On Tuesday, Law Library Director Zhihong Chen and her senior staff gave Ken and me a fascinating tour of the Law Library of Peking University Law School. We reviewed the library’s diverse collection of international and foreign law periodicals, and noted the availability of HeinOnline’s legal databases. Director Chen graciously permitted us to examine legal texts that were hundreds of years old. These were part of the library’s rare books collection. They were beautifully preserved texts in old-style Chinese calligraphy. My law student friend and guide, Jenny, explained that one of the texts described Chinese criminal investigation procedures.

Following our tour, Director Chen and her entire staff treated Ken and me to a sumptuous feast of Chinese delicacies in Peking University’s faculty dining hall. The librarians expressed great interest in the BLS faculty/librarian liaison program.

At Director Chen’s request, I will make a presentation to leading Chinese law librarians this coming Thursday. I will speak about trends in U.S. academic law librarianship, and will highlight some of the services that our staff provides to faculty.

China-U.S. Summit: Law Library Director Chen and Prof. Ken Davis discuss China's legal system

Today is one of a number of days in December and througout the year when students from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) School of Law (Facultad de Derecho) take part in graduation ceremonies. UBA is the largest university in Argentina and the largest university by enrollment in Latin America. The BLS Library Blog was present to witness the awarding of dipolmas to the more than 200 law students along with their family and friends. The reason there are several graduation ceremonies is that the student body at the Facultad de Derecho consists of 35,000 students who study over a period of 7 years, according to Silvia Abadal, Vicedirectora of the Biblioteca Central at UBA who gave me a tour of the law school and the library on behalf of the Director, Corrina Tiribelli.

The ceremony took place in the Aula Magna under a magnificient painting of the founding of the UBA in 1825. In attendance were professors who provide legal instruction as part of a faculty of 3,000 members under the leadership of the Dean, Atilio Anibal Alterini, el Decano de la Facultad de Derecho.

Vicedirectora Abadal led a tour of the library which contains 300,000 volumes along with about 3,000 legal periodicals mostly from Latin America but also many international legal periodicals including several from the US. At this time, there are none from Brooklyn Law School. One item of interest is that legal periodicals at UBA are not operated by student run organizations but rather by the faculty. There are many other differences in legal education in Argentina. For example, besides the 7 year course of study, most student take three courses per quarter during two quarters per year and attend class about 6 hours per week. The basic law degree comes at not cost to the students as it is paid for by the State. The doctoral degree is very costly. Most students live off campus, as there are no university dorms, and nearly all students are full time employees while attending law school. The library is able to provide students with free access to legal databases but only in a designated room operated by the two major legal database publishers, La Ley and Lexis. Students have to pay for off campus access as the cost of providing access off campus to so many students is prohibitive.

In addition to electronic databases, the library´s print collection is housed in two large rooms, a circulation room and a Reading Room (la Sala Silenciosa) which can accommodate less than 500 of the student body. Our tour of the library took place when it was closed and no students were using it as final exams took place in the past two weeks. With the closing the library, law students working for the library were engaged in an annual inventory of the collection. With my limited Spanish language skills, I was able to communicate with some of the student workers, who, while not fluent in English, were able to communicate with me. Most of the students with whom I spoke were about half way through their studies and had not yet decided their area of interest. Grading is on a scale of 1 to 10 with the average grade at 5. The library student workers I met were above average students with a grade of 7 and planned to pursue a graduate law degree depending on the availability of money from family or jobs as financial aid and student loans are not common in Argentina.

The classrooms in the enormous building total about 140 most of which have about 40 seats each. That helps explain the limited class time for most students and the length of study over 7 years. On leaving the vast entry hall, I had to work my way through the enormous crowd of family and friends of the graduates. The school will close for the month of January although there will be summer courses beginning the following month.

Lexis Web Course platform, also known as Blackboard, will be performing maintenance on the Web Courses platform. Starting Saturday, December 19th at 12:31 a.m. EST, the Blackboard will become unavailable until later on Sunday, December 20th.

Semester pass letters will be available at the first floor reference desk beginning Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9:00AM.  These letters of introduction allow BLS students to use the library of another law school in the metropolitan area for the spring semester.  After presenting the letter from our library to another school’s reference librarian, the student is issued a pass that is valid until that school’s exam period begins.  While the pass does not allow the student to borrow books from the reciprocating libary, it can be convenient for a student to to study at another law library closer to their home.  The letters are available on a first-come, first-serve basis and there are a limited number of letters available for each school.

