Author: library

Have You Tried Loislaw Yet?

Loislaw is a comprehensive, user-friendly, low-cost electronic legal research service.  It offers access to a wide range of primary and secondary materials for federal as well as all fifty state jurisdictions.  Secondary sources and bar association materials are somewhat limited in the law school edition.  Loislaw also offers an electronic clip service, a citator (GlobalCite), and a variety of productivity features and services. 

Once students register for Loislaw, they have access throughout their law school program.  Service continues through summers and there is no restriction on use.  Best of all, it’s available free to law students for 6 months following graduation.  If you’d like help with Loislaw, stop by the Reference Desk or contact The Loislaw Support Group at 1-800-364-2512.

To sign up for Loislaw you need to get New York Law School’s code for registration.  Once you have the code follow the instructions for registration found here.  Look for the New to Loislawschool.com link.

New Look for Lexis

Lexis has just introduced a brand new interface. The change in look is not dramatic and after a few uses, you should feel right at home. The new design lets users experience the enhanced features at their own pace.  To oversimplify, the gray background has become white and the top tool bar has moved over to the right side. The “Related Content” section in the left frame of the search results screen has case background information, related secondary source links, and tools to allow one to move easily around and within documents.  Lexis has also introduced Lexis for Microsoft Office, a productivity tool that automates certain Lexis research tasks and frees users from having to leave a Word document or Outlook message to sign onto Lexis.  It is now available on all Mendik Library computers and you can download it to your laptop or home computer (including Macs).

Spilled Coffee Imperils Airliner . . . and your Library!

For those Library patrons who tend to minimize the impact of spilled coffee, read about the nightmare that ensued on a recent United Airlines flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany.  The Wall Street Journal report is here.

If you’d rather watch than read, check out the referenced movie, Fate is the Hunter.  Follow Glen Ford as he discovers the cause of the fatal plane crash he is investigating – a spilled cup of cockpit coffee (which short-circuited the plane’s instruments).  Here’s the less than stellar New York Times movie review (from December 10, 1964).

Moral:  Use spill-proof mugs!

 

A Day in the Life of a 1L

On a Wednesday in April 2008, during the second semester of his first year of law school, Jesse Nix decided to capture “a normal” day of his life as a student at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.  “I set my computer to take a picture every 30 seconds . . . .”

Nix chose Wednesday because it was his busiest day of the week.  He began filming on his car ride to campus at 7:45 a.m. and stopped filming at 3:00 p.m.  “I didn’t want to film me studying for hours and hours, so I decided to stop it on my way back home.”

Nix’s resulting “video representation” is now the popular YouTube video “A Day in the Life of a Law Student.”

Enjoy!

 

Library Closed Monday, December 27

Due to weather conditions, the Library will be closed on Monday, December 27, 2010.  For study purposes, NYLS students can use the 5th floor student areas of the 185 W. Broadway building, the Broad Student Center, and the Stiefel Reading Room.  The Library will reopen on Tuesday,  December 28 at 9:00 a.m.

Anniversary of the Lockerbie Bombing

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, the result of a bomb in the luggage compartment. All 259 people aboard and eleven people on the ground were killed. In 1991, after a massive international criminal investigation, Libyan intelligence officers Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were charged with the deaths. Their motive was alleged to be retribution for the 1986 U.S. bombing of Tripoli.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi refused to turn over the suspects to U.S. or United Kingdom authorities. What followed was eight years of U.S. sanctions against Libya and negotiations involving the U.S., Libya, the U.K., Saudi Arabia and the United Nations in an attempt to bring the suspects to justice. In March, 1999 they were finally turned over to authorities in the Netherlands, where they were tried by a Scottish tribunal. The trial began May 3, 2000 and on January 31, 2001 the three judges acquitted Fhimah and convicted Megrahi, who was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve 20 years before being considered for release. Megrahi’s appeal hearing, the first U.K. judicial hearing ever broadcast publicly, ended with a dismissal.

The government of Libya eventually paid billions of dollars to the victims’ families in order to settle civil lawsuits. After a criminal conviction of willful misconduct regarding its security services, Pan Am was also found civilly liable for the deaths. See, e.g., Pescatore v. Pan American World Airways, Inc., 887 F. Supp. 71 (E.D.N.Y. 1995), aff’d and remanded, 97 F.3d 1 (2d Cir. 1996).

In 2009, Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds after it was found he suffered from terminal prostate cancer. He returned to Libya and as of this writing is still alive. The recent Wikileaks scandal has revealed information indicating that Libya had threatened harsh reprisal against the U.K. if Megrahi died in prison.

Volume 36, Issues 2 & 3 of the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (“Terrorism on Trial”) features multiple articles examining the Lockerbie trial.

 

A New Resource for N.Y. Criminal Law

Researchers tasked with finding the legislative history of New York criminal statutes have long faced a daunting challenge.  By far the best source of this history is found in the records of the Temporary Commission on Revision of Penal Laws and Criminal Code, a state agency that functioned between 1961 and 1970.  Unfortunately, these published documents were not widely distributed to law libraries, nor was their research value generally recognized.  As a result, few libraries hold this collection, and the few libraries that do are unwilling to lend documents from it.  Thus the legislative history has been difficult to come by – until now.

The State Supreme Court Criminal Term Library for New York County has just released a digital collection of these records, available on its website:

http://www.nycourts.gov/library/nyc_criminal/library_resources.shtml

This free public resource is full-text searchable, and makes the documents accessible in PDF format.  For the first time ever, the legislative history of most modern New York criminal law – substantive and procedural – will be easily accessible to researchers.