Thanks to Maria Okanska, Manager of Bibliographic Operations at BLS Library, for adding 14 new databases that many library users probably don’t know. They are:

1. The Forms Catalog provides citizens and businesses with a common access point to federal agency forms. — http://fedforms.gov/
2. Statistics gathered and projected by the United Nations regarding the world population covering 1950-2050. — http://esa.un.org/unpp/
3. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) System Search — http://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/sicsearch.html
4. Information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. —
   http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
5. The collection presents exact reproductions of major United Nations legal publications, including the complete collection of the United Nations treaty series. Also included are the Monthly statement of treaties and international agreements, United Nations legislative series, United Nations juridical yearbook, Official records of the First, Second, and Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea with Final Act , International Court of Justice reports, advisory opinions and orders, and more. — http://www.heinonline.org/HOL/Index?collection=unl
6. Nineteenth-century serials edition is a collection of six full-text British 19th century newspapers and journals: Monthly repository (1806-1837), Unitarian chronicle (1832-1833), Northern star (1838-1852), Leader (1850-1860), English woman’s journal (1858-1864), Tomahawk (1867-1870), and Publisher’s circular (1880-1890). Digitization was a collaboration between Arts and Humanities Research Council, Birkbeck College, King’s College London, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, the British Library, and Olive Software. The titles were chosen for their emphasis upon social issues, political reform, and women’s rights issues. — http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html
7. An information database used for trade negotiations and general research on international trade. — http://r0.unctad.org/trains_new/index.shtm
8. Easy Access to NIBRS: Victims of Domestic Violence allows users to analyze state-level data on victims of domestic violence based on information collected by the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). With EZANIBRSDV, users can explore the characteristics of domestic violence victims, including demographic information of the victim (age, sex, and race), victim injury, and the victim-offender relationship. — http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/ezanibrsdv/
9. Records of the parliaments of Scotland to 1707. — http://www.rps.ac.uk/
10. Google patent search. — http://www.google.com/patents
11. Legal information archive. — http://cdm266901.cdmhost.com/
12. Illinois digital newspaper collection. — http://www.library.uiuc.edu/idnc/
13. The WomanStats Project. — http://www.womanstats.org/
14. OECD.Stat includes data and metadata for OECD countries and selected non-member countries … access by keyword, by theme, by country via the selection of key indicators. — http://stats.oecd.org/wbos/Index.aspx

Last month, the law school held two events to honor the memory of the late Law Librarian and Professor Sara Robbins. The first was the Third Annual Sara Robbins Memorial Spelling Bee held on Thursday, January 29 in the Subotnick Center. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle article by Samuel Newhouse gave a full account of the event reporting that of the 38 contestants “the last speller standing was Professor Marsha Garrison, who went home a winner after correctly spelling amanuensis (defined as a stenographer, or one who transcribes dictations).” By the end of the night, about $3,000 had been raised for the Sara Robbins scholarship, which is for a Brooklyn Law student.

The next day, Friday, January 30, Dean Joan Wexler hosted a luncheon prior to the Sara Robbins Portrait Dedication on the third floor of the library. In addition to members of the faculty and the library staff, Prof. Robbins sisters, Anne Robbins, Kay Ehrenkrantz and Marlene Robbins were in attendance to dedicate the portrait painted by award-winning artist Linda Tracey Brandon of Phoenix, Arizona.

There is more news about open access to government documents in today’s NY Times article An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy. The article highlights the efforts of Carl Malamud of the Public Resources.Org to make court proceedings and legal records freely available to citizens and taxpayers and to overcome barriers to open access to documents published by the government. Malamud has been a long time advocate of open access to government documents with successes in posting online free CRS reports as well as the records of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office. For more, see the December 12, 2008 Wired Magazine article Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free about Carl Malamud and his open access efforts.

Malamud’s most recent open access efforts deals with Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), the fee based and outdated electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. PACER is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and allows users to obtain for a fee case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts. Malamud, using $600,000 in contributions in 2008, bought a 50-year archive of papers from the federal appellate courts and placed them online. He was ready to take on the larger database of district courts, which, with the help of the Government Printing Office (GPO), had opened a free trial of PACER at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could retrieve them. One of the activists managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database consisting of 19,856,160 pages of text before the GPO suspended the program. For now, the 50 years of appellate decisions remain online and Google-friendly with the 20 million pages of lower court decisions available in bulk form, but not yet easily searchable.

The open access movement is gaining strength. Last year on October 14, Open Access Day, at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Stephen Schultze conducted a presentation on Open Access to Government Documents with some statistics about the income the PACER system generates for the courts. A PDF version of the slides used in that presentation are available here.

