Welcome Back!
We hope you all had a relaxing and rejuvenating winter break!
All of us at the Mendik Library wish for you a rewarding and fulfilling semester. We’d love to be a part of your success and hope you will let us help you with all your research and information needs.
Good luck and best wishes for a great semester! We’re looking forward to strengthening our partnership.
The Mendik Library Staff
A historic moment in New York Law School’s 126-year history came on December 27, 1974, when we received accreditation as the 133rd member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).
Accreditation came just four months after submission of the school’s application, and made NYLS the first AALS-accredited law school not affiliated with a university.
To learn more, read (or download) the February 1975 issue of Equitas, available on New York Law School’s Digital Commons.
Exam period is here and your easygoing nature probably is diminishing quickly. So much studying and outlining to do! Because of that, little things that you ignored last week are a big deal today. So, if it bugs you, say something.
Tell us about the light bulb over your favorite study spot that is out. And the person who brings in those delectable garlic fries you love, that now seem too garlicky and too greasy for the library. And the guy in the stairwell talking on his cell phone at full volume.
If you see, hear, or smell something, say something. It’s your library and you are here to study without distractions. Let us help do that.
With finals approaching, your thoughts may be turning to study aids. If you’re interested in digital versions, you’re in luck. Our LexisNexis Digital Library, a collection of eBooks that you can check out and read on your computer, includes dozens of study aids and treatises.
You can access all of them from the Library’s home page. Click on LexisNexis Digital Library (under Electronic Resources) and then enter your NYLS credentials.
The service is easy to use, but if you have any questions, just contact a Reference Librarian.
All published U.S. court decisions from 1658 to June 2018 are now freely accessible online, thanks to the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a partnership between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and Ravel Law, acquired by LexisNexis. CAP’s goal is to “make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent digitized format.” To create this massive collection, law librarians at Harvard digitized roughly 40 million pages of decisions contained in roughly 40,000 bound reporter volumes .
Users can access the data via an open-source API (application programming interface). CAP provides a Beginner’s introduction to API along with usage examples that explain how to retrieve cases by ID or through simple full-text searches.
For more information, see Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog post and the CAP website.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Halloween Info Hunt!
We want to thank ALL of you for putting your research skills to work and joining us in what we hope you all found to be a great learning experience. Here are the 29 winners drawn from our renowned Raffle Drum:
Happy soon-to-be-Halloween from the Mendik Library!
As an early Halloween treat, here’s your opportunity to WIN great study aids, law dictionaries, faculty books, pre-loaded OneCards, NYLS swag, and who knows what else! Just answer the 6 Haunted Halloween 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 that will get you to the answer.
Print this answer sheet (or pick up a copy at the Reference Desk) and drop it the Raffle Drum on the Reference Desk by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, October 31, and then join us outside the library at 5:45 p.m. for some sweet treats and the drawing.
The new Supreme Court term is set to begin this year on Monday October 1, 2018.
For previews of arguments scheduled for this term, visit the SCOTUSblog. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII) offers a comprehensive preview of the upcoming term. You can also find summaries of and links to all cases scheduled thus far for argument at Oyez. The First Mondays podcast, hosted by law professors Dan Epps and Ian Samuel, is a self-described “entertaining podcast about the Supreme Court.” The most recent episode (recorded September 24, 2018) provides a birds-eye view of the coming term. You can listen to oral arguments at the Supreme Court’s Oral Arguments link, where the audio is posted at the end of each argument week. You can access the parties’ briefs at the Supreme Court’s web site. (Under Case Documents click the link for Docket Search.)
Take a break from the tedium of law study and enjoy the pleasures of punctuation!
September 24 is National Punctuation Day: “A celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”
How do you celebrate such an event? Enter the 2018 National Punctuation Day contest, the topic of which will be posted here on September 24.
