, “Justice Kennedy no longer appears to reside at the court’s center of gravity. The center has shifted to the right.”

How to find personal information about someone is one of those difficult research tasks that is never taught.  Want to know what public records are available where?  Here is a wonderful overview of the various free and fee-based resources available for public records.

The library hours for Pappas and the Annex are as follows:

Friday, July 2: 9am - 3pm

Saturday, July 3 - Monday, July 5: CLOSED

Have a good weekend everyone.

As you may recall, last July’s arrest of Professor Gates by Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department made news headlines and resulted in a heated debate about “the ways in which issues of race, class, power, authority, and respect intersect with the everyday operations of the police.” (Report, p. 13)

Today’s Boston Globe discusses the report on Gates’ arrest and mentions how the report found both parties “at blame” for the incident and its aftermath.  The report of the Cambridge Review Committee on the Gates’ arrest may be found in the City of Cambridge Police Department website.

Check out Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing live on C-SPAN!

Wordles are word clouds that help visualize large datasets. All you need to do is find text that you want to analyze, go to www.wordle.net, dump it into the wordle generator, and presto! a wordle. Below is a wordle I made using all 86 federal rules of civil procedure.

There are few things more exciting than the publication of a new edition of the Bluebook (free cake, maybe?).  The new edition, the 19th, is hot off the presses and here in the library.  The new edition is available online with a pay subscription, but for many of us the best way to navigate the book is the old-fashioned way, by looking in the index and flipping the pages.  The changes from the 18th edition appear somewhat substantial and are summarized by the Bluebook’s editors after the jump.

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Are you researching an international arbitration issue? If so, check out the Library’s newest resource on international arbitrations, the Investment Arbitration Reporter. The IA Reporter is an electronic news service that “tracks cross-border arbitrations between foreign investors and their host governments.” The service consists of reports on the latest lawsuits and developments in investment arbitration.

The IA Reporter only provides a handfull of source materials for download. It does not serve as a full database of all investment arbitration awards. The Reporter instead contributes to the free Investment Treaty Arbitration database which provides access to all publicly available investment treaty awards and resources relating to investment treaty arbitration.

Users can either search by keyword or browse by major themes to access reports on their area of research. Some of the major themes included are ICSID, UNCITRAL and Ad-Hoc, Stockholm Chamber, ICC, NAFTA, CAFTA, Energy Charter Treaty, Argentine Disputes, Damages Determinations, Intra-EU Treaties and Claims, Treaty Negotiations, and Arbitrator Challenges. Users can also browse by general topics such as Transportation Disputes, Environmental Disputes, Human Rights, and Land Reform Disputes.

Printing and emailing options are available at the top of each article. The newsletters are also bundled together by month and available as a PDF download (click on PDF editions in the top horizontal menu). Users can follow the IA Reporter with an RSS feed or on Twitter.

To access the Investment Arbitration Reporter, go to http://www.iareporter.com.ezproxy.bu.edu.  It is also listed in the eResources A-Z list on the Pappas home page.

In his remarks at Harvard’s 359th Commencement recently, Justice David Souter shared some reflections about how Justices interpret the Constitution. For anyone who is interested in constitutional law, this is worth reading.

Good morning.  The make-up class for legislative history is today at 3pm in room 334.  Hope to see you there!