End of Year Lists and Awards

As the year draws to an end, reviews, awards, and lists for 2004 are starting to appear. Dennis Kennedy has released the 2004 Legal Blogging Awards. The "Best Overall Legal Blog Award" went to Sabrina Pacifici's blog, BeSpacific.com. On Findlaw, Edwin Lazarus in a recent column reviews the "Most Important Legal Developments of 2004." The Supreme Court's gerrymandering decision, Vieth v. Jubelirer, took the top spot. Project Gutenberg's list of top 100 downloaded authors and downloaded EBooks, although not based on a full calendar year is also a useful review of what works are being downloaded.

Hot (as in controversial) off the press

A lengthy empirical study, entitled "A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools" by Professor Rick Sander comes out this week in the Stanford Law Review (Issue 2, volume 57). It concerns whether affirmative action has helped or hurt minority students (specifically black students) in the long run. Sander takes the position that more harm is done than good. Even before publication, the study had generated a lot of buzz because Sander posted a draft version in November. It was such a hot potato that Stanford has issued a FAQ about it. In addition, Sander posted raw data at this resource page. Also pre-publication, Sander had guest-blogged at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog featuring Sander's UCLA colleague, Professor Eugene Volokh, who introduced Sander thusly and commented further about Sander's study here. Sander's blog entries at Volokh are here, here, here, and here.

Here's some other early commentary: from another UCLA law prof, Professor Bainbridge; from The American Constitution society for Law & Policy blog; from Terry Eastland in The Weekly Standard here; and a full-scale rebuttal to Sander by Professors David L. Chambers, Richard O. Lempert both of the University of Michigan Law School, Professor Timothy T. Clydesdale of the College of New Jersey, and William C. Kidder, of the Equal Justice Society, entitled "The real impact of eliminating affirmative action in American law schools: an empirical critique of Richard Sander's Stanford Law Review study", which is slated to appear in a subsequent issue of the Standford Law Review.

UPDATE: Sander's reply to the Chambers et. al. critique.

More: Sander debates William Henderson, Associate Professor of Law, Indiana University.

The law of Christmas gift cards

The American Bar Association Business Law Section provides this run-down of the terms and conditions of store or national gift cards.

Parsing al-Zawahiri's latest

Apropos of the release, this past Wednesday, of a new bin Laden audiotape, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington, D.C.-based terrorism research center, takes a stab at parsing the recent videotaped words of bin-Laden's chief ideologue, al-Zawahiri. Gartenstein-Ross is a 2002 graduate of the New York University School of Law. He previously worked as a law clerk for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and as a commercial litigator at the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner.

The Supremes in historical context

In the February, 2005 issue of American History Magazine, Presidential Distinguished Professor at the Emory University School of Law, David J. Garrow, traces historical trends on the Supreme Court over the past four decades. Professor Garrow teaches civil rights litigation and reproductive rights. His most recent book is Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (1994). His Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986) received the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Tort reform

Four states, including Massachusetts, are considering specialized medical malpractice courts, as discussed in this December 16, 2004 National Law Journal article. More discussion here. The American Medical Association weighs in in this December 4, 2004 report, Medical Liability Reform - NOW!, and there is a recent news story from the ABA Journal here Tort Reform Gaining Traction. More advocacy on tort reform, in general, can be found at The American Tort Reform Association, and at The American Tort Reform Foundation.

Supreme Court to hear Peer to Peer case

On Friday, December 10th, the Supreme Court granted MGM's Petition for Cert to review the Ninth Circuit's decision in MGM v. Grokster. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has done an amazing job in collecting briefs supporting and opposing the petition. (scroll down to "Supreme Court Documents"). You can also access a number of news stories from PC World, C-Net, and Wired.

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy to Speak at NESL Law Day Banquet.

NESL announced today that United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will address the NESL Law Day Banquet on April 8, 2004. Here are some links to Justice Kennedy's opinions, biographical information, and speeches.

• Cornell Legal Information Institute.
• FINDLAW Supreme Court Center.
• Speech before the ABA Annual Meeting, August 9, 2003.
• Supreme Court Historical Society.
• ABA Justice Kennedy Commision Recommendations on Prison and Correctional System.

A little pre- or post-exam levity

Good luck on your exams, from all of us at NESL library! For a little frolic and detour, see the 8 December 2004 article from The Onion: Son, we need to talk about this Supreme Court obsession of yours.

Proximate Curse

When we in New England hear of a curse born of events that took place in New York near the beginning of the century, a curse responsible for four score and more years of misery, we think of the Yankees, right? However, The torts scholars among us may think of Mrs. Palsgraf, and the Long Island Railroad. Most of us know the misfortune of Mrs. Palsgraf, injured by an impromptu fireworks display, ultimately denied relief by the New York Court of Appeals via the seminal opinion of future Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo.

