By popular demand, our Westlaw and Lexis reps are offering more supplemental training sessions during the next two weeks. The classes are open to all students — 1Ls, upper-class JD students, and LLM students.

Topics for the sessions include secondary research, case law research, case law updating, statutory research, administrative law research, terms and connectors searching, and more.

No advance sign up is necessary for these optional sessions.

For dates/times of these sessions, see this calendar.

The Supreme Court today agreed to hear a case on the legality of the $2.5 billion puntive damages award against Exxon Mobil in the Exxon Valdez case.  For more information on goings on in the Court, check out SCOTUSblog.

The law library enjoys providing its community of users with access to open source or free legal resources.  In that vein, the Legal Information Institute @ Cornell Law School (http://www.law.cornell.edu/) is a terrific source of reliable and free primary legal materials.  The main areas of information provided include:

• Constitutions and Codes
• Court Opinions
• Law by Source or Jurisdiction
• Introduction to Basic Legal Citation
• LII Topical Libraries

Take a look!

The department formally known as the Office of Computer Systems (OCS)” has changed its title to Office of Systems and Technology (OST). They’ve also changed their help-desk number to the user-friendly 8-5555. 

You may be familiar with U.S. Law Week (and its Supreme Court Today section), a great tool for monitoring developments in cases pending before the Supreme Court. Law Week is just one of many BNA update services to which the library subscribes. See the simple directions for subscribing to these services (below).

Here are a few other ideas for getting up-to-date information on the U.S. Supreme Court: Continue Reading »

Did you know that the University licenses thousands of books in electronic form?  Some of the licensed collections  include: Anglo-American legal treatises via Making of Modern Law, Oxford Scholarship Online “covering religion, philosophy, political science, and economics” and HeinOnline, which offers the text of legal classics and more. 

In addition to BU licensed books, Mugar Library’s E-Books Research Guide lists over a dozen repositories of open access eBooks which includes university press titles, Google Book Search, and more.

Hein Online is an awesome electronic legal resource.  Click on the link below and give a listen to learn about Hein’s extensive contents.  The audio file is in .mp3 format.

Pappas Podcast #2 — The Sublime Greatness of Hein Online

Hi.  You can find an insightful and quite brilliant tutorial on finding and updating statutes at the link below.  The tutorial is a Power Point presentation with a 5.1 Dolby Digital audio narration. So, turn up the volume and take a look!

Pappas Podcast #1 - Finding and Updating Statutes

Hi.  Law Library Portals provide a “one-stop shopping” collection of links and resources in specialized research areas on one easy-to-see-and-use webpage.  We’ve got portals on American Constitutional and Legal History, European Union Human Rights, International Trade, and much more.  Take a look!

Over the next two weeks, there will be numerous optional training opportunities for you to learn more about LexisNexis and Westlaw. These supplemental sessions will cover in depth those research skills we introduced in the mandatory online legal research classes. Supplemental training sessions include secondary sources, case law research, case law updating, statutory research, administrative law research, and online search strategies (including terms and connectors searching, etc.). Multiple sessions per topic will be offered. And all sessions are completely OPTIONAL.

The LexisNexis sessions will be taught by our LexisNexis rep, Michael Campion, and the Westlaw sessions will be taught by our Westlaw rep, Mari Bergeron.

In class last week, you received calendars for both the Westlaw and LexisNexis supplmental sessions. However, if you can’t find those calendars, you can just check the 1L Tour & Training Schedule. It lists the times and locations for the Westlaw and LexisNexis sessions–all in one place!