A study in 2007 found the average person encounters approximately 174 newspapers worth of data every day.  With all of that information coming in, we are constantly making decisions about what is and is not worth remembering, and the information comes at such a steady pace that we cannot focus on any one item for too long.  I don’t know about you, but after a while, I felt like my brain had turned to mush; I couldn’t remember anything unless I immediately wrote it down, and my attention span was not what it had once been.

I searched for a way to improve my memory; that’s when I found Lumosity.  Lumosity is a site that creates cognitive games intended to improve your memory, speed, problem solving, flexibility, and attention.  There is a free version that includes games in all of the categories, but if you want to be able to unlock all of the games and see which percentile you fall within for your age group, then you need to subscribe.  I’ve been using Lumosity for almost a month now, and I am seeing improvement in my game performance.  I think it may be improving my memory outside of the games as well, but I’m not sure if that’s just a placebo effect.  Regardless, the games are fun, and I feel less guilty about playing them because they’re for self-improvement.  If you want to improve your memory, or are interested in free games, give Lumosity a try.

The Makers project highlights the contributions of prominent American women by providing interviews that explore the personal as well as the professional in these American lives. One the the featured pioneers is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The interview with Justice Ginsburg is here (after a sponsor’s ad), with extended segments that highlight her experiences: as a student at Harvard Law School, being rejected by law firms, her marriage, her work for the ACLU womens’ rights project and women and the law.

Other interviews in this series feature dozens of women from many different fields. The pioneers in law include: Sandra Day O’Connor, Maddy DeLone, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Catharine MacKinnon and Sarah Weddington.

Do you know the best place to go to for free access to court rules online?

The U.S. Courts web site provides PDF documents for all the current sets, including rules of civil procedure, criminal procedure and evidence. Also provided is directory of links to local federal court rules (including Circuit, District and Bankruptcy courts). Like many other courts, the U.S. Supreme Court provides its rules on its web site.

For state courts, rules are usually provided by the state judiciary web sites–e.g., Massachusetts. For other states, this directory from the National Center for State Courts can take you to the court web site(s) from each jurisdiction.

Especially when the citation rule, Bluebook 12.9.3, requires only citation to the current rule (and not to any particular published source), the Internet source for court rules can meet a researcher’s need in most situations.

The convenience of the major commercial legal databases has made them so popular that many law students rely on them almost exclusively for legal research. This session will highlight free tools available via Internet that are increasingly important for lawyers who need to do cost-effective research in the current economic environment. In some cases, these resources are as good as (or better than) anything provided by commercial publishers. We’ll consider resources for both primary and secondary legal sources, including: federal and state government web sites, Google Scholar (and tips for using Google), blogs and other current awareness tools, and more.

The class page is HERE.

Free Legal Research
April 8, 10 & 12 | 1 p.m. (Room 334)
David Bachman, instructor; dbachman@bu.edu

BU Law LibX is a browser extension for Firefox and Google Chrome that allows you to search library resources directly from your browser.

If you have a known item, you can use the LibX Toolbar to search for it without going to the library catalog:

Or highlight text on a webpage, right-click, and use LibX to search it as a keyword, subject, title or author.

If you find a book or article referenced online, highlight it and right-click to find it in our catalog:

LibX also embeds a “cue” on search results on New York Times Book Reviews, Amazon, Google Scholar, and other search engines if BU Libraries owns this item. Click on the BU Law button to access the catalog record for the item.

Download the toolbar at BU Law’s LibX page.

See how it works here.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, the Senate confirmed the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense. The vote on the confirmation was 58-41. With all Senate Democrats on record supporting the nomination–and Democrats in the majority–the nomination was not in doubt, once it came to an up-or-down vote. The key vote was the one to invoke cloture, or end the filibuster of Hagel’s nomination. There, the vote was 71-27.

A comparison of the roll-call votes in the Senate (numbers 23 and 24 of the 113th session) reveals who made the difference.  Altogether, there were 15 Republicans who split their votes. While ultimately voting to oppose Hagel’s confirmation, these Senators allowed the nomination to go forward: Alexander (TN), Ayotte (NH), Blunt (MO), Burr (NC), Chambliss (GA), Coburn (OK),  Collins (ME), Corker (TN), Flake (AZ), Graham (SC), Hatch (UT),  McCain (AZ), Murkowski (AK), Sessions (AL) and Thune (ND). Just four Republican Senators were pro-Hagel in both votes: Cochran (MS), Johanns (NE), Paul (KY) and Shelby (AL).