However, anyone who does not think immediately about negligence and proximate cause should check out this recent article on law.com (it might also be of particular interest to law students preparing for their Torts exams). Not only does the story recount the historic Cardozo Palsgraf opinion (good review!) but it describes the series of broken arms, dismembered thumbs, defective ladders, stolen evidence broken ankles, and tanker trucks "tottering precariously" on cliffs that have plaqued the progeny of Mrs. Palsgraf since the famous case was decided in 1928. The curse? None of the injured parties ever received reasonable damages for the injuries they all suffered (all, they alleged, due to the negligence of others). Yes, the unfortunate offspring of Mrs. Palsgraf were all denied any major league legal satisfaction for a variety of reasons: stolen evidence, protracted court proceedings, a Bucky Dent home run....

One wonders, of course: should any of Mrs. Palsgraf's heretofore accursed heirs run into legal trouble following the events of October, 2004, do you suppose they might manage to reverse their ill fortune?

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

The vanderbilt TV news archive is "the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news." It contains the archived broadcasts of ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN news programs, and some special news programs such as NightLine. They will loan a tape from their collection for a fee; they will also duplicate news programs from their archives, also for a fee.

They do not archive news "magazine" programs, such as 20/20 and 60 minutes. The evening news broadcasts from the major networks are available from August, 1968 to the present.

Journalist privilege debate

Current topic at Legal Affairs Debate Club:
Time magazine journalist Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller go to trial in Washington, D.C. for refusing to reveal confidential sources. They are the first of several journalists who could face lengthy prison sentences because of charges related to the July 2003 revelation that Valerie Plame was a covert operative of the CIA. Similar cases abound. Last month a Rhode Island reporter was found guilty of contempt for refusing to reveal a source and the invasion-of-privacy case of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee may bring other journalists to trial. While 31 states and the District of Columbia have shield laws designed to protect journalists from being forced to reveal their sources, no such federal law exists. Do journalists need more protection from prosecution?

Media law in general is the topic of Attorney Robert Ambrogi's blog Media Law: a blog about freedom of the press

LexisNexis Launches LexisNexis AlaCarte

Last week information provider LexisNexis announced LexisNexis AlaCarte!, a service for small businesses and independent professionals. This new service will allow users to search free-of-charge and pay only for documents received. The new service is available at: Alacarte.lexisnexis.com

Becker-Posner Blog

Prolific author and federal circuit judge Richard A. Posner and Nobel prize winning economist Gary S. Becker began publication of their blog on December 5th. The blog "will explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format." Initial plans are for a weekly posting. The initial posting deals with preventative war.

Law Professor Blogs.

Law professor blogs are starting to rapidly appear. Two good sites are: BLAWG which is organized as a directory and includes a listing of the most popular law blogs. Presently, there are 29 blogs under the Law Professors link. Law Professor Blogs , advertises itself as a network of blogs designed to assist law professors in their scholarship and teaching. Each site is maintained by a leading scholar in the area and will contain both key links for professors in that area as well as daily news items of interest. Presently, 8 blogs are active and several more scheduled for early January.

Legal history

Time to read over Xmas break? Try American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, just published this November. Great for Lincoln buffs in general and those specifically interested in the assassination's legal aftermath. Michael W. Kaufman loaded 11,000 documents from National Archives microfiche collection into an interactive database so he could re-sort by hundreds of criteria and look for previously unnoticed patterns and connections. Descriptions of the military tribunal and state criminal prosecutions are rich in legal detail (for ex., under existing rules of evidence, conspirators could not act as witnesses if they were indicted) and capture the drama and intensity of the events as they happened.

Supreme Court, Military Commissions and International Law

In two recent postings on the SCOTUSBLOG (United States Supreme Court Blog.) the issue of the degree of attention the Court pays to foreign nations legal views are discussed. The issues arise in Medellin v. Drake and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (brief.) In the Hamdan brief, a total of 271 parliamentarians from British and the European Community asked the Court to act swifly on an appeal on the legality of the commissions under U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. Medellin involves the enforceability of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which provides that detained foreign nationals to communicate with their national consulate. Several foreign governments and amici curiae groups have filed briefs. Amici I , Amici II, European Union.

NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository

NESLReference

In a posting today E-LawLibrary Weblog referenced Marcus P. Zillman's collection of annotated links for academic research on the Web, Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources (PDF, 32 pages). The NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository is among the many resources listed. NELLCO is the New England Law Library Consortium of which NESL is a founding member. The Repository "provides access for working papers, reports, lecture series, workshop presentations, and other scholarship created by faculty at NELLCO member schools."