With the growth of information on the web, Google and Wikepedia searches, once viewed as novel and sophisticated, now seem fairly simplistic as they search only one query at a time. Work on the Semantic Web has been underway for some time to navigate the growing amount of data on the web in ways that are more usable through more intelligible interfaces. So move over Google and Wikipedia; here comes Freebase Parallax! Using the slogan “Don’t just search for one thing! Explore a whole set of related things together!”, it is a new way to search the web.

A recent article on ZDNet entitled The Future of the Web describes how Parallax, a novel browsing interface, can make contextual connections with machine readable data for richer search result sets which in turn can display visual representations of the search results. Describing how the semantic web works is not easy. Fortunately, David Huynh, who designed Parallax, has made a video that is a useful, clear demonstration of the enormous promise and power of the future of knowledge sharing. Parallax is truly an amazing product that allows for complex web searching more simply and in far fewer steps than Google and Wikipedia. Check out this video by David Huynh posted on Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/1513562.

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

Try the Parallax search interface here, using “Foreign donations to 2008 US Political Candidates “as a search query. At this point the interface is still slow. But ultimately this kind of searching will have a major impact on the future of searches in large enterprises.

Yesterday, in a 67 page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its ruling In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 affirming the 2006 ruling by the late U.S. District Judge Richard Casey, In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, 349 F.Supp.2d 765 (S.D.N.Y. 2005), which dismissed a lawsuit brought by survivors of the 9/11 attacks against the nation of Saudi Arabia and four of its princes. The Second Circuit ruled that the defendants were protected from prosecution under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The plaintiffs accused the princes of donating money to anti-American charities, which then funneled the funds to al-Qaeda. Judge Jacobs summarized the holding, as follows:

We conclude that the FSIA protects the appellees – most obviously, the Kingdom iself. First, we hold that the FSIA applies to individual officials of foreign governments in their official capacities, and therefore to the Four Princes. Second, we affirm the district court’s conclusion that the [Saudi High Commission for Relief to Bosnia and Herzegovina] is an “agency or instrumentality” of the Kingdom, to which the FSIA likewise applies.

Further, we conclude that none of the FSIA’s exceptions applies. The plaintiffs’ claims do not come within the statutory exception for state-sponsored terrorist acts, 28 U.S.C. § 1605A (“Terrorism Exception”), because the Kingdom has not been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States. As to the exception for personal injury or death caused by a foreign sovereign’s tortious act, id. § 1605 (a)(5) (“Torts Exception”), we decline to characterize plaintiffs’ claims – expressly predicated on a state-sponsored terrorist act – as sounding in tort. Nor do the plaintiffs’ claims come within the statutory exception for a foreign sovereign’s commercial activity, id. § 1605(a)(2) (“Commercial Activities Exception”), because the defendants’ specific alleged conduct – supporting Muslim charities that promote and underwrite terrorism – is not conduct in trade, traffic or commerce.

Accordingly, we agree with the district court that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the claims against the Kingdom, the Four Princes in their official capacities, and the SHC. We likewise affirm the district court’s dismissal of the claims against the Four Princes (in their personal capacities) and Mohamed for want of personal jurisdiction, and the denial of the plaintiffs’ motions for jurisdictional discovery.

For a legislative history of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, see
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 with Amendments: a Legislative History of Pub. L. No. 94-583 compiled by William H. Manz, Call Number. KF1309.5 F67.

Episode 031 – Conversation with BLS Professor Susan N. Herman.mp3

In this conversation, Professor Susan N. Herman discusses her participation in the Tenth Annual Supreme Court Review held on Aug. 5, 2008 and sponsored by the Practicing Law Institute (PLI) in New York, NY. The Co-Chair(s) of the program were:

Erwin Chemerinsky, Founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine, School of Law
Martin A. Schwartz, Professor of Law, Touro Law Center

Speakers participating in the program along with Susan N. Herman, Centennial Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School were:

Preeta D. Bansal, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Maegher & Flom LLP
Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Visiting Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Joan Biskupic, Supreme Court Correspondent & Author, USA Today
Leon Friedman, Joseph Kushner Distinguished Professor of Civil Liberties Law, Hofstra University School of Law
Burt Neuborne, Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties, Legal Director, Brennan Center of Justice, New York University School of Law
Jeffrey Toobin, Staff Writer, The New Yorker, Senior Analyst, CNN

Prof. Herman discusses both the highlights of the recently concluded Supreme Court term and cases expected to be addressed in the upcoming term along with the impact of the presidential election on the future of the Court. She also recommends reading books on the Supreme Court authored by two of the panel members: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, Call No. KF8748 .T66 2007 and Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice by Joan Biskupic, Call No. KF8745.O25 B57 2005.

