Category Archives: Uncategorized

Law School Rankings

Earlier this month, Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings posted the Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality 2009. Using a metric that averaged the 75th and 25th percentile of LSAT scores for the class that entered in fall 2008, the list ranks law schools and gives their average LSAT scores, the average of their 75th/25th Grade Point Average, their approximate class sizes (rounded to the nearest 50). Brooklyn Law School came in tied for number 39 with an average LSAT of 161.5 (compared to 173.0 for number 1 Harvard), a GPA average of 3.380 and a class of 500 that entered in fall 2008 (topped only by Georgetown with 600 and Harvard with 550).

The ranking does not measure other aspects of the student population that would be useful to know, such as the average age of the students, those who have advanced degrees, what kind of work experience they have and the cultural diversity of the entering class. It might also be useful to measure graduating students’ starting salaries, placement rates, and bar exam pass rates as current rankings rely so much on reputation, admissions rates, LSAT scores, and GPAs. While law school rankings often lack real substance, they often do conform to the general reputation these law schools have among lawyers, law students and potential applicants.

National Bar Exam in the Future?

Law.com has posted an article entitled Uniform Bar Exam Inches Closer To Reality by Leigh Jones which says that at least 10 states are expected to switch to the so-called Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) and that 22 other jurisdictions may adopt the test in the next few years. Proponents of the UBE say that its use will standardize attorney licensing across the country and would provide financial relief for states by relieving them from having to create their own test questions. Historically, states have retained their own testing autonomy by developing their own exam questions and by using their own pass scores.

The Bar Examiner, the journal of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, has several prominent legal professionals writing Essays on a Uniform Bar Examination advocating the UBE in Volume 78, Number 1 from February 2009. Among them is Diane Bosse, chairwoman of the New York State Board of Law Examiners, who wrote: “The benefits the UBE can bring to the lawyer-licensing are clear; what has been uncertain is whether, in adopting a common set of test instruments, we would need to abandon our long-standing position that a person seeking to become a member of the bar in our state should be required to demonstrate competence in our state-specific law.”

The UBE would have three components: the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), the Multistate Performance Test (MPT), and the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE). Individual states would continue to perform their own grading. The Law.com article points out that the UBE still has hurdles to overcome as big states like New York, California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois and Texas have yet agree to the idea. However, the article quotes John J. McAlary, executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners which administers some 15,000 bar examinations each year, as considering the uniform exam.

Hate Crimes Legislation

Jurist’s Paper Chase reports that the House of Representatives, by a vote of 281-146, passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (the federal hate crimes legislation) as part of the larger Defense Authorization Act of 2010 (it is at page 1471 of the 1515 page H.R. 2467) to address an issue that has been an unfortunate part of American history: crimes of hatred and prejudice that include lynching, cross burning and vandalism of synagogues. In 1990, Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, to collect data “about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” Since then, the FBI has published hate crime statistics every year. Reports for the years 1995 to 2007, available on the FBI website, breaks down hate crime statistics by type. The 2007 version reports 7,624 hate crime incidents involving 9,006 offenses from 2,025 law enforcement agencies. The 2008 report is due out this fall.

  • Race – 4,724 offenses (Anti-White – 18.4 %, Anti-Black – 69.3 %, Anti-American Indian/Alaskan Native – 1.6%, Anti-Asian/Pacific Islander – 4.6 %)
  • Religion – 1,477 offenses (Anti-Jewish – 68.4%, Anti-Catholic – 4.4%, Anti-Protestant – 4.0%, Anti-Islamic – 9.0%, Anti-Atheism/Agnosticism – 0.4%)
  • Sexual Orientation – 1,460 offenses (Anti-Male Homosexual – 59.2%, Anti-Female Homosexual –12.6%, Anti-Heterosexual – 1.8%, Anti-Bisexual – 1.6%)
  • Ethnicity/National Origin – 1,256 offenses (Anti-Hispanic – 61.7% and other – 38.3%)
    Disability – 82 offenses (Anti-Physical – 62 offenses and Anti-Mental – 20 offenses)
Passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act seems likely as in July the Senate passed a comparable bill (S.909) and President Obama has promised to sign the legislation into law. Besides questioning the inclusion of hate crimes legislation in an unrelated military appropriations bill, critics have raised First Amendment free speech and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection concerns as well as double jeopardy concerns. See for example Nat Hentoff’s article ‘Thought Crimes’ Bill Advances. The Assistant Attorney General Office of Legislative Affairs wrote a Memorandum Opinion that the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act is constitutional.

