The Library of Congress Law Library has posted on its blog an entry about the World Trade Organization with a hyperlinked map of disputes between its members. The site has hyperlinks that allow users to access the dispute documents filed by the contending parties with the WTO. There are other links that show a chronological listing of dispute cases, another link to tables that show the disputes by country and by subject.

There is an additonal link that shows the adopted panel reports under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) disputes that pre-date the WTO. The site also links to Stanford University’s GATT Digital Library that gives access to documents and information about GATT from 1947-1994. Particularly useful is the resource page with bibliographies, research guides, and web sites of interest to GATT Digital Library users and researchers.

The graphical feature showing the map of disputes is a useful tool for readers who respond to visual learning. Choosing to see the participation of the United States, for example, in the WTO dispute process shows that it has been a complainant in 73 cases and a respondent in 106 cases.

A NY Times article, Judge Allows Civil Lawsuit Over Claims of Torture, reports that Judge Jeffrey S. White, of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, has issued a 42 page opinion permitting a law suit on torture. The judge denied a motion to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo who wrote memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers for the department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003. The ruling states that the convicted terrorist can sue the Bush administration lawyer for drafting the legal theories that led to his alleged torture. The order is the first instance where a Bush administration lawyer has been held potentially liable for the abuse of detainees.

Padilla, a 38 year old Brooklyn born convert to Islam, is serving a 17-year sentence on terrorism charges who has claimed that he was tortured while being held nearly four years as a suspect.

Links to the Complaint was filed in the Northern District of California in January 2008 (Docket No. 08-cv-00035) are available on PACER and the Justia Federal Documents website. Judge White’s Order-Granting-in-part-and-Denying-in-Part-Defendents-Motion-to-Dismiss is available on the Scribd a website where more than 60 million people each month share original writings and documents.

This year, the BLS Library subscribed to LibGuides, a platform for creating research guides from Springshare. The Library now has a growing list of research guides that students and faculty can use in their research. BLS LibGuides are available at http://guides.brooklaw.edu/. The list of LibGuides include an Administrative Law Research Guide, a Treaty Research Guide, a New York Civil Practice: Selected Resources, a LibGuide on Researching Statutes and one for New Jersey Legal Resources. The platform is another example of web 2.0. Students and faculty are encouraged to create a LibGuide account and post their own research guides for the benefit of other library patrons.

Putting together a research guide with LibGuides is easy as it relies on Microsoft Word which is familiar to most library patrons. An individual guide consists of multiple boxes of content, such as text or database links, a catalog search box, RSS feeds, embedded videos and more. These boxes of content can be shared across different guides. This feature allows users to import content into other research guides. While creating content on the LibGuides platform requires some time investment , the updating of those guides is faster than traditional formats like paper or regular HTML guides. The biggest benefit is that LibGuides are easily shared with other researchers.

As for the correct pronunciation of “LibGuides”, Springshare, in its LibGuides F.A.Q, states that the product is pronounced “Lib” as in “liberation”.

This week, the US Supreme Court issued a major decision in Caperton v. Massey, setting a new standard for ruling on motions for the recusal or disqualification of a judge from a pending case, particularly when a judge may have benefited from campaign contributions from one of the parties. The facts in the case, according to a Wall Street Journal article titled Justices Set New Standard for Recusals, read like a John Grisham novel. The parties were the plaintiff, Hugh Caperton and his small, independent Harman Mining Co. and the defendant, Massey Energy, the country’s fourth largest coal company, and its CEO, Don Blankenship. At trial before a West Virginia jury, Massey lost a $50 million verdict in a fraud lawsuit brought by Caperton which Massey then appealed to the West Virginia Supreme Court. As the case moved through the appeals process, Blankenship contributed $3 million to Charleston lawyer Brent Benjamin’s election campaign against the incumbent Supreme Court Judge Warren McGraw. This amounted to 60 percent of Benjamin campaign contributions. Benjamin won the election. Three years later, when Massey’s appeal reached the West Virginia Supreme Court, Benjamin cast a crucial vote overturning the $50 million verdict. After repeated denials of motions that Judge Benjamin recuse himself, the case came to the Supreme Court where for the first time it set a standard for disqualifications arising from the money that judges receive in their campaigns for election to the bench. In a fact-driven decision, the Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, reasoned that, as an objective matter, the Due Process Clause requires recusal by a judge where “the probability of actual bias on the part of the judge or decisionmaker is too high to be constitutional.” The dissent by Chief Justice Roberts lamented that the majority “the standard the majority articulates—”probability of bias”—fails to provide clear, workable guidance for future cases”.