Brooklyn Law School has announced it will freeze faculty salaries, in order to keep 2009 tuition increases low. Dean Joan G. Wexler discussed the issue in a letter to students:

… I am writing to let you know that when the School sets tuition for the next academic year, we will be mindful of the current difficult economic times and the financial pressures that you face.

Over the past five years, annual tuition increases have been approximately 6.2% for entering students and 5% for upperclass students. I anticipate that any increase for the 2009-10 academic year will be substantially lower…

… All departmental budgets will be carefully reviewed, but we will be able to keep our tuition increase to a minimum by foregoing salary increases for deans and almost all administrators, faculty, and staff in the coming year. The savings will be passed on to you.

… We are imposing this limit on our tuition increase not because we have to, but because we are able to, and because we know it will help you deal with these challenging economic times.

Brooklyn Law School’s faculty includes 68 full-time professors and five emeriti faculty as well as adjunct faculty consisting of practitioners, public officials and judges who teach specialized courses. BLS is not the only law school feeling the economic pinch. Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog provides a list of other law schools responding to the economic downturn. But none of them has tied budgetary cutbacks to student tuition as clearly as BLS.

Wikileaks, a website that has been publishing anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents since December 2006, has been described as a Wiki for Whistle-Blowers in an article in Time magazine. Like Wikipedia, the content on the site is posted by users and must be evaluated for authenticity. The site, if used with a healthy dose of skepticism, could become as important a tool as the Freedom of Information Act.

In this week’s announcement Wikileaks says that it has published an extensive database of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. The Congressional Research Service is an arm of the Library of Congress devoted to providing research and analysis on legislative issues for Congress. The 6,780 reports now posted on Wikileaks date back to 1990 and have an estimated value of US$1 billion. The reports may give the public a better idea of the information Congress has had at its disposal, and perhaps push lawmakers into making future reports publicly available.

“Legally, they belong in the public domain,” Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Schmitt said. “It is very important for anyone who is doing research as well as the general public to have access to this information, and see what the congressional research services is [producing].” In the past few years, there has been increasing demand to make CRS reports open to the public. Open CRS is another website whose aim is to make CRS reports public. While it is legal to make these reports public, historically members of Congress and their staffers have done this at their discretion. Schwartz estimates that Open CRS was publishing between 80 and 90 percent of all reports being produced. The reports are also sold by data collection services such as Penny Hill Press.

A number of libraries and non-profit organizations have sought to collect as many of the released reports as possible. Such collections include:

• the National Council for Science and the Environment National Library for the Environment,
• the Thurgood Marshall Law Library University of Maryland School of Law,
• the IP Mall at Franklin Pierce Law Center, and the
• University of North Texas Libraries Government Documents Department

This week, by a vote of 264 to 158, the House of Representatives approved the DTV Delay Act to postpone the transition to digital television until June 12, 2009. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on its web site states that “This delay will grant millions of households the chance to be prepared for the transition and retain access to an important information resource.” The Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D. Cal.), in a statement in support of the bill, suggested that the delay is necessary because of lack of preparation in the Bush Administration:

Unfortunately, we are not yet prepared for this transition. The prior Administration assured the Committee on Energy and Commerce repeatedly that the transition effort was on track. But on December 24, 2008, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) notified Congress that the converter box coupon program would run out of funding the first week of January and that it would need an additional $250 to $350 million to meet projected demand.

As part of the effort to delay conversion, Rep. Waxman sent a letter to his colleagues with an updated list of households on the waiting list, organized by congressional district noting that there were over 2 million households on the DTV Coupon Waiting List.

The conversion project dates back many years and culminated with the enactment of the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 on February 8, 2006 when it was signed into law by President Bush. The multi-year effort was aimed at driving broadcasters from some of the choicest frequencies in the airwaves to make room for advanced wireless broadband services. The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 was part of a much larger bill dealing with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

The issue of funding the cash-strapped converter box coupon program, which provides up to two $40 coupons per household for DTV converter boxes (which cost anywhere between $40-$60), is not addressed in the DTV Delay Act. However it has become a point of controversy in the pending economic stimulus bill. Title III of the stimulus package dealing with the Department of Commerce provides for $650 million to be available until September 30, 2009 for the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Program.

As the DTV Delay Act awaits President Obama’s signature, a new feature on the White House web page asks for public input. According to the White House, all non-emergency legislation will be published to the Web site for five days, allowing the public to review and comment before the president signs it. The page, DTV Delay Act of 2009 on WhiteHouse.gov, includes the full text of the bill and offers a form for users to send in their thoughts.

This month, the Library of Congress, along with other US Government institutions like the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, honors African American History Month. This year’s theme, “The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas”, is a tribute to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which marks its 100th anniversary on February 12. The centennial of the NAACP, formed in 1909 by a group of men and women — whites and blacks, Jews and Gentiles — is an occasion to highlight the problem of race and citizenship in American history, from the experiences of free Blacks in a land of slavery to the political aspirations of African Americans today.