The Brooklyn Law School Library’s collection has several items on hate crimes laws including Hate Crimes: a Reference Handbook by Donald Altschiller (Call #HV6773.52 .A47 2005) with chapters: History of hate crimes legislation — Executive branch — U.S. Supreme Court decisions — Hate crimes legislation at the state level — Critics of hate crime laws — Recent hate crimes — Some major targeted groups — Hate crimes around the world — Gays and lesbians — Jews.

See also Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror by Michael Welch (Call #HV6431 .W444 2006) including chapter titled Talking about terror — Seeking a safer society — Scapegoating and social insecurity — Crusading against terror — Hate crimes as backlash violence — Profiling and detention in post-9/11 America — State crimes in the war on terror — Claiming effectiveness — Assaulting civil liberties.
See also Violence, Prejudice and Sexuality by Stephen Tomsen (Call #HV6250.4.H66 T67 2009) with ‘Homophobia’ and the social context of sexual prejudice — Violence and ‘hate crime’ — Researching anti-homosexual killings — Killings as ‘hate crimes’? — Male honour and the ‘homosexual advance’.

Interviewing Tips for the Recession

With the current economic slowdown, recent legal periodical literature has articles helpful to law school students as they consider their future legal careers. The Fall 2009 edition of the American Lawyer Student Edition has an article by Tamara Loomis describing how the recession has changed large law firms with salary freezes and cuts, deferred start dates for first-year associates, and canceled or downsized summer programs. In reviewing how large law firms are responding to the recession, the article takes a look over the past period of unprecedented prosperity for the legal profession when law firm expenses rose by an average of 10.1 percent each year from 2000 to 2007. The article quotes Dean David Van Zandt of Northwestern Law School on how firms have now become choosier. “During the boom years, firms just needed bodies. Now firms are looking for students who not only can draft briefs and review documents but can also work well with clients and other lawyers.” He goes on to say that firms are starting to look more closely at a candidate’s basic project-management and communication skills.

This same point is made in another article by Debra Cassens Weiss in the ABA Journal which describes changes in interview techniques used by law firms with fewer job openings. The article says that more senior interviewers are using behavioral questions to learn more about students’ personalities. The interviews begin with question such as “Tell me about a time” or “Give me an example of a time.” The article describes the techniques that law firms to identify four behavior patterns:

  • Decision-making and problem-solving skills. An interviewer might ask: Tell me about a difficult decision you had to make.
  • Motivation. An interviewer might ask: Tell me about a time when you failed to meet expectations.
  • Communication and interpersonal skills. An interviewer might ask: Describe an unpopular decision you made and how you dealt with the aftermath.
  • Planning and organization. An interviewer might ask: Tell me about a time when you were too busy and had to prioritize your tasks.

The ABA article refers to a 2005 article published by the National Association for Law Placement in the NALP Bulletin. In particular, it helps students familiarize themselves with the purpose of —and how to prepare for—the “behavioral interview.” Students are advised to engage in significant introspection so that they understand such things as why they have made the life decisions they have made (this reflects their values, talents, and motivation); and how to provide specific examples of behavior that demonstrates they have the proficiencies and traits an employer seeks. The STAR method will help students keep their answers concise and specific. It entails briefly describe the Situation or Task; explaining the Action that he or she took and describing the Results of the action. The reprint which is worth reading.

