The Library will be open the following hours during the Thanksgiving break:
Wednesday, November 25th: 9:00am – 10:00pm
Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 26th: CLOSED
Friday & Saturday, November 27th-28th; 9:00am – 10:00pm
Sunday, November 29th: 10:00am – 12:00am
Enjoy your Thanksgiving Holiday!
The Law Library of Congress produces many excellent legal research tools – including the Guide to Law Online. The Guide to Law Online provides links for web-based sources of federal law http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/federal.php, state law http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/states.php, and for the laws of hundreds of foreign countries http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/nations.php.
Another great Law Library of Congress research tool is the Global Legal Monitor http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/?loclr=bloglaw. The Global Legal Monitor offers coverage of legal news and developments worldwide. Global Legal Monitor is produced by a team of Law Library of Congress editors, it is updated frequently, and its content is drawn from news stories found in official national legal publications and reliable press sources. Browse news stories from the Global Legal Monitor homepage or search for older news stories by text, topic, jurisdiction, author, or date.
Pro Bono Celebration Week, sponsored by the American Bar Association Standing Committee 
on Pro Bono and Public Service, is a national event that takes place every year in late October with events all over the country. It is an opportunity to spotlight the difference lawyers can make in their communities, to recruit and train more pro bono volunteers and to acknowledge the partnerships that form the basis for many successful pro bono efforts.
Although national in breadth, the Celebration provides an opportunity for local legal associations across the country to take the next step in their efforts to provide high quality legal services to those living on the social margins.
The need for legal services among the poor is overwhelming. According to an American Bar Association study, at least 40% of low and moderate-income households experience a legal problem each year. Yet studies show that the collective civil legal aid effort is meeting only about 20% of the legal needs of low-income people.
Interested in volunteering and want to find out more about what opportunities are available? Check out the NYS Pro Bono Opportunities Guide. The Guide is a database of organizations that lawyers, law students and paralegals can search in order to find volunteer opportunities.
The New York State Pro Bono Opportunities Guide is a joint project of The City Bar Justice Center, the New York State Bar Association, Pro Bono Net and Volunteers of Legal Service.
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This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Landmarks Law of New York City, which was enacted on April 19, 1965 when Mayor Robert F. Wagner signed it beginning an era of historic preservation. Since then, almost 1,400 individual landmarks, 115 interior landmarks, 10 scenic landmarks, 109 historic districts, and 10 historic district extensions located throughout all five boroughs have been designated. The Landmarks Law established the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the mayoral agency responsible for identifying, designating, preserving, and regulating New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings and sites. The Landmarks Law is found in Chapter 74 of the New York City Charter.
On Wednesday, October 21 at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, a panel of land use experts in a session called Preserving our Architectural History: The Business Case for Landmarks Preservation will discuss the economic impact of historic preservation in New York City. Another event marking the anniversary of the Landmarks Law is scheduled on Monday, October 26, 2015 at the New York City Bar Association. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design will host History in the Making: The New York City Landmarks Law at 50, a full-day conference at the Bar Association offices at 42 West 44th Street, New York, NY.
On the subject of historic sites, the Brooklyn Law School Library has in its collection Landmarks Preservation and the Property Tax: Assessing Landmark Buildings for Real for Real Taxation Purposes by David Lisotkin (Call #KF6535 .L58 2012). The book examines the growing importance of historic preservation. Communities across the country have established designation programs whereby individual buildings or districts of historical-architectural significance are accorded landmark status. It focuses on New York City in considering the effects of historic status on property value and in evaluating assessment practices. Its findings are transferrable to other communities because the base conditions are similar. Many other cities have designation programs modeled on New York City’s. In addition, New York’s property-tax system and administrative processes resemble those found in communities across the nation. To enhance the transferability of this study’s findings, Listokin refers to the national experience and literature, typically on a side-by-side basis with the New York City counterpart.
In anticipation of the first year Research and Citation Quiz, the Library will offer two review workshops.
The workshop on Bluebooking with Success will be offered twice; you may attend either session. Please bring your Bluebook!
Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 4:00pm – 5:00pm, Room 601
Thursday, October 22, 2015, 5:00pm – 6:00pm, Room 503
You may bring your research questions to this Question & Answer Workshop. We will also go over some sample quiz questions.
Monday, October 26, 2015, 5:00pm – 6:00pm, 7th floor Moot Court Room
Looking forward to seeing you at these timely and helpful research & citation review sessions.
Episode 095 – Conversation with Prof. Lawrence Fleischer.mp3
In this podcast, Brooklyn Law School Adjunct Professor Lawrence Fleischer talks about his Criminal Law, Procedure, Evidence and Film Lore Workshop, which he has been teaching for the past five years, initially with the late Professor Robert Pitler and now by himself. In the first part of the interview, Prof. Fleischer relates how the workshop uses movies to teach criminal trial evidence by requiring students to view legal films and give presentations to address current criminal law related matters. Prof. Fleischer, who serves of counsel to the New York law firm of Gotlin & Jaffe, received his B.A. in History Summa Cum Laude from City College of the City University of New York, a Juris Doctorate from American University School of Law, and an LL. M degree from New York University Law School. In addition to teaching at BLS, he teaches at City College of New York and has taught in the CCNY Political Science department, NYU’s School of Continuing Education, Hunter College’s Graduate History department, Brooklyn College’s Graduate department of Political Science, and Seton Hall’s School of Law. In the second part of the conversation, Prof. Fleischer discusses his use in his course of the case of Maria Barbella a/k/a Maria Barberi, the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair in the US and of the Italian-American countess who came to her aid. The story is told in The Trials of Maria Barbella: The True Story of a 19th Century Crime of Passion by Idanna Pucci (Call #HV6053 .P83 1996) discussed in this site’s most recent blog available at this link.
On June 29, 2015, the final day of its 2014 term, the US Supreme Court ruled in Glossip v. Gross. The Court, in a 5-4 opinion by Justice Alito, ruled that death-row inmates had failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the use of midazolam, a sedative in Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, violates the Eighth Amendment because it fails to render a person insensate to pain. Today, Glossip is scheduled to die by the controversial method that the Court greenlighted this summer unless there is a stay of execution. The case is likely not the final word on the death penalty. Justice Scalia this week Scalia told students at a Memphis college that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional citing Justice Breyer’s dissent that it is time to consider whether the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment in all cases.
Breyer is not the first Supreme Court justice to invite constitutional debate about the death penalty. Several justices in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 US 153 (1976) bringing back the death penalty later came to reject it. Justice Powell told his biographer that the death penalty should be abolished. Justice Blackmun, wrote in 1994 that he would no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.” In 2008, Justice Stevens wrote that his review of hundreds of cases had persuaded him that the penalty is both profoundly unworkable and unconstitutional. Justice Breyer in his dissent in Glossip argued that the death penalty is unreliable and arbitrary in application citing the long delays that undermine its purpose, convinced that we have executed the innocent. In Rudolph v. Alabama, 375 U.S. 889, (1963), Justice Goldberg’s dissent also suggested that capital punishment might violate the Eighth Amendment. That dissent prompted statewide moratoriums and encouraged cases to be brought to the Court challenging the constitutionality of capital statutes. A decade later, the Court struck them all down in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Perhaps, in the wake of Glossip, we are about to travel down that path once again.
On the subject of capital punishment, Brooklyn Law School Library has The Trials of Maria Barbella: The True Story of a 19th Century Crime of Passion by Idanna Pucci (Call #HV6053 .P83 1996). This book illustrates the debate over the death penalty in the late 19th Century in the story of the trial of Maria Barbella for the murder of Domenico Cataldo in New York City on April 26, 1895. Maria and her family immigrated to New York in 1892. She met and became friendly with Cataldo, also from the same region of Italy. One day Cataldo took her to a boarding house, drugged her with the drink he bought her, and took advantage of her. With strong morals about intimacy and marriage, Maria said that they would have to get married. He promised they would marry in several months, even though he was already married to a woman in Italy, with whom he had children. Later Cataldo told Maria that he was going back to Italy and would not marry her. When Maria and her mother confronted him and insisted he marry Maria he said the only way he would do that was if they paid him $200. As the mother stormed away, Maria asked, one last time, whether she would be his wife. When he replied that “Only a pig would marry you“, she drew out her razor and killed him by cutting his throat.