Aside from the question of how judicial bias is measured, Caperton spotlights the larger question of whether choosing judges by popular vote is sound policy. In recent times, judicial elections have become high profile, big money political events much different from the quiet, low key affairs of earlier times. Choosing judges by popular vote on its face seems like an exercise in democracy but in practice judicial elections call out for reforms to rein in out-of-control judicial campaigns and to prevent litigants from buying judges through campaign contributions to cast votes in their favor. Imagine filling the current US Supreme Court vacancy by judicial election rather than appointment and Senate confirmation.

The BLS Library has in its collection some worthwhile material on the subject of disqualification of judges including an electronic resource entitled Fair Courts: Setting Recusal Standards by James Sample, et al., Call #KF8861 .S26 2008 (INTERNET) published by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, the legal team that represented the plaintiff in Caperton v.Massey. See also Judicial Disqualification: Recusal and Disqualification of Judges by Richard E. Flamm (Call # KF8861 .F53 2007).

For those who may have missed it, last fall George Mason University’s Zotero project prompted allegations of copyright infringement. Thomson Reuters, makers of the commercial reference management application EndNote , brought the lawsuit in a Virginia state court accusing GMU of violating itssite license to the EndNote software. Open source advocates are cheering the dismissal of the suit as a major victory. For more detailed information, see the Ars Technica article entitled “EndNote maker’s lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed”.

For those unfamiliar with Zotero, a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension designed to help researchers collect, manage, and cite research sources, a video explaining how Zotero works is here.

A new website, The Legal Workshop, provides plain language summaries of articles published by member journals. The mission of the site is to feature “op-ed” versions of the articles published in the member journals. The concise summaries are written for a generalist audience and combine the best elements of print and online publication.

The site states that each Legal Workshop Editorial undergoes rigorous editorial treatment and quality screening and that readers can offer comments. Academics can submit response pieces, which are checked for citations and substance.

By aggregating the work of multiple law reviews, The Legal Workshop is able to provide frequently updated content. New article-based content is posted every Monday and most Wednesdays and Fridays. The Legal Workshop provides a one-stop forum for readers wishing to stay abreast of contemporary legal scholarship.

Currently member journals include

• Cornell Law Review
• Duke Law Journal
• Georgetown Law Journal
• New York University Law Review
• Northwestern University Law Review
• Stanford Law Review
• University of Chicago Law Review

Episode 042 – Conversation with Professor of Law William D. Araiza.mp3

In this pod cast, BLS Professor of Law William D. Araiza discusses the recent California Supreme Court decision in Strauss v. Horton upholding Proposition 8 and its impact on the ongoing debate over same-sex marriage. Throughout the conversation, Prof. Araiza, who recently joined the BLS faculty in January 2009 from Loyola Law School Los Angeles, refers to his October 2008 Review Essay: Four Books on Gay Rights and Same-Sex Marriage where he reviewed four books dealing with the complexities raised in the same-sex marriage debate. Publication in the Journal of the History of Sexuality is expected in 2010. Among the titles of the books included in Prof. Araiza’s review are:

The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights by Richard D. Mohr (Call #HQ76.3.U5 M643 2005)

Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse? What We’ve Learned from the Evidence by William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Darren R. Spedale (Call #K699 .E85 2006)

These two books are part of the BLS library collection and are of interest from an argumentation perspective on the topic of same-sex marriage. As the review points out, the 142 page Mohr book is an effort “to engage in a non-academic discussion of the role of gays and lesbians in contemporary American society” while the more substantial 336 page Eskridge book examines “examines the empirical evidence of the effects same-sex union rights have had on Scandinavian nations that pioneered legal status for same-sex unions, starting with Denmark in 1989 and continuing with the rest of Scandinavia through the 1990’s”. To download a copy of Prof. Araiza’s Review Essay: Four Books on Gay Rights and Same-Sex Marriage, see his Selected Works page which has links to his other scholarship.

