All BLS students are eligible to take advantage of the American Bar Association’s offer of free membership to students enrolled at ABA approved law schools. With your free membership, you can: access the ABA Job Board, subscribe to ABA publications, participate in ABA career webinars, and take advantage of ABA discounts on a wide variety of products and services.
For more information or to enroll online, visit www.americanbar.org/abalawstudents or call the ABA Service Center at 800-285-2221.
While the library staff wishes all students the best of luck on their exams, we want to remind you about library etiquette while studying during this important time:
And now for the good news: Ear plugs, if needed, are available at the circulation desk and chocolate candy will be available each day next week at 12Noon at the circulation desk.
Good luck!
During the reading and exam period, you must make a reservation to use a library study room. Mandatory study room reservations will begin on Thursday, April 30, 2015 at 8:00am; at that time all study rooms will be locked and you must go to the first floor circulation desk to charge out the key to the room at the time of your reservation. Please use the link to the study room reservations which is on the library homepage under “Related Links.Study Room Policies:
Library Hours for the Reading & Exam Period:
Library Hours for the Writing Competition Weekend:
Reminders:
Good luck on your exams and have a great summer!
On March 25, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down Young v. United Parcel Service and set forth a new standard making it easier for a female employee to establish discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act [42 U.S.C. 200e(k)] (“PDA”). The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which amended Title VII in 1978, explicitly provides that discrimination “because of sex” or “on the basis of sex” includes discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”
The Young case arose when UPS offered light-duty accommodations to disabled and injured employees but not to pregnant employees. Young alleged this policy violated the PDA.
In Young, the Court did not go as far as to say that employers must accommodate pregnant workers whenever they accommodate non-pregnant workers. What the Court did say is, whenever different accommodations are provided to similarly situated pregnant and non-pregnant workers, the employer must determine whether there is any legitimate reason for the disparate treatment. If no legitimate reason exists, then the employer has discriminated on the basis of pregnancy in violation of the PDA. Even when the employer is able to articulate a neutral business rational for the different accommodations, the Court ruled that the pregnant worker must still be given the opportunity to show that the different accommodations impose a “significant burden” on pregnant workers that cannot be justified by the employer’s neutral rationale.
Going forward, the Young decision means that a pregnant worker will not be required to establish explicit discriminatory intent to prove a PDA violation. Instead, under Young, it is sufficient for the worker to show that different accommodations offered to similarly situated pregnant and non-pregnant workers impose a “significant burden” on pregnant employees.
Rosalie Gardiner Jones was born in 1883 to Mary and Oliver Livingston Jones, wealthy Oyster Bay socialites. She graduated from Adelphi College, then a women’s school, in Brooklyn and later from Brooklyn Law School.
When she was 28, Rosalie entered the suffrage movement and led two “suffrage hikes”, one from NYC to Albany, and the second from NYC to Washington DC, to bring attention to the women’s right to vote movement.
The NYC to Albany hike took thirteen days. Rosalie along with other women, walked (in skirts), through bad weather and difficult roads, a distance of 150 miles to reach their destination. They made speeches, sang songs to keep morale up, and gave interviews to the press along the way. The press dubbed her and her followers, “General Jones” and the “suffragette pilgrims”.
The NYC to Washington, DC hike covered more than 200 miles and took 20 days to finish. When the arrived in DC they joined over 5,000 of their fellow suffragists in the National Woman Suffrage Parade procession, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Constitution Hall.
The month of March every year is Women’s History Month. Each year the Library celebrates March with a book display in the first floor display case opposite the elevator. These books will be back on the shelves and available for loan on April 1st. If you have an interest in any of them now, just go to the first floor reference desk and we’ll retrieve the book for you immediately.
During this month the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society are highlighted with professional conferences and social activities throughout the country.
Each year the President issues a proclamation reminding us of the contributions American women have made to American society. See this year’s proclamation from President Obama here.
Also see the American Bar Association’s report entitled A Current Glance at Women in the Law, published in July 2014, which gives statistics on the number of women in the legal profession, the number of women in the judiciary, the number of women in law schools, the number of women on law reviews, etc. The report can be found here. Great strides have been made, but more progress is needed.
To read about how far women have come in the legal profession and some of the issues that they still encounter, see the selected titles below about women and the law in the Library.
Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present
The Rhetoric of Supreme Court Women
Learning to Lead: What Really Works for Women in Law
Women Attorneys Speak Out! How Practicing Law is Different for Women than for Men
Women on Top—The Woman’s Guide to Leadership and Power in Law Firms
Sisters-in-Law: An Uncensored Guide for Women Practicing Law in the Real World
It’s Harder in Heels: Essays by Women Lawyers Achieving Work-Life Balance
Legally Mom: Real Women’s Stories of Balancing Motherhood & Law Practice
And finally, there is a quarterly publication from the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Professions: Perspectives – A Magazine For and About Women Lawyers.
Earlier this week, BLAWg IN Bloom, the Indiana Law Library Blog, had an interesting post that could be of great help to Brooklyn Law School faculty and students who use WestlawNext. Titled Legal Research Tech Tool: Bestlaw, the post discusses how cost-effective research is one of the toughest skills to master. Law students have the luxury of using legal databases without any fiscal consequences. In the practice of law, when paying for subscriptions to legal research platforms (with clients are being billed for research time on these platforms), users need to think more carefully. Now a new tool called Bestlaw, developed to encourage cost-effective in subscription platforms, will change things.
Joe Mornin, a third year law student at UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, built Bestlaw, that adds useful features to WestlawNext:
WestlawNext users can download the Bestlaw browser add-on for Chrome (support for Firefox is coming soon too) and get help conducting research in WestlawNext more cost-effectively Morin is working on support for Lexis Advance that is coming soon). After installing Bestlaw, its tools appear for searches on WestlawNext. The add-on allows a view of documents in free sites like Casetext, Cornell LII, Court Listener, Findlaw, Google, Google Scholar, Ravel Law, or Wikipedia before viewing (and paying to view) them in WestlawNext. For secondary sources, like law review articles, users have the option under Display to show an automatically-generated Table of Contents for documents. While many law review articles come with these already, some do not, and many other secondary sources do not either, so this can be a handy tool for quick skimming to find the parts of the document that are most germane to the research task.
During the month of March the Library will be offering “Prepare to Practice” workshops on various topics to prepare for summer legal jobs and internships.
Each “session” will last for 30 minutes and will be held in Room 113M of the Library at 1:15 pm on the dates indicated below.
No reservations are required to attend any of the sessions. Librarians will be conducting all workshops. Drop by and check them out.
Spring Break
This week Prof. Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil held their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper. Topics discussed include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and how to effectively organize and write your paper. If you were unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources, and the writing and research presentations. The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper. From the guide’s landing page, you will be able to access a recording of this year’s presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper. If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.
The Library hours for the coming weeks are as follows
Wednesday Dec. 24th – Friday January 2nd – CLOSED
Tuesday, Jan. 20th Spring Semester Begins Normal Library Hours Resume
The BLS Library staff wish you all a Happy Holiday. See you all next year!