Guess what? Summer is literally just weeks away!  

Shortly your final exams and papers will be a distant memory as you begin your summer jobs and clerkships. Starting in May, however, several of our subscription-based  legal research resources restrict student access over the summer, to help avoid the use of nonprofit educational passwords at paid summer employment. However, each service treats summer access a bit differently, and there may be further variations for continuing vs. graduating students. Here’s your guide to summer database access:

• Bloomberg Law accounts are valid between school terms and for 6 months after you graduate. Your BUSL Bloomberg account may be used for both academic and employment-related purposes, including full access to federal court filings . If you do not already have a Bloomberg Law account, you may Request A Law School Account with your BU email address.
• LexisNexis this year will provide unlimited access this summer to Lexis Advance, its next-generation research interface.In June, Lexis will be moving entirely to Lexis Advance.   That means that all current law school  home page (Lexis.com) ID’s will no longer work.  If you currently have a working Lexis Advance ID and password (http://advance.lexis.com) then you are all set and need to nothing.  If you use your old Lexis.com ID only, you need to ensure that you are registered with your Advance ID.  Please contact, Michael.campion@lexisnexis.com, to obtain that ID.  You will be able to access Lexis.com, and the law school home page with your Advance ID only.   The Lexis.com interface will be available for academic (non-commercial) use only until July. 2013 graduates will have full access to Lexis Advance through July 31; continuing students will have unlimited access until August 31.
• Westlaw offers extensions of your Law School password for academic work, including: summer classes, journal work, projects for faculty, moot court, unpaid/non-profit public interest internships or externships, or a pro bono project that is required for graduation. Commercial use of your Law School password (such as at a law firm summer job) is strictly prohibited. May graduates can also extend their Westlaw passwords to obtain 10 free hours of research time for bar exam study. If you qualify for a summer extension of your Westlaw password, log in to the extension page and follow the instructions.
• Other Law Library Databases: Access to Boston University databases for continuing students is available over the summer with your BU username and password. Recent graduates will find that their off-campus, password-based access to other subscription databases (such as HeinOnline and LegalTrac) expires very quickly after graduation. Alumni may access many University and Law School subscription databases on-site via the reading room computer terminals.
• Click HERE for more information.

For more information about access to library resources for the graduating class of 2013, bookmark our guide to Law Alumni Services.

Summer hours for the Pappas Law Library following graduation begin May 20th and will be from 9-5 Monday through Friday.

Wishing you a restful and productive Summer!

The event mentioned in my last post has been cancelled.  If you have questions about how firms are using Westlaw, please reach out to Mark Jackson through the Westlaw home page.

Our Westlaw Rep, Mark Jackson, is having a lunch and learn this Thursday, April 18th at 1PM in Room 520.  Come hear from a firm rep about the use of Westlaw by legal employers.

(medical or medicinal) /s marijuana /s states

What will this search turn up?  Why would you want to use this search string instead of simply typing in your terms?  Learn the answers to these questions and more at the Power Searching Certification Class.  This class will be offered Tuesday (4/2), Thursday (4/4), and Friday (4/5) from 1-2 PM in Room 334.  Questions? Email me at jekblaw@bu.edu.

Our Westlaw representative, Mark Jackson, will be providing training soon here at BUSL.

Several classes are being offered:  WestlawNext Certification, Cost-effective Research on WestlawNext, Transactional materials and Research, Litigation Practice materials,  as well as several state-specific (MA, CA and NY) training classes

To see the various dates available, click on this link:

http://law.bu.libcal.com/room323

and be sure to Register for the classes you intend on taking on your Westlaw Law School homepage !

WestlawNext recently added the Statutes at Large.  They can be located in the Tools and Resources box under the United States Code Annotated (see below).  Using this link will open a template that will allow you to search for not only keywords, but also by Public Law or Statutes at Large citations.  Hat tip to Barco Law Library.

Here are the dates for upcoming vendor training sessions on their respective platforms:

Lexis: Click here

Westlaw: Click here

Bloomberg Law:

American LLM Training:

October 10: 2-3 in room 820

October 12 11-12 room 1420

JD Training:

Oct. 23 1-2 room 1420

Oct. 24 330-430 room 820

Oct. 25 1-2 room 1420

RSVP to Eric Malinowski emalinowski@bloomberg.net

or, register with a Bloomberg Law student representative at the Bloomberg Law table on Thursday’s from 10-2 in the Law Lobby.

It is not everyday that a US Supreme Court Justice engages in a public tit for tat with a respected legal theorist and judge in the popular media. What pressing controversy you might ask yourself could lead to such aberrant and unlikely behavior? Nothing less than the meaning of “legislative history.”