Thus began the saga of Maria Barbella, who shortly became the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair. She was arrested and put in the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention (otherwise known as “The Tombs”) for more than two months. Her trial began on July 11. Maria was unable to speak or understand English. She admitted everything: how she slit his throat and how he ran after her, unable to reach her and dropped dead. The jury showed sympathy for her case; but trial Judge John W. Goff asked the jury not to have mercy on Maria. He said, “Your verdict must be an example of justice. A jury must not concern itself with mercy. The law does not distinguish between the sexes. The fragility of the female sex is sometimes involved to excuse savage crimes. We cannot publicly proclaim a woman not guilty of killing a man solely because this man has proposed marriage and then changed his mind!” The jury declared her guilty. On July 18, 1895, Judge Goff sentenced her to “execution by electricity” and sent her to Sing Sing Prison, the first female convict held there in 18 years and the first one on death row.
The case stirred up controversy in the Italian community which felt that the verdict was unjust with no Italians on the jury. Many complained to the Governor about how the trial was handled. On April 21, 1896, the Court of Appeals of New York in People v Barberi, 149 N.Y. 256 (also available on Westlaw Next at this link) ruled that the judgment of conviction should be reversed and a new trial granted. In the second trial at the criminal branch of the New York Supreme Court, she was said to be epileptic and mentally ill because of everything that had happened. She was found not guilty.
A US District Court judge in Los Angeles has issued a 41 page ruling that will hopefully end copyright claims to “Happy Birthday to You” perhaps the most recognized song in the English language. Chief U.S. District Judge George King ruled that the publishers Warner/Chappell Music’s claim to own the copyright to “Happy Birthday” is “implausible and unreasonable.” After an announcement of a documentary about the Happy Birthday song. Warner/Chappell demanded a $1,500 licensing fee, which the company making the film agreed to pay. When Warner/Chappell sent a second letter, warning it could claim a $150,000 statutory penalty for copyright infringement, Good Morning to You Productions, the company making the documentary, filed suit in the US District Court for the Central District of California against Warner/Chappell which has collected millions of dollars in licensing fees for “Happy Birthday to You” although the song has been in the public domain for decades.
The opinion provides a history of the tune from before 1893, when sisters Mildred and Patty Hill wrote words and music for 73 songs, composed or arranged by Mildred, with words by Patty. They sold or assigned their rights to Clayton F. Summy on Feb. 1, 1893, for 10 percent of retail sales. The songs included “Good Morning to All.” It had the same tune but different words from Happy Birthday. Summy published a songbook that year under the title “Song Stories for the Kindergarten,” and filed a copyright application on Oct. 16, 1893, in which he claimed to own the copyright, but not to be the author. His copyright expired in the 1920s and he did not immediately renew it. A reconstituted company, the Hill Foundation, applied for a new copyright on it in 1934, and a number of lawsuits followed. By then, a number of other companies claimed to own the copyright, including the Board of Sunday Schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1912), and the Gospel Trumpet Co. (1928). The opinion states:
The Hill sisters gave Summy Co. the rights to the melody, and the rights to piano arrangements based on the melody, but never any rights to the lyrics. Defendants’ speculation that the pleadings in the Hill-Summy lawsuit somehow show that the Second Agreement involved a transfer of rights in the lyrics is implausible and unreasonable.
The summary judgment record shows that there are triable issues of fact as to whether Patty wrote the Happy Birthday lyrics in the late Nineteenth Century and whether Mildred may have shared an interest in them as a co-author. Even assuming this is so, neither Patty nor Mildred nor Jessica ever did anything with their common law rights in the lyrics. For decades, with the possible exception of the publication of The Everyday Song Book in 1922, the Hill sisters did not authorize any publication of the lyrics. They did not try to obtain federal copyright protection. They did not take legal action to prevent the use of the lyrics by others, even as Happy Birthday became very popular and commercially valuable. In 1934, four decades after Patty supposedly wrote the song, they finally asserted their rights to the Happy Birthday/Good Morning melody – but still made no claim to the lyrics.
