to register for the Library’s upcoming Lunch and Learn programs.

There is still room for the following sessions –

October 16:   Statutory Research

October 23:   Apps for Legal Research: Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline, Fastcase

October 30:   Using Law Reviews for Research

Unfortunately, the October 9 Case Law Research session is sold out.

Please join us for the remaining sessions.  Lunch will be provided.

See you then.

The 2nd Annual Library Research Fair will be held on Tuesday, September 24th, 2013.   The Fair will be held in the Student Lounge from 12Noon to 3:00PM.

Representatives from the following companies will be here to demonstrate their databases:

Bloomberg Law, CALI, Ebsco, Fastcase, HeinOnline, Lexis, PLI Discover, ProQuest, Westlaw and Wolters Kluwer,

Come and learn how these databases will help you with your legal research.  There will be handouts, light refreshments, prizes and a raffle to win an iPad mini or a $50.00 gift card.

Save the Date: Tuesday, September 24th, 12Noon – 3PM, Student Lounge.

See you there!

With the launch of the Fall 2013 Semester, the librarians at the Brooklyn Law School Library are pleased to announce that its two blogs, the BLS Library Blog and the Brooklaw Library Weblog, have merged into one combined blog. The newly merged blog will use the name BLS Library Blog. Its new home is http://www.blslibrary.com. To continue reading blog posts by the librarians at the Brooklyn Law School, readers need to update their bookmark to the new URL.

All of the older posts from the two former sites, along with reader comments and resources remain available at the new site. We look forward to seeing you  at http://www.blslibrary.com.

The blog, Government Information, which Brooklyn Law School Library Government Documents Librarian Rosemary Campagna writes, is about Politics, Legislation and Government Documents in the News. That blog retains its own URL at http://governmentinfo.wordpress.com/.

The Library recently installed a second mobile charging station.  This charging station is in Library room 104M, which is our lounge for students.  It is to the left as you enter the room and is a gift from Westlaw.  The first charging station is on the ground floor and was described in the Library blog of July 3, 2013.

These charging stations are for cell phones and tablets only.  When using either charging station, remember to sit nearby while your device charges.  The Library is not responsible for unattended devices.

This week Brooklyn Law School’s Library instituted a new chat reference service.  The service is accessible through the Library’s

BLSConnect page, and is available for Brooklyn Law School’s students, faculty, and staff.

Librarians are available to chat during regularly scheduled reference hours.   Reference librarians attempt to respond to instant message questions as quickly as possible.  If you do not get a response back, please leave your email address or phone number, and someone will get in touch with you as soon as possible.

The service is best suited for short, fact-based questions and general questions on finding the relevant resources for a given topic.   If you have a more detailed question, we may encourage you to arrange a meeting with a reference librarian, or to stop by the reference desk during our normal reference hours.

Reference Hours

Brooklyn Law School Professor Gregg Macey and former BLS Professor Christopher Serkin (now at Vanderbilt Law School) recently posted Symposium Introduction: Post-Zoning: Alternative Forms of Public Land Use Controls on SSRN.   The full text of the introduction appears at 78 Brooklyn Law Review 305 (2013). The abstract reads:

The Brooklyn Law School Library has several items in its collection related to the Voting Rights Act. The latest is Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy by Gary May (Call #KF4893.M39 2013). This fast-paced history of the VRA offers a dramatic, timely account of the struggle that finally won African Americans the ballot—although, as May shows, the fight for voting rights is by no means over.

When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer terror and insidious devices such as complex literacy tests and expensive poll taxes. Most African Americans would remain voiceless for nearly a century more, citizens in name only until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act secured their access to the ballot.

The author describes how black voters overcame centuries of bigotry to secure and preserve one of their most important rights as American citizens. The struggle that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act was long and torturous, and only succeeded because of the courageous work of local freedom fighters and national civil rights leaders—as well as, ironically, the opposition of Southern segregationists and law enforcement officials, who won public sympathy for the voting rights movement by brutally attacking peaceful demonstrators.

Many argue that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama rendered the act obsolete, and there have been renewed efforts to curb voting rights and deny minorities the act’s hard-won protections. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder declared the protections in Section 4 of the VRA unconstitutional. Recent actions by the Department of Justice make clear that Section 2 and other sections of the VRA remain in play as methods to promote the goal of increasing voting rights. See the Jurist article for more on this issue.

An interesting new case law research tool that Brooklyn Law Students can use to gain a better understanding of case law research is Casetext. It isa free, searchable legal database that readers can annotate. The beta version just opened to the public, and the site is building a community of annotators so that lawyers reading a case see related legal documents, articles, and commentary alongside the text.

The database currently contains the bulk of federal cases (all Supreme Court, circuit courts from 1 Federal Reporter 2d, and district courts from 1980); it also has Delaware cases in the Atlantic Reporter from 30 Atlantic Reporter. Co-founders Jacob Heller (former president of the Stanford Law Review) and Joanna Huey (former president of the Harvard Law Review) decided to build Casetext for their own research.

The library recently acquired a new legal research database:  Legal Source. This database may be accessed from the library homepage in the alphabetical list of databases or here.

Legal Source is a single resource for the extensive content previously found in the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books from the H. W. Wilson Company as well content from EBSCO Information Services, a provider of research databases and e-journals.

Legal Source includes over 1,200 full-text journals and over 2.5 million records.  Included is the Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective covering 1908-1981 and the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books with full-text available for over 400 periodicals as far back at 1994.