The schools that participate in this program are:  Cardozo Law School, Fordham Law School, Hofstra Law School, New York University Law School, Pace Law School, St. John’s Law School, Seton Hall Law School and Touro Law School.

Current BLS students may use the libraries of CUNY Law School and New York Law School by simply presenting their valid BLS ID cards.  This arrangement is made possible through our membership in the JILP (Joint International Law Project) consortium.

Episode 048 – Conversation with Professor of Law Derek Bambauer.mp3

In this pod cast, Brooklyn Law School Professor of Law Derek Bambauer discusses his latest paper Cybersieves recently published at 59 Duke L.J. 101 (2009). Prof. Bambauer, who teaches Internet law and intellectual property, is also one of the co-authors of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School’s Info/Law, a popular blog that addresses Internet law, intellectual property, and information law. In his article, Prof. Bambauer discusses a framework for internet filtering and censorship that draws on procedural values respected in democratic societies. The abstract for the article reads:

This Article offers a process-based method to assess Internet censorship that is compatible with different value sets about what content should be blocked. Whereas China’s Internet censorship receives considerable attention, censorship in the United States and other democratic countries is largely ignored. The Internet is increasingly fragmented by nations’ different value judgments about what content is unacceptable. Countries differ not in their intent to censor material—from political dissent in Iran to copyrighted songs in America—but in the content they target, how precisely they block it, and how involved their citizens are in these choices. Previous scholars have analyzed Internet censorship from values-based perspectives, sporadically addressing key principles such as openness, transparency, narrowness, and accountability. This Article is the first to unite these principles into a coherent methodology. Drawing upon scholarship in deliberative democracy, health policy, labor standards, and cyberlaw, this Article applies this new framework to contentious debates about sales of censorship technology by Western companies, public law regulation of these transactions, and third-party analysis of Internet censorship.

Prof. Bambauer’s other scholarly publications are available on his publications page.

Here is the second installment from Jean J. Davis, our Foreign and International Law Reference Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law, who is in Beijing, China with her husband, Kenneth R.  Davis:

My adventures continue…I am a little afraid to return to the convenience store in this housing project, after my husband Ken tried to pay for bottled water with the equivalent of a Macy’s coupon…  (In his defense, the coupon does look somewhat similar to the old 5 yuan paper bill previously printed in China.)  I am expecting a “wanted” poster of J & K Davis to be plastered to the wall.  

 This will interest the students of BLS:  Nick is a kind and helpful graduate mathematics and finance student who often accompanies me on excursions.  Yesterday I told him that I thought that he spoke English very well, and I asked how he had practiced his pronunciation.  He proudly told me that he had learned by watching episodes of  “Desperate Housewives” and “The Apprentice.”  Nick was intrigued when I explained that a BLS student had been a contestant on “The Apprentice.”  I gave him permission to tell me “you’re fired” when I mispronounce Chinese phrases.  (I get fired a lot…)  Nick explained to me that English is now compulsory for Chinese students.  The students begin studying English at age 6, and continue studying throughout the equivalent of high school.  Nick’s girlfriend is majoring in English.  One interesting result of this educational requirement–Chinese university students understand my attempts to say hello, thank you, how are you, excuse me, etc. in Chinese.  (I very much appreciate my lessons, Annie, Shing and Mr. Chung!)   I have more difficulty making myself understood in restaurants in which none of the staff members or managers speak English.  I am sure that this is because my intonation is incorrect, although I am trying to do better…  I am so grateful to Dean Gerber for providing me with some menu recommendations, and for providing me with my “restaurant phrases” in Chinese and English!

 Nick will interview for a job tomorrow.  (He is completing his last year of graduate school.)  Nick is from a northern province.  He explained that it is harder for a student who is not a native of Beijing and who does not have a network of contacts here to obtain a position in this city.  I hope that his interview goes well–he would be an asset to any corporation!  