As law students you may well think that you have developed an above average understanding of this intricate and at times highly confusing research task—or you may realize that you know next to nothing about this subject in which case the Law Library has Certification classes in the Spring you should consider taking (schedule is still pending)—but it is highly unlikely that you have yet to manifest the passion on the subject that these two evidence in the series of volleys linked below.

Which of the two convinces you with their arguments?

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2012/09_-_September/Scalia_v__Posner__Round_4/

As we  learn WestlawNext, questions arise as to whether helpful tricks that worked in classic Westlaw still work in WestlawNext.  The good news is that for field searching, the answer is yes.

What is field searching?  Field searching allows you to search specific parts of a document, like title, author, or judge, for a term.  It also searches the metadata assigned to the document for particular information specified by the researcher.  One of my favorite field searches is Words and Phrases.  This search allows you to search cases for instances where a word or phrase has been defined by the court.  Below is a picture showing where you would’ve gone to do a field search on Westlaw.com:

You might ask, if WestlawNext has relevancy rankings, why do I need field searching?  Field searching is a more narrow approach that you can use when you know a concrete fact about what you’re looking for (i.e. “I want an opinion authored by Judge X.”).  Field searching is helpful when you know what you want more specifically than the algorithm.  Also, field searching can help you specify a search that might be difficult to express with keywords.  Going back to Words and Phrases, you want instances where the court has defined a term (ex. “constructive trust”).  If you had to do a keyword search, you could search for “constructive trust,” but that would provide results for every time the term appears, not just where it is defined.  You could try adding defin! to pick up definition or defined, but a court is not always going to write, “Constructive trust is defined as….” so you might miss important definitions if you limit the results this way.

Ok, I get it, field searching is important.  How do I construct a field search on WestlawNext?  If you want to search only for the title, that can be entered in the appropriate box on the Advanced Search page.  Other fields are a little more tricky.  First, you have to type strict: to tell the computer you want to conduct a strict search and bypass the WestlawNext algorithm.  Then you need to enter the abbreviation for the field you want to search (I have provided a table of abbreviations at the bottom of this post).  Immediately following the abbreviation, enter your term(s) in parentheses.  Our example searching Words & Phrases for constructive trust would look like this:

Although field searching still works in WestlawNext, it is not well advertised, so there was some concern that the West editors might not be tagging cases and other documents with the relevant field information anymore.  However, if you conduct this search, you will see that there are cases from the last couple of months in the results, so field searching is still a great way to obtain tailored results that are also recent.  If you have any questions about field searching or using WestlawNext efficiently, please don’t hesitate to contact any of the reference librarians.  Below is the chart with the field abbreviations:

Please remember that there are important access restrictions associated with the use of our subscription-based  electronic databases.  As Summer approaches I thought a timely reminder might be helpful.

Bloomberg Law subscription remains active throughout the Summer and can be used to research federal and state cases, statutes, rules and regulations.  Bloomberg Law also includes foreign and international law databases, U.S. congressional information, federal and selected state court dockets, news and corporate information.  Bloomberg encourages law students to use their academic access to Bloomberg Law as much as possible, even when working for law firms. (For those of you graduating, BL is available for 6 months following graduation.) Sign up here if you have not yet done so.

Lexis Summer use begins on June 1st and is restricted to Lexis Advance. (This is a change from previous years’ policy.) If you have not yet registered for your Advance ID and PW, check your email(s) for notice from Lexis, and if you don’t see it – contact michael.campion@lexisnexis.com, to obtain your Advance temporary ID and PW.( Graduating students have access through August 31st on Advance.) Access restrictions include these points:

Lexis Advance:

• Summer course preparation and assignments
• Research associated with Moot Court, Law Review, or Law Journal
• Research associated with pursuing a grant or scholarship
• Service as a paid or unpaid research assistant to a professor
• An internship, externship or clinic position for school credit or graduation requirement
• Study for the bar exam
• Research skill improvement for educational purposes

Westlaw Summer access begins on June 1st and ends on August 1st.

You are eligible to register for a Summer extension if you are:
· enrolled in summer classes,
· working for a law review/journal or moot court,
· working for a faculty member as a research assistant, or
· working in an unpaid public interest internship/externship (excluding court and government settings).  Unpaid means ANY form of compensation (including stipends, fellowships, or expense reimbursements) invalidates the qualification.
The link for requesting extensions is here.

If you do not qualify to request an extension as explained above, your access will be limited to 40 hours of access in each of the months of June and July.

Graduating Students may apply to extend their passwords beyond May 31st for 5 hours of access per month in June and July.