For ordinary citizens, this kind of analysis used to be difficult because roll-call vote information could be hard to locate. The more obscure the issue, the more difficult it was to find the voting records. The New York Times provided tables to show how members voted, but only on selected, major votes. The Congressional Record was a source for those who could visit a library that had CR in print. Beyond those, interested citizens may have had to consult  Congressional Quarterly (CQ) publications, Roll Call (the Capitol Hill newspaper), or possibly political, business or labor organizations that had a stake in the issue. In some cases, it may have been necessary for a constituent to contact the office of the Congressman or Senator directly.

Now, with Congressional and other government web sites providing House and Senate voting information, anyone with Internet access can learn how members of Congress voted on issues that matter to them–provided they know where to look.

As we move toward Spring, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is issuing an increasing number of decisions; there were nine decisions this week alone. This Term, important cases will be decided over the next four months, including the Monsanto seed patent case, argued earlier this week, and the marriage cases (Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor), to be argued in late March.

A variety of sources are available to keep track of new developments: some through subscription services, and some free to all.

Commercial updates include United States Law Week (among the suite of Bloomberg BNA titles), which provides extensive coverage of the Supreme Court, from news coverage to docket information to publication of full opinions. Users can create alerts on Lexis and Westlaw, to be notified of news or new opinions, whatever your preferences.

Among the free services for tracking new SCOTUS decisions are daily opinion summaries from Justia (just log in and click the box next to the court for which you want daily summaries of new opinions) and the Supreme Court Bulletin (subscribe to receive an email with the syllabus of each new SCOTUS decision) from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII). Then there is SCOTUSblog, which provides exhaustive coverage of all things SCOTUS, including easy access to briefs and other informaton on pending cases in its Merits Cases section. Likewise, the ABA’s Previews pages offer background on each case to be argued before the Court.

Other tools? Consider following the Twitter feeds of journalists who cover the Court, including The New York Times’ Adam Liptak and Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick; or SCOTUSblog; or such other feeds as @SCOTUSOpinions, which posts only links to new opinions.

To survey other sources of SCOTUS information, consult the library’s portal or (more generally) our links to legal news and blogs.

Students, for more tips and strategies for staying current, register for the Keeping Up with the Law certification class next week.

Today, law students and lawyers have access to a remarkable range of newer current awareness tools–such as commercial and free updates, blogs, Twitter feeds, and database alerts–while traditional sources such as legal newspapers, bar magazines and topical newsletters are generated now in multiple formats. And there are many tools that you can use to access these resources more conveniently, among them newsreaders and smartphone apps.

The class page is here.

What sources–national, state, or local, topical or general–would best meet your need to keep up? Offered twice next week, this class will present some alternatives and suggest some strategies.

Keeping Up with the Law
February 26 or 28 @ 1 p.m. in Room 334
Instructor: David Bachman – dbachman@bu.edu

If you are conducting research a treaty to which the United States is (or may be) a party, free Internet resources provide some of the most useful tools available. Some tips on using these free sources follow.

One example of a treaty that was recently considered by the Senate is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (“the Convention”). Late in 2012, there was much news coverage of the Senate’s failure to ratify the Convention. To check on recent treaty actions in the Senate, a good first stop is Thomas, the Congressional web site. In Thomas’ Treaties section, a simple search (“disabilties”) in the 112th Congress leads to information about the Convention, identified as Treaty no. 112-7; Senate Executive Report 112-6, which accompanies the treaty; and the Senate vote on December 4, 2012. However, Thomas does not link out to these reference documents or more details.

For the text of the treaty documents, go to the Government Printing Office web site, FDSys, which provides access to Congressional Documents; that includes Senate Treaty Documents for each recent Congress, including the 112th. Treaty Document 112-7 is available in PDF there. Likewise, Executive Report 112-6 is available; to find it, run a search (e.g., “senate executive report 112-6″) on the FDSys main page. The Senate’s web site provides information on roll-call votes, including the December 4 vote on the Convention. (Because the 61-38 vote fell 6 votes short of a two-thirds majority, ratification was rejected.) Continue Reading »

This week, the ABA Journal released its annual Blawg 100, a selection of the best law-related blogs, in its December issue.

The list includes perennial favorites (such as Above the Law, SCOTUSBlog and the Volokh Conspiracy) and newer picks, e.g., CFPB Monitor, which tracks news related to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This year’s list includes a wide range of interests and purposes, from the widely informative (The BLT: The Blog of the Legal Times) to the very specific (crImmigration‘s beat is “the immigration consequences of criminal violations”), with titles for practitioners (Litigation & Trial) and students (The Girl’s Guide to Law School) alike.

Go through the alphabetical list or peruse by category. For legal humor, check out the”for fun” entries, including Lowering the Bar, ZombieLaw and the Supreme Court Haiku Reporter.

To take a deeper dive, consult the much more extensive ABA blawg directory, listing hundreds of blogs in dozens of categories. Or see our guide to law blogs.