Brooklyn Law School’s On-Campus Interviewing (OCI) Program has a number of videos that are accessible through SARA the online catalog including among others Student Advice about OCI Interviewing 08.

Library’s Lunch and Learn Series: Using Digests to Find Case Law (posted by Kathy Darvil)

Digests: Slide Show: Oct. 2009

Chart of Fields and Segments for Searching Case Law

As a part of the library’s ongoing Lunch and Learn series, I ran a workshop on how to use digests to research case law.  Topics covered in this workshop included the anatomy of a case, the structure of the digest system, how to access the digest system both in print and online, and using the digest system to manipulate your keyword searches.  For those interested, I have attached the slide show and the handout I provided to this post.

Health Care Reform: A Selected Bibliography (posted by Kathy Darvil)

The United States’ health care system is in crisis and in need of reform.   A majority of politicians on either side of the aisle would in fact agree on this.  Agreeing on how to reform the complex system is another matter entirely and is the fodder for debate both in Congress and in the media. Presently, there are several health care reform bills at various stages in the committee process.  Any one of these pieces of legislation would make for an interesting note topic or seminar paper topic.

For a law student researching health care reform, it is important to understand the underlying policy arguments behind the proposed legislation and the historical context within which the legislation fits.  Listed below is a selected bibliography of some resources the library has on the subject of health care law and policy.

Current Awareness Resources:

BNA’s Health Care Daily Report:  Available online through the library’s electronic resources page.

BNA is a leading provider for quality non partisan news on business and government.  BNA’s Health Care Daily Report is, as the name would suggest, a daily news service on the topic of health care.  For researchers interested in health care reform, one useful feature of this report is a chart, created by the BNA’s editors, called “Hill Watch: the Status of Major Health Care Legislation.”

Inside Health Reform:  To go directly into this database, access it through SARA, the library’s online catalog.

Available on Lexis, Inside Health Reform is a weekly publication that delivers news on the national health care reform debate.

Books and Treatises:

Health Policy: Crisis and Reform in the U.S. Health Care Delivery System (Charlene Harrington & Carroll Estes, eds., 4th ed., 2004).

Topics covered in this title include: access to health care, the economics of health care, private insurance and managed care, reforming the U.S. health care system and the international health system.

Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System (William Mm. Sage & Rogan Kersh, eds., 2006).

Topics covered include: malpractice reform as a health policy problem,  the effects of the U.S. malpractice system on the cost and quality of care, liability, patient safety, and defensive medicine, and caps and the construction of damages in medical malpractice cases.

Julius B. Richmond & Rashi Fein, The Health Care Mess: How We Got into It and What It Will Take to Get Out (2005).

This title examines the history of the United States health care system from 1900-2005. It examines the competing forces that shaped our current system and also discusses the system’s future.

Journals and Scholarly Publications:

Health Affairs:  Available online through the library’s electronic resources page.

Health Affairs is a peer-reviewed bi-monthly journal. The journal’s primary focus is on domestic health care, but international developments are covered as well.

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law: To view the most recent issue, access the title through SARA, the library’s online catalog.

The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law is an interdisciplinary journal which focuses on the initiation, formulation, and implementation of health policy and analyzes the relations between government and health–past, present, and future.

Medical Law Review:  Available online through the library’s electronic resources page.

The Medical Law Review publishes articles of international interest. In addition it carries two commentary sections. The first concentrates on UK law and includes case reports and legislation summaries followed by analytical interpretation. The second section concentrates on recent medical-legal developments in the USA, the Commonwealth, and Europe.

Databases and Online Resources:

Health Care Policy Tracking Service: Available online through the library’s electronic resources page.

This database serves as a gateway to tracking and finding bipartisan analysis of major health policy and legislation.

For additional materials available at Brooklyn Law School, search SARA using the subject field for “medical care united states” or “medical policy united states”.