The idea for African American History Month dates back to 1925 when Harvard educated historian, Carter G. Woodson, an early member of the NAACP, conceived and announced Negro History Week. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that had the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. This year, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) will deliver the keynote address kicking off the Library of Congress celebration of African American History Month on Wednesday, February 4.

This past year, with such notable firsts as the first African American President, Attorney General and New York Governor, is a good time to look back at the first African American lawyers. The Just The Beginning Foundation, a multiracial, nonprofit organization comprised of lawyers, judges, and other citizens, is dedicated to developing interest in the law among young persons from various ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in the legal profession and supporting their continued advancement. Its long-term goal is to increase racial diversity in the legal profession and on the bench. On its web page of First African American Lawyers, George Boyer Vashon is listed as the first African American lawyer to be admitted to the practice of law in New York in 1848. He followed Macon Bolling Allen who was the first African American licensed to practice law in the United States (Maine, 1844) and the first Black American Justice of the Peace.

The BLS Library has in its collection Fire from the Soul by Donald Spivey (E185.86 .S65 2003) with chapters on Race first: an introduction to black history — The destruction of a people — Democracy contradicted — Outright violence — The new slavery — Urban blacks: new consciousness and new voice to the American dilemma — Seeking salvation during more hard times — Battling on every front — Race to the future: toward a conclusion.

Episode 036 – Conversation with Professor of Law Deborah A. Widiss.mp3

This pod cast features Visiting Assistant Professor of Law Deborah A. Widiss discussing her article Shadow Precedents and the Separation of Powers: Statutory Interpretation of Congressional Overrides soon to be published in the Notre Dame Law Review. Professor Widiss won the Scholarly Paper Award for the article at the 2009 AALS Annual Meeting in early January in San Diego. The Special Committee to Review Scholarly Papers chose her paper out of almost 60 papers submitted.

In the article, Professor Widiss addresses Congressional overrides of judicial interpretations of statutes. She argues that because judges are often faced with determining the exact extent to which Congress has overridden a judicial decision, they can easily leave in place as precedent the very concepts that Congress sought to override. When other courts follow these “shadow precedents,” legislative supremacy is threatened and the standard rationales offered for adherence to precedent are undermined. In this pod cast, Professor Widiss discusses the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the most recent Congressional override of a Supreme Court decision.

Professor Widiss joined Brooklyn Law School’s Visiting Assistant Professor Program in 2007 and is completing her two-year term this spring. She teaches Employment Discrimination, Legislation and Statutory Interpretation, and Family Law. Her research interests include employment law, the legislative process, and the significance of gender and gender stereotypes in the development of law and government policy. Her recent publications include Domestic Violence and the Workplace: The Explosion of State Legislation and the Need for a Comprehensive Strategy in the Florida State University Law Review (2008) and a co-written article, Exposing Sex Stereotypes in Recent Same-Sex Marriage Jurisprudence which appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (2007) and received a Dukeminier Award from the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School.

Today, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-2) the first major piece of legislation enacted into law in the new Congress. In his remarks at the signing ceremony, the President said: “It is fitting that with the very first bill I sign – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act – we are upholding one of this nation’s first principles: that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness. . . But equal pay is by no means just a women’s issue – it’s a family issue.”

The bill signing comes after lengthy litigation that resulted in the 2007 US Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), that reversed a $3 million jury award that found that Goodyear discriminated against her in pay, giving her smaller raises than the male managers. The basis of the Supreme Court ruling was the narrow issue of limitation of actions and that Ledbetter’s claims had to be filed within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers. The decision became a major issue during the presidential campaign dividing the Democratic and Republican parties. The Democrats viewed the case as an ideologically driven decision — one that tossed aside precedent and logic — and campaigned in Congress to override the decision by enacting corrective legislation. The Republicans (almost united in their opposition to eliminating any time requirement for filing a claim involving pay discrimination and extending an expanded statute of limitations) led a successful filibuster against the bill in 2008 and this year unsuccessfully proposed eight amendments to weaken the legislation.

The passage of the new legislation raises broader questions about congressional overrides of US Supreme Court decisions in general. We generally assume that the courts – and especially the Supreme Court – have the “last word” on the meaning of Congressional statutes. But today’s bill signing makes clear that Congress can act to change or to clarify the legal framework in response to judicial decisions when those decisions have produced outcomes that are not favored by a congressional majority. The BLS library has in its collection a number of items that address the issue of congressional overrides of court cases including these two volumes:

Making Policy, Making Law: an Interbranch Perspective edited by Mark C. Miller and Jeb Barnes (JK305 .M35 2004)