 It is cold today (in the twenties right now).  I am off to take some photographs with my magic Blackberry, Jean

Earlier this month BeSpacific linked to the U.S. Debt Clock, a site designed to inform the public of the US financial condition. “The numbers are laid out so as to give a complete real-time snap-shot of the country’s balance sheet. . . All the debt clocks are updated continuously.” The site uses government data to show different measures of the national debt. For example, the total US national debt now exceeds $12 trillion, with debt per each citizen approaching $40K and more than $110K per each taxpayer. In addition to US federal tax revenue of almost $2 trillion, the site lists the largest budget items for the federal government: $712 billion for Medicare/Medicaid, $642 billion for Social Security, $603 billion for defense/wars and $363 billion for interest on debt. The site also lists state revenues of just over $1 trillion along with state debt of an almost equal amount. In addition, there is data on money creation, trade numbers, business assets and employment statistics.

To deal with the growing national debt, the House leadership plans to raise the debt ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010. President Obama is expected to seek an additional $30 billion early next year to pay for the 30,000 troop buildup in Afghanistan with another $50 billion to pay for a six-month extension of unemployment benefits and health care insurance subsidies for the long-term jobless. With growing concern about the federal budget deficit, more than half of senior executives surveyed by the Tax Governance Institute expect some type of value-added tax (VAT) to be introduced in the US within five years according to a press release. A recent NY Times Many See the VAT Option as a Cure for Deficits explains why a value-added tax may be good for economic purposes but bad politics. A Congressional Research Service report A Value-Added Tax Contrasted With a National Sales Tax addressed the recommendations of President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform’s final report with analyses of both a national sales tax (NST) and a value-added tax (VAT). How the VAT works is explained in this short video:

The Brooklyn Law School Library has in its collection the print version of Value Added Tax: A Model Statute and Commentary by the ABA, Alan Schenk, Reporter (Call #KF6598.A95 1989) which contains the report of the ABA Section Committee on Value Added Tax, an introduction to value added tax, the text of a model statute, and commentary on the statutory language. It is available on Westlaw (Database ID:ABA-VALADTAX). See also Reducing the Deficit through Better Tax Policy by Diane Lim Rogers published by the Brookings Institution (Call #HJ2051 .R64 2007) (INTERNET).

Just in time for the Brooklyn Law School final examination period, the WSJ Law Blog has posted two items that BLS students may want to review. The first was a post called What Makes a Good Law School Exam Answer? Law Profs Weigh In with thoughts by six noted law professors that might shed some light on what professors lookfor. Next is On Crushing Your First-Year Exams: Advice From Some Who Did with responses from half a dozen students who finish this sentence: “The smartest thing I did while preparing for my 1L first-semester exams was . . .” Among the student responses was one from Max Shifrin, BLS Class of 2010 and a member of Brooklyn Law Review, who offered this advice:

The most crucial thing to do as a 1L, in my opinion, is start outlining early in the semester and finish [your outlines] early enough to take as many practice exams as possible in real time. Professors test the exact same things year in and year out. If you do enough exams, you’ll begin to see a pattern which will give you a huge advantage on exam day.

Those who have been less diligent in preparing for exams throughout the semester may want to check out A Law School Slacker’s Guide to Cramming at Nuts & Boalts. To take a break from study, today’s Law Librarian Blog in a posting under the category “Exams – Studying” about movies, A Tribute to the Movies, urges law students to give the brain cells a break and completely relax in order to be able to go back to the books refreshed.

Here is a post from Jean J. Davis, our Foreign and International Law Reference Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law, who is in Beijing, China with her husband, Kenneth R.  Davis:

Beijing, China – 12/11/2009

Hello Everyone:

The excellent administrators of Beijing University’s International M.B.A. Program have greatly eased our transition to life in this exciting city. Professors have a high status here–students refer to my husband, Ken, as “Dr. Davis.”

Jean and Ken Davis with the extremely helpful staff of Beijing University's International MBA program.

The university students of China are wonderful ambassadors!  They began helping me from the moment that I sought a place to rest my bulging backpack in the full tram at the airport.  Nick, a graduate mathematics student who speaks very good English, is our assigned assistant.  Today, he accompanied Ken and me to the administrative office of the M.B.A. program.  Then, he took us to a local shopping mall so that I could buy a pair of running shoes.  The mall offered everything from a Sephora cosmetics store to (sadly) a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.

The administrators are trying to arrange for me to meet librarians at the business school and the law school, as well as a Chinese professor who studied law in the U.S. and has a scholarly interest in U.S. corporate law and mergers/acquisitions.

I am going to relinquish the netbook to Ken now, so that he can prepare for his first classes tomorrow.

More later, Jean