Selecting Your Courses for Next Year: Why You Should Consider Legal Research

Selecting Your Courses for Next Year: Why You Should Consider Legal Research

Among the most important skills all lawyers rely upon is the ability to do legal research—to find what’s needed to interpret and analyze legal issues. Legal research is an integral part of the “competencies” that NYLS and the ABA require of law students. Effective research skills are vital to students engaged in any type of legal writing, to those who are clerking or participating in externships, and to those entering legal practice.

To help you prepare for the realities of law practice, we offer a number of courses that build upon skills learned in the first year and will make you a more efficient, confident and successful researcher.

Legal Research: Practical Skills (1 credit)
Builds on fundamental research skills through refining students’ techniques, introducing shortcuts and new approaches, and developing effective strategies. The course focuses on finding legislation, administrative materials, and related cases; using the secondary sources relied on by practitioners; attaining greater proficiency and comfort with Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, and other online research tools, including reliable free and low-cost sources. We also offer this class with a focus on a particular substantive practice area, including Corporate & Business Law; Criminal Law; Family Law; Foreign and International Law; Intellectual Property Law; Labor and Employment Law; and Real Estate Law.

Legal Research: Skills for the Digital World (3 credits)
Continues to build on the fundamentals described in Legal Research: Practical Skills. Students concentrate on more advanced techniques and strategies and learn to evaluate online and print materials in order to choose the best and most cost effective source for particular projects. Some assignments are geared to students’ individual subject interests. Take-home assignments test and enhance students’ ability to perform various research tasks and strengthen their understanding of important research process and strategy considerations.

Want more information? Contact Prof. Michael Roffer

Meet Peggy!

March is Women’s History Month. So introduce yourself to Peggy, the Women and the Law database available on HeinOnline.  It brings together books, biographies and periodicals dedicated to the role of women in society and the law.  You can access it from the HeinOnline home page.  In addition, the Library of Congress has a dedicated web page for Women’s History Month, including information about events, ceremonies, and celebrations.

The Green Book

The Green Book: Travel is Fatal to Prejudice

Green Book, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, was loosely based on the true story of a friendship between an African-American concert pianist, Dr. Don Shirley, and his Italian-American driver and bodyguard, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga—a friendship that developed on the road during a concert tour through the “Deep South” in the 1960s.

While the story is moving and the acting superb, the movie and its audiences might have been better served if its eponymous inspiration had been given a more prominent role.  Few people recognize the film’s title as a cinematic nod to the Negro Motorist Green Book—an indispensable ready reference source that many African-American travelers and motorists relied upon during the Jim Crow era.

The film is set in 1962—more than a quarter of a century after the “Green Book” was first published by Victor Hugo Green, a New Jersey mail carrier living in Harlem.  The Green Book, which was updated annually, contained travel tips, articles, and listings of hotels and other lodging, restaurants, nightclubs, gas stations, garages, salons, barbershops, and other businesses and establishments where African-Americans were known to be welcomed and served.

The Green Book provided a measure of protective reassurance and was designed to avoid or mitigate “embarrassing situations,” as Green himself put it, while also affording subtle commentary on the racial and social injustices of the time.  For example, the same 1949 cover that cautions its readers to “Carry your Green Book with you—You may need it” also displays “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice,” a quote from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.

 

You can access digital versions of one of the largest collections of Green Books here, courtesy of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Find Love in the Library!

Find Love in the Library!!

The Valentine’s Day Info Hunt is back! Can you find love in the Library?

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, here’s a sweet treat for you: an opportunity to WIN study aids, Lexis points, NYLS swag, and other swell stuff. Just answer the easy (and fun) Valentine’s Day Info Hunt questions. Your answers don’t need to be perfect—just close!

Click here to access the questions. Each slide includes just one question, along with step-by-step instructions to get you to the answer. Print the PDF answer sheet (or pick up a copy at the Reference Desk) and drop it in our Reference Desk Raffle Drum by 3:00 pm on Thursday February 14, and then join us outside the library at 5:30 for some sweets and the prize drawing at 5:45pm.

 

xoxo

Black History Month: Moses Leonard Frazier, NYLS First African American Graduate

Moses Leonard Frazier, Class of 1899, is believed to have been NYLS First African American Graduate.  In the early days of NYLS, students enrolled by signing a student registration ledger and writing certain basic information about themselves, e.g., their age (in years, months and days!), the college or graduate school they had attended (although a college degree was not a requirement for admission to NYLS until the 1960s), their address and the names and addresses of their parents or guardians.  Moses Leonard Frazier’s signature appears on the Student Ledger Book 7, page 13, line 9.

 

A collection of all student ledgers can be found on the NYLS Digital Commons Page.

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Day

Legislation signed in 1983 marked the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a federal holiday, celebrated on the third Monday of each January. In 1994, Congress designated the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a national day of service, now led by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

This year, the NYLS community is honoring Dr. King’s legacy by expanding its traditional day of service to a week of volunteering, trainings, and discussions. The “Week of Action” is being organized by NYLS’s Impact Center for Public Interest Law, one of its six academic centers. Click here for more information.

 

Spring 2019 RSW Registration is Open

Registration is open for this semester’s Research Skills Workshops (RSW):

  • EELR II (1/15 – 2/7)
  • Introduction to Administrative & Regulatory Research (2/11 – 2/24)
  • Citators:  Is All your Research Up to Date? (2/25 – 3/7)


Please Note:

  • Legal Practice Students must attend all three RSW.
  • Other members of the community are welcome to attend the Introduction to Administrative & Regulatory Research and the Citators:  Is All your Research Up to Date? RSW.
  • Advance Registration is required for all three RSW.
  • To register please go to the library homepage or click on link:  https://libguides.nyls.edu/rsw

 

IMPORTANT CHANGES TO NYLS LIBRARY LABS

Important changes have been made to the Library lab PCs. Most students use these labs, and so should pay careful attention to the following:

Network Login: All lab PCs have been reconfigured to login automatically to a generic account named “Lab User”. You will no longer login with your personal username and password. Rather, the PC you’re using will have a desktop that gives you access to internet browsers and applications – Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat – logged in as Lab User.

Password? Your lab PC shouldn’t be asking you for a password, but if it does, just restart the PC.

My Network Account? You won’t be able to login to your own network account when you’re working at a lab PC. If you want to save a file you have several choices: 1) Save it to your OneDrive; 2) Email it to yourself; 3) Save it to a thumb drive.

Name Your Documents before Printing!!! When you send a document to print, it will appear in the queue as coming from “Lab User”, a generic name. To make sure you can identify your own document in the queue, you must give it a name you can recognize! If your document is named “Document1” you won’t be able to distinguish it from other users’ documents. Save it with a unique name before you send it to the printer!

The Library staff stands ready to help you adjust to these changes. Just visit the Reference Desk, or call us at ext. 2332.