Law School Labyrinth

The Oxford English Dictionary, available at Brooklyn Law School in eleven print volumes in the National Reading Room on the 2d floor of the BLS Library and online on the Library database page, gives the figurative defintion of “labyrinth” as a “tortuous, entangled, or inextricable condition of things, events, ideas, etc.; an entanglement, maze”. That meaning of the word may well describe what many 1Ls and upperclass members feel as they work through their law school careers. To help them, the BLS Library recently added to its collection Law School Labyrinth by Steven R. Sedberry (Call #KF283 .S43 2009). The eight chapters in this easy to read book are: Lesson from the labyrinth, or how I learned to stop worrying and start booking classes — The money minotaur: keeping law school costs at bay — How to hit the ground running your first day as a 1L — Your law school study approach — How to prepare for final exams — Summer clerkships — Your second and third years — The bar exam and beyond.

For students who are feeling overwhelmed, this is an excellent guide and a good analysis of law school with some good tricks to succeed in law school. The book has useful tips on how to avoid spending precious time on the conventional competitive aspects of law school and more on what matters such as doing well on tests, the bar, and being a good lawyer. The book offers a study method that attempts to level the playing field even for those students who are intimidated by larger personalities. It has interesting anecdotal examples that bring down to earth the people, teachers and tests and scores that law students encounter during their academic years.

Chapter 1 sets the tone with five highly readable Lessons on navigating the labyrinth and some Fatal False Turns that are well worth reading. Sedberry defends the often criticized Socratic method in his Lesson #4: Law School Can Actually Help You to Become an Effective Lawyer.

Chapter 3 “How to Hit the Ground Running Your First Day as a 1L” explains what the Socratic Method is and offers reasons to embrace it rather than fear it. Sedberry impresses upon readers the absolute critical importance of those first-year grades and states that first-year grades determine who gets chosen for law review, moot court, and even summer clerkships.

Chapters 4 “Your Law School Study Approach”and Chapter 5 “How to Prepare for Final Exams” may be the most useful for law students as they explain law school study approaches and the once-a-semester exams. Sedberry explains the bell curve to students wondering why they did not get an “A”, offering useful tips to ensure placement at the top of that bell curve. Law students are accustomed to achieving high marks and turning in competent academic work. So competition for “A”s is high and students must push themselves differently than they did in their undergraduate schools. Students will benefit from reading the rest of the book.

The above comments are excerpted from Sami Hartsfield’s book review in the September 30 edition of the Houston Legal Issues Examiner.

Legislative History Help from LLSDC

Researchers at Brooklyn Law School can benefit from the very useful Legislative Source Book published by the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) which recently added a webpage on Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Laws, Cases and Resources. The page links to Federal EEO laws, a number of related CRS reports, Federal agency resources, non-governmental resources, and US court opinions.

The Source Book has other links that will help researchers including a multi-part Federal Legislative History Research: A Practitioner’s Guide to Compiling the Documents and Sifting for Legislative Intent. The guide explains what Federal legislative histories are and how they are used, discusses the Federal legislative process and legislative history documents, directs researchers on finding already compiled Federal legislative histories, explains the process of compiling a Federal legislative history in paper format and electronically and from older records. There is also a section on sifting for legislative intent language in a Federal legislative history as well as links to other Federal legislative history web sites. Another valuable resource in the LLSDC Source Book is Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet which organizes its material by Popular Name Listing, Public Law Number Listing, and Commercial Legislative Histories on the Internet (those of Westlaw, LexisNexis and HeinOnline).

The BLS Library has in its collection Reference Librarian Joseph Gerken’s book What Good is Legislative History? Justice Scalia in the Federal Courts of Appeals (Call #KF425 .G47 2007). Justice Scalia is an outspoken critic of legislative history. The book analyzes more than 250 Circuit Court decisions that refer to Justice Scalia’s criticism of legislative history. It covers Scalia’s preference for textualism rather than relying on material he considers unreliable for interpreting laws. It has chapters on the history of legislative history and the evolution of the Supreme Court’s attitude toward its use.