An article by Charles Toutant in this week’s New Jersey Law Journal reports the findings of a national poll that the pressure of regulatory compliance on corporations is leading to corporate and securities law offering the most job opportunities for lawyers in the coming decade. Litigation is a close second in the survey which was released on July 29 and conducted by staffing agency Robert Half Legal. The survey posed this question to practicing lawyers “Which one of the following legal practice areas, in your opinion, will offer the greatest number of job opportunities over the next 10 years?” Their responses were:

Corporate and securities 24%
Litigation 21%
Intellectual property 16%
International law 16%
Environmental 12%
Commercial real estate 5%

The article cites the increasingly global nature of capital markets as creating more business opportunities here, and therefore more work for U.S. lawyers. Quoting Dina Cappuccio of Advocate Legal Search and Consulting in Newark, several law firms have put in requests for corporate and securities lawyers. “’In terms of keeping corporate law hot, I think one of the reasons is there’s a lot of foreign money coming in.”

A Washington Post article by Ellen Nakashima, Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border, reported on newly announced powers of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to search and seize electronic devices such as laptops, cell phones and Ipods at border crossings into the US:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies — which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens — are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism… The policies cover ‘any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,’ including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers,
and video and audio tapes. They also cover ‘all papers and other written documentation,’ including books, pamphlets, and ‘written materials commonly referred to as pocket trash…

The Practising Law Institute (PLI) will be conducting its Tenth Annual Supreme Court Review on Tuesday, August 5, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the PLI Center, 810 Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street, New York City. The program will cover cases decided during the Supreme Court’s 2007 Term including those involving the rights of enemy combatants, voting rights, the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the death penalty, the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, and sentencing. Among the presenters will be Brooklyn Law School Professor Susan N. Herman. Links to many of Professor Herman’s prolific body of writings are available on Selected Works.

A simultaneous live webcast of the session will be made available to webcast participants who will be able to submit questions electronically. The cost of the program is $995. PLI has a Law Student Scholarship where law students generally receive full scholarships to most programs, except for the $25 application fee.

Recently, Professor Betsy Fajans and I conducted a workshop for new members of the Brooklyn Journal of International Law. Professor Fajans’ half-hour presentation about selecting a topic and writing an article will benefit any student who recently joined the staff of a BLS legal journal or review. I have asked the circulation staff to place five DVDs of Professor Fajans’ presentation on Course Reserve. Through the library’s circulation desk, a BLS student can check out this DVD overnight.

The links to my handouts describing sources to select and to develop an international law-oriented topic are:

public-copy-of-bjil-finding-articles-books-20081 (Finding an Article Topic)

public-copy-of-bjil-topic-selection-and-development-2008 (Developing an Article Topic)

Note: Only faculty, students and administrators of Brooklyn Law School can implement the proxy instructions for off-campus access to BLS subscription databases.

In September, Professor Fajans and a member of our library staff will conduct a similar workshop for BLS students who plan to write seminar papers. I will announce the upcoming date/time through this blog.

One of the most emailed stories in yesterday’s New York Times was one by Laurie Goodstein entitled Serenity Prayer Stirs Up Doubt: Who Wrote It? Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), once vice president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, is generally credited as the author of the Serenity Prayer. See the online version of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The Times article reports the findings of Fred Shapiro, the Associate Law Library Director at Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library:

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Some refer to the prayer as if it were a proverb, while others appear to claim it as their own poetry. None attribute the prayer to a particular source. And they never mention Reinhold Niebuhr.

For the Yale Alumni Magazine article by Fred Shapiro cited in the Times story, click here.