In the latest legal development over marriage rights for same sex couples, the California Supreme Court ruling in Strauss v. Horton raises some interesting equal protection issues. The 136-page majority opinion devoted a great deal of discussion to what the Court ruled in the Marriage Cases last May, namely that same-sex couples enjoy the same rights afforded by the state constitutional right to marry as opposite-sex couples.

The Court then shifted its focus to the impact of Proposition 8 passed by California voters last November which added the language to the California Constitution that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The 6-1 decision ruled that Proposition 8 was legal. However, the Court ruled that the marriages performed between the court’s previous ruling in May 2008 that same sex marriage was legal and the passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008 were still valid. See pages 128-135 of the Court’s decision for its discussion of retroactivity which let the existing marriages stand. The number of such marriages is estimated to be about 18,000 according a New York Times article.

Ultimately, the Court avoided the issue of separate and not equal regimes for straight and gay couples seeking state recognition of their relationships. Straight people get marriage, gay people get civil unions. Such a dual regime raises serious equal protection issues particularly in light of the Court decision from one year ago in the Marriage Cases which ruled that all Californians are entitled to state recognition of “two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own.” The dissenting opinion of Judge Moreno states the issue clearly when he writes “Granting same-sex couples all of the rights enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, except the right to call their ‘officially recognized, and protected family relationship’ (maj. opn., ante, at p. 7) a marriage, still denies them equal treatment.”

The Supreme Court may soon have an honorary Brooklyn Law School Doctor of Laws degree holder now that President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to replace Justice David Souter. In 2001, Dean Joan G. Wexler presented Judge Sotomayor with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree before the 454 graduates and the entire BLS community at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center when Judge Sotomayor delivered the commencement address at Brooklyn Law School’s Centennial Commencement. Championing the value of pro bono work, Judge Sotomayor encouraged the graduates to dedicate part of their careers to public interest law.

Before serving on the Second Circuit bench, Judge Sotomayor served as US District Judge for the Southern District of New York after President George H.W. Bush appointed her in 1992, making her the first Hispanic woman to serve on the federal bench.

Her personal story is a compelling one that offers encouragement and inspiration to aspiring young lawyers. Born in the South Bronx, she was raised in a housing project by her parents who came to New York from Puerto Rico during World War II when her mother served as part of the Women’s Army Corps. Her father was a factory worker with a 3rd-grade education who did not speak English. He passed away when his daughter was nine. Her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for her children. With the support of family, friends, and teachers, Sonia earned scholarships to Princeton, where she graduated at the top of her class, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

The confirmation process will likely see intense scrutiny of Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record. For a review of her record while on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, read the four-part summary of Judge Sotomayor’s opinions in civil cases at Scotusblog here, here, here and here. Opponents of her nomination will likely point to Sototmayor’s concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano, 530 F.3d 88, the case involving a suit by white and Hispanic firefighters passed over for promotion when the City of New Haven declined to implement the results of a promotion test upon which black firefighters performed disproportionately poorly. A decision by the Supreme Court on its grant of certiorari in the Ricci case is expected soon.

However the argument over Sotomayor’s judicial record unfolds, it is her personal story and character that will likely be the most decisive factor in determining whether the Supreme Court can count a BLS honorary Doctor of Laws degree recipient among its members. The Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit corporation providing admission-related services for legal education institutions and their applicants throughout the world has a video discussing her story as part of their “Believe and Achieve: Latinos and the Law” program that is worth watching.