To help researchers looking for New York legislative history materials, the BLS Library catalog links to an electronic resource from the New York State Library called Legislative Intent in New York State: Materials, Cases and Annotated Bibliography by Robert Allan Carter (KFN5074 .C37 2001). The link leads to a page that was last updated on June 22, 2009 and has a New York State Legislative History Research Tutorial.

New Web-Based Research Guides

In September, our librarians worked hard to create many new LibGuides for BLS researchers.  These guides are accessible through the BLS Connect portal > Library > Research Guides and Aids > LibGuides.  In these guides, librarians recommend free and fee-based databases, as well as print sources.  Guides include sources ranging from RSS feeds to slide presentations.  Feel free to provide feedback to authors of the guides!

English Legal Sources Available through BLS Library

Starting Points for EU Legal Research

Starting Points for Foreign Law Research

Researching Foreign Responses to the Global Financial Crisis

Selecting and Developing Your Seminar Paper Topic (primary focus: U.S. legal topics)

Locating Articles and Keeping Current

BLS Databases: EBSCOhost

The Brooklyn Law School Library database page has an alphabetical listing of dozens of databases with which many library patrons are unfamiliar. Most are law related although some are multi-disciplinary. The full range of databases available through EBSCOhost (a search system made accessible to the BLS community by subscription through the library) provides full text searches and abstracts of magazines, newspapers and reference books in a variety of subject areas, updated on a daily basis.

Included in the range of EBSCO products are these databases briefly described by content.

  • Academic Search Premier

    • “The world’s largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full textdatabase” includes indexing and abstracts for additional periodicals.

  • Business Source Premier
    The industry’s most popular business research database features the full text for more than 2,150 journals. Full text is provided back to 1886, and searchable cited references back to 1998.
  • ERIC
    The world’s largest source of education information, it contains more than 950,000 abstracts of documents and journal articles on education research and practice.
  • Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia
    The multidisciplinary encyclopedia offers more than 25,000 articles on a wide variety of topics. This source provides full text for all articles.
  • Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition
    This database has full text articles from academic and/or professional sources and provides 600 scholarly full text journals, including more than 450 peer-reviewed journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for more than 850 journals, covering nursing and allied health.
  • MasterFILE Premier
    This database covers diverse topics including general information, business issues, health and multicultural materials. It includes an image collection with photos of people, places, natural science photos, historical photos, maps, and flags.
  • MEDLINE
    The world’s most comprehensive source of full text for medical journals, MEDLINE provides full text for more than 1,470 journals.
  • Newspaper Source
    This source provides cover-to-cover full text for 185 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, and others.
  • The Philosophers Index
    This database provides indexing and abstracts of “scholarly research published in journals and books, including contributions to anthologies and book reviews. It contains research published since 1940 including nearly 570 journals from 43 countries with content representing a variety of languages”.
  • Professional Development Collection
    This collection includes full text for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Educational Leadership, Journal of Education, Journal of Higher Education, Theory Into Practice, and nearly 520 high quality education journals.
  • Regional Business News
    The source provides full text for more than 80 regional US and Canadian business publications (including titles from Crain Communications).
  • The Serials Directory
    This database contains nearly 212,000 U.S. and international titles, including newspapers; data from nearly 108,235 publishers worldwide, including e-mail and Internet addresses.

EBSCOhost has created these tutorials to help make searching the databases easier:

  • Basic Search
    A concise guide to the most popular EBSCOhost features. (3.4 minutes)
  • Advanced Search
    Learn about Advanced Search features, from limiters and expanders, the ability to save searches, set up Search and Journal Alerts, search Publications and browse Indexes, to how to manage search results in your personalized My EBSCOhost folder. (4 minutes)
  • Create Search and Journal Alerts
    Search and Journal Alerts save valuable research time, and can be set up to provide automatic notification to any email address(es) you specify, whenever new results become available. (3 minutes)