Defendants ask us to find that the Hill sisters eventually gave Summy Co. the rights in the lyrics to exploit and protect, but this assertion has no support in the record. The Hill sisters gave Summy Co. the rights to the melody, and the rights to piano arrangements based on the melody, but never any rights to the lyrics. Defendants’ speculation that the pleadings in the Hill-Summy lawsuit somehow show that the Second Agreement involved a transfer of rights in the lyrics is implausible and unreasonable. Defendants’ suggestion that the Third Agreement effected such a transfer is circular and fares no better. As far as the record is concerned, even if the Hill sisters still held common law rights by the time of the Second or Third Agreement, they did not give those rights to Summy Co.
In light of the foregoing, Defendants’ Motion is DENIED and Plaintiffs’ Motion is GRANTED as set forth above. Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics, Defendants, as Summy Co.’s purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics.
The Brooklyn Law School Library has a wealth of material on the subject of copyright often called a “limited monopoly.” When copyrights grow old and die, the works they protect fall into the public domain. Subject to certain exceptions, public domain works may be freely copied or used in the creation of derivative works without permission, or authorization, of the former copyright owners. One book in the BLS Library collection on copyright and the public domain is Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain by Robert Spoo (Call #KF2994 .S656 2013). The book tells the story of Samuel Roth who made a name–and a profit–for himself by publishing selections from foreign writings–especially the risqué parts–without permission. When he reprinted segments of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, the author took him to court. The story shows that clashes between authors, publishers, and literary “pirates” influenced both American copyright law and literature itself. From its inception in 1790, American copyright law offered no or less-than-perfect protection for works published abroad–to the fury of Charles Dickens, among others, who sometimes received no money from vast sales in the United States. American publishers avoided ruinous competition with each other through “courtesy of the trade,” a code of etiquette that gave informal, exclusive rights to the first house to announce plans to issue an uncopyrighted foreign work. The climate of trade courtesy, lawful piracy, and the burdensome rules of American copyright law profoundly affected transatlantic writers in the twentieth century. Drawing on previously unknown legal archives, Robert Spoo recounts efforts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Bennett Cerf–the founder of Random House–and others to crush piracy, reform U.S. copyright law, and define the public domain.
The Fourth Annual Library Databases Research Fair will be held on Tuesday, September 29, 2015. The Fair will be held in the Student Lounge from 3:00pm to 6:00pm. Representatives from the following legal research companies will be here to demonstrate their databases:
Come and learn how these databases will help you with your legal research. There will be handouts, light refreshments, and a raffle drawing for prizes including gift cards and gift bags.
Save the date: Tuesday, September 29th, 3:00pm – 6:00pm, Student Lounge.
This year, on Constitution Day, Brooklyn Law School will host a special symposium discussing the impact of the Magna Carta on the development of the Constitution. The U.S Constitution, in turn, has become perhaps the most influential legal document. Since its adoption on September 17, 1787, more than one hundred countries have used it as a model for their own constitutions. It is one of the world’s oldest surviving constitutions. The Constitution’s basic tenets have remained virtually unchanged since its inception. People quarrel over its interpretation, but they never question the wisdom of its underlying principles.
The Constitutional Convention proposed a new Constitution establishing a much stronger national government. Although this controversial new constitution provided a great deal of resistance, it was eventually ratified by the necessary number of states, replacing the Articles of Confederation as the framework of the United States government. Some fascinating facts about the U.S. Constitution
For m
ore on the U.S. Constitution, see the BLS Library copy of The U.S. Constitution A to Z, 2nd Edition by Robert L. Maddex (Call # KF4548 .M33 2008). The book clearly and concisely explains every key aspect of the U.S. Constitution. This classic, easy-to-use reference is thoroughly updated with new entries covering the events of recent years including court cases with impact on Constitutional rights. Each of the more than 250 entries, arranged in encyclopedic A-to-Z format, provides accessible insight into the key questions readers have about the U.S. Constitution.