The Law Library Association of Greater New York, a chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries, is the local library association for legal information professionals.  Each year LLAGNY, as it is referred to, hosts a series of educational programs.  This year, as a member of LLAGNY’s education committee, I coordinated tours of the City Hall Library and the new Visitors’ Center.  The first tour was held on March 13, 2012 and the second tour, already fully booked, is slated for April 24, 2012.  Since the City Hall Library collection is little known in the New York City community, it’s the purpose of this post to inform the BLS community about this gem of a collection.

The City Hall Library is located in room 112 of the Surrogate’s Court building at 31 Chambers Street in Manhattan.  The architect of the building was John R. Thomas and it was constructed between 1899 and 1907.  The building was originally intended as a Hall of Records and was renamed the Surrogate Courthouse in 1962.  The first floor interior is frequently compared to the Paris Opera House.  The building was designated a New York City landmark in 1977.

Christine Bruzzese, Supervising Librarian, pointed out the highlights of the City Hall Library to the LLAGNY group.  The City Hall Library is New York City’s official depository for all agency published reports and studies.  The City Hall Library was established in 1913 and now has a collection of approximately 250,000 volumes.

Some of the highlights of the City Hall Library include:

• New York Laws from 1674 to date
• Proceedings of the New York City Council
• Building Codes, used by city and private attorneys, architects and engineers
• Board of Estimate Proceedings from 1879 to 1989 (when the board was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court)
• Landmark designation reports
• Laws of the City of Brooklyn (an independent city until it was annexed by New York City in 1898)
• New York City labor contracts
• Press releases of the mayors
• New York City biographical files and topical clipping files from the early twentieth century until the early twenty-first century

The new Visitors’ Center, scheduled to open in April 2012, will have rotating displays of pictures, memorabilia and miscellaneous items of interest.  During the LLAGNY pre-opening tour in March, we saw several gifts presented to the mayors over the years from visiting heads of state, mug shots of various infamous New York City crime figures and most impressive to me, were the beautiful crystal ball and bat given to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani by the New York Yankees when they won the World Series in 2000.

The City Hall Library is open to the public Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 10:00am to 4:00pm and Tuesday and Friday, 10:00am to 12:00pm.

Linda Holmes, Associate Law Librarian

The 2012 commencement season is coming up and this list shows the names of those announced so far to deliver addresses to the graduates of New York area law schools.

New York



Albany Law School – Judge Victoria A. Graffeo, New York Court of Appeals

Brooklyn Law School — Judge Carol Bagley Amon, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York

Buffalo Law School – Kirsten E. Gillibrand, United States Senate

Cardozo School of Law — Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, New York Court of Appeals

New York Law School — Kenneth R. Feinberg, Founder & Managing Partner of Feinberg Rozen, LLP

New York University School of Law — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, US Supreme Court

Pace University School of Law — Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr., United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

Syracuse University College of Law – Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter, producer and playwright

New Jersey



Rutgers University School of Law at Newark — Paul J. Fishman, United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey



Connecticut



Quinnipiac University School of Law — Justice Lubbie Harper Jr., Connecticut Supreme Court

Yale University Law School — Class Day speaker is journalist Barbara Walters

Brooklyn Law School students looking for the location of the printing account replenishment link can find it on the main Students page in the new BLS Connect. The fourth link under “My Links,” near the bottom of the right-hand section of the page, is Printing and Account Replenishment.  After linking to that page, students will receive a message stating the Printing Account balance. The student will  be able to enter an amount to add to the Printing Account ($1.00 minimum) which will be applied to the Printing Account after saving the payment information on the following page. All major credit and debit cards are accepted. Students call also use PayPal to enter payment information. Students do not need to have a PayPal account or join PayPal to use this service.

Episode 076 – Conversation with BLIP Clinic Team.mpg

This conversation with Brooklyn Law School Prof. Jonathan Askin, Founder and Director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (“BLIP”) Clinic, and three of his students, Philip Weiss, Class of 2012, John Randall, Class of 2012 and Warren Allen, Class of 2012, discusses the Legal Hack-a-thon scheduled to begin on Sunday, April 15, 2012.

Prof. Askin outlines the goals in the first of what he hopes will be an annual event that will allow law students to take an active part in drafting legislative proposals. Phil Weiss discusses the focus of this year’s event, an experiment in collaboration and crowdsourcing which grew out of the public response to the SOPA and PIPA bills and builds on the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (or OPEN Act) now pending in Congress. John Randall talks about one of the workshops, Creative Rights for Creative Children: IP Education in the Digital Age, scheduled to take place during the event. Finally, Warren Allen addresses how the event offers an opportunity to law students and policy makers to have an impact on a wide range of legal issues involving intellectual property. Sponsors of the Legal Hack-a-thon include BarBri, Panera Bread and Docracy, a web site that hosts legal documents freely available to the public. Docracy is the platform that those who register for the Legal Hack-a-thon will use for finding proposed language, editing proposals, and uploading the final product.

See the video below for the conversation with the BLIP Hack-a-thon team and for details about registering for the event and using the Docracy website.

Dennis Block, Brooklyn Law School Class of 1967, and Jeffrey Feil , BLS Class of 1973, have each donated $1 million to Brookly Law School to support student scholarships and public service programs. Block’s donation will establish the Block Judicial Intern Fellows program, which will support students who spend the summer interning with federal judges. “One of the best experiences a law student can have is to intern for a federal judge,” Block said. “It gives a student an opportunity to study the judicial decision-making process and to build writing and analytical skills.” He supported the founding of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law and teaches mergers and acquisitions as an adjunct professor. Block has previously contributed to student scholarships.

Feil made his gift through the Charitable Lead Annuity Trust of Louis Feil, named for his father. The money will supplement $1.25 million that the Feil family donated last year to create the Gertrude and Louis Feil Scholarship Fund. The law school already has a 22-story residential building named after Feil. “I am grateful for the training I received at Brooklyn Law School,” Feil said. “Every day I use the skills I acquired there to analyze complex real estate transactions. I want to help students take advantage of the opportunities the law school offers, just as I did.”

The Alumni Directory, which is on Reserve at the BLS Library Circulation Desk, states that Block is a Senior Partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and that Feil is President of the Feil Organization. For more information, see the BLS announcement here.

Please join us for a “lunch (free!) and learn” program about finding and using court documents on Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 1 PM in room 113M of BLS Library.  Reference Librarian/Adjunct Assistant Professor Sara Gras will discuss how legal researchers can use briefs, motions and pleadings 1) to develop legal arguments and 2) to identify primary legal sources cited in similar cases.  Then, she will highlight court documents available in Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis and WestlawNext.

This event requires advance registration at http://courtdocuments.eventbrite.com

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Jean Davis, Interim Library Director

Episode 075 – Conversation with Noor Alam, Class of 2012.mpg

In this podcast, Noor I. Alam, Brooklyn Law School Class of 2012, talks about a recent event Representing the Poor Today: Poverty Law in Recession Times which the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program sponsored. The Sparer Program has been preparing law students and lawyers to work for social justice and the greater good since 1985 and has earned nationwide recognition. Sparer Fellow Noor I. Alam organized and hosted the event. The panelists were Keynote Speaker Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Edward De Barbieri , BLS Class of 2008, former Sparer Law Fellow and Staff Attorney at Urban Justice Center; Richard Blum, staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society; Jennifer DaSilva. Executive Director at Start Small Think Big, Inc.; Sarah Ludwig, founder of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP); and Brooke Richie, founder and executive director of the Resilience Advocacy Project.

In her comments, legendary political scientist and activist Frances Fox Piven, who has been writing about poverty, welfare rights and protest movements for nearly half a century, discussed rising inequality, poverty, and the condition of the safety net. The BLS Library has a several books which Prof. Piven wrote including Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Call #KF4749 .P584).

Another panel member, BLS alumnus Edward De Barbieri, showed how the working poor can organize to improve their lives by helping immigrant women launch an employee-owned housecleaning business called Sí Se Puede. Within four years, its worker-owners tripled their wages to as much as $25 an hour and the company now has 37 worker-owners grossing $1.6 million. For more detail on that effort, see the Gotham Gazette article More Low-Wage Workers Become Their Own Bosses.

Brooklyn Law School’s Visiting Associate Professor of Law Irina D. Manta has posted Reasonable Copyright (Boston College Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Professor Manta, who teaches International Intellectual Property, Property, Trademark and Unfair Competition, joined the BLS faculty for the current academic year visiting from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. This abstract explains that her article provides an analysis of the role of reasonableness in the copyright context, disclosing flaws in the current standard for infringement, and offers a proposal for changes to copyright infringement doctrine:

Using the lens of the cognitive bias literature, this article examines and critiques the “reasonable man” standard found across a wide range of legal doctrines. I focus on the use of the standard in an extremely fuzzy area of the law: the law of copyright. In copyright, the test for infringement is whether a “reasonable observer” would believe that two works—often involving media that do not lendthemselves to precise masurement—are substantially similar. I begin by exploring and casting doubt on the usefulness of the reasonable man standard in such a setting. Are judges and juries truly able to determine what an abstract reasonable actor would find substantially similar in the comparison of two works? What types of cognitive biases will likely cloud this determination? And are biases likely to have a stronger or weaker effect when infringement questions are subjected to group deliberation, such as within a jury, as opposed to the individual decision-making of judges? Next, I address the problems that I uncover in the copyright context by first reviewing some potential solutions including both a proposal to reduce the role of juries in substantial similarity determinations and the possibility of trial bifurcation. Ultimately, I show that an openly subjective standard that focuses on the intended audience of works and uses social science surveys as evidence of infringement should replace the prevalent “objective” reasonable observer standard. Implementing such a solution would at least partially acknowledge that we are dealing not with perfectly reasonable but rather boundedly rational actors. This article represents the first systematic use of the psychology and legal literatures on cognitive bias to demonstrate the flawed nature of the substantial similarity test. The test’s overhaul is more necessary than ever in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder and the emergence of new enforcement initiatives such as SOPA that foreshadow an increase in copyright infringement litigation.

BLS Library recently licensed HeinOnline’s New York Legal Research Library.  It includes reports and opinions of the New York Attorney General, the New York State Register, Tax Cases, New York State Session Laws, New York legal journals, the New York State Bar Association Journal (1928-2010), legal classics from or about New York, documents from selected historic New York trials, New York Codes prior to 1923, and New York State Reports.  Access through: 360 Search (database list) > HeinOnline New York Legal Research Library 

Also, Hein has added to HeinOnline’s U.S. Congressional Documents Collection over 3,000 hearings from the 71st Congress (1927) through the 103rd Congress (1994).  Hein will release additional hearings each month and plans to bring this collection up to date through the 112th Congress. (When fully loaded, this collection will contain more than 16,000 hearings.)  Access through: 360 Search (database list) > HeinOnline U.S. Congressional Documents Library  In this collection, the “Quick Finder” search tool allows users to browse and search by Congress, Chamber, Committee, or words in the Text:

Feel free to ask BLS librarians about these new tools.