Jotwell is a new online law journal from "leading academics and practitioners providing short reviews of recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience."

Jotwell, short for The Journal of Things We Like (Lots), is housed on a set of inter-linked blogs on the following subjects:

• Administrative Law
  
• Constitutional Law
  
• Corporate Law
  
• Criminal Law
  
• Cyberlaw
  
• Intellectual Property Law
  
• Legal Profession
  
• Tax Law

You can view each section individually or view them all on the Jotwell main page. If you wish to subscribe by RSS or email to specific subject sections or to all Jotwell posts.

Jotwell is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Law. As you can see below, UW Law School's Allison Christians is one of the editors for the Tax section.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the latest batch of faculty scholarship from the UW Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series via SSRN.

• Coping with Uncertainty: The Role of Contracts in Russian Industry During the Transition to the Market by Kathryn Hendley

• Risking Health: Failing to Balance Access to Essential Medicines and the Protection of Intellectual Property in Developing Countries Facing a Continuing HIV/AIDS Disaster by Heinz Klug

• Talking Originalism by Andrew B. Coan

• How the Conservatives Canonized Brown v. Board of Education by Brad Snyder

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 2009-2010 State of Wisconsin Blue Book is now available on the Legislative Reference Bureau website.

Past editions of the Blue Book (1995-2008) are also available on the LRB sites. Older editions (1853-2004) have been digitized and made available by University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.

From the UWDCC site:

The State of Wisconsin Blue Book remains the primary one-volume reference source about the state, documenting the organization of the state's three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial).

Typically, each volume includes extensive description and statistics on virtually all aspects of life in Wisconsin, including major sections on the state's population, geography, history, election data, educational resources, social services, finance, agriculture, industry, transportation system, etc. Various useful lists are also provided, such as of statewide associations, news media, local governmental units, post offices, political parties, etc.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barbara Fritschel, law librarian for the U.S. Courts Library for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has compiled a new guide entitled, "State Documents Bibliography: Wisconsin". The guide is part of a larger series of state guides published by Hein & Co. Inc.

The guide lists selected materials produced by or about the State of Wisconsin that are useful when doing in law related research. The last such guide produced for Wisconsin was Janet Oberla's "An Introduction to Wisconsin State Documents and Law Related Materials" published in 1987.

The new guide is available at a cost of $30. For more information, see this brochure from the publisher.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Heidi Yelk's Tech Tip in Brief in the latest WSLL @ Your Service:

In case you missed it (as I did), Wisbar.org, the State Bar of Wisconsin's website, now provides full text searching of Wisconsin Lawyer issues dating back to 1997. This can be a quick way to locate full text feature articles as well as news and case notes. To find it, click on the Wisconsin Lawyer tab under the Research Tools module.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Press Release:

London, 13 July 2009.

Today sees the launch of a prestigious new legal Journal which aims to bring the highest standards to bear in analysis and comment on all aspects of Free and Open Source software.

The 'International Free and Open Source Software Law Review' (IFOSSLR) is a peer reviewed biannual journal for high-level analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues and is published by an independent Editorial Committee....

In concord with the aims of the Free and Open Source Software movement, IFOSSLR will be available printed and on-line under a licence allowing it to be freely reproduced by individuals and organisations, commercial and non-commercial alike, provided that the content and authorship of the articles is respected.

The first issue is now available on the Internet to be read and downloaded without charge at www.ifosslr.org. Paper copies can also be ordered via the website.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Washington and Lee Law School has launched a free online law review submission service called LexOpus.

From the About page:

The system allows an author to submit a work to a sequence of author-selected law journals. An author may also, or instead, invite offers from any journal by choosing to indicate the work as open to offers....

An author is free to simply upload a work to make it available for general viewing. There is no obligation to make the work available to journals.

According to W&L's John Doyle:

LexOpus is not intended to be directly competitive with Expresso, as by design it will not simultaneously submit works to multiple journals. Instead, an author selects an ordered list of journals and the system makes the work available to each journal serially on a short-term exclusive basis. One of the main aims of LexOpus is to discourage what I see as the socially wasteful practice of simultaneous submissions....

Most law journals I've heard from seem happy to use LexOpus, or at least to try it out. The big question is whether or not authors will be motivated to use this system. On that, time will tell.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I had the pleasure of reviewing the recently published, Fundamentals of Legal Research, 9th edition. This edition is of particular interest to me since it was edited by our UW Law Library director, Steve Barkan. Many members of our library staff, including myself, contributed to the publication. I authored two chapters and an appendix.

Although this edition retains many of the features that have been popular through the years, it has also been substantially revised to reflect changes in the resources and methods of research.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new edition of WisBar's InsideTrack was published last week. Highlights include:

• Counseling clients regarding a potential swine flu outbreak
  
• Genetic testing: Is best interest of the child 'good cause'?

This issue also features my last column in InsideTrack, Finding journal articles on the Internet. I've decided to step down due to increased responsibilities in the coming months. Bev Butula of Davis & Kuelthau will contribute legal research articles in the future.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month, West launched Black's Law Dictionary for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The cost? A hefty $49.99, although that is still less than the print edition.

This digital version of Black's 8th edition offers audio pronunciations of selected legal terms.

Thomson Reuters said in a statement that lawyers and law students can expect more apps from West soon.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The complete Wisconsin Property Assessors Manual is now available online.

The manual aids assessors in the interpretation of statutes related to classifying and valuing property, describes the property assessment cycle and deadlines, and defines the responsibilities of public servants charged with carrying out property valuation. The manual is developed and maintained by the Department of Revenue, Bureau of Assessment Practices per WI Stats. 73.03(2a) and is updated on an annual basis.

See Bev Butula's post on the Wisconsin Law Journal blog for some notes on searching.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent study by Ross E. Davies, editor in chief of The Green Bag and a professor of law at George Mason University reveals that print subscriptions to law reviews are declining dramatically.

Davies compared the subscription numbers for the flagship law reviews of 15 top tier law schools and found that all of them "have seen significant drops - most in the range of half to two-thirds - in their print circulations."

The author wonders whether this drop "might be connected to a drop in influence or status" or if it is simply because more journals are now available online. I suspect both. It's true that libraries, at least, are canceling print subscriptions to journals that are available to them electronically. But there have also been some indications that the influence of law reviews may also be declining.

For example, a 2005 study on the judicial citation of student notes revealed that:

the average note published in 1980 has been cited 3.5 more times than the average note published in 2000. This decline appears to correlate to a similar decline in the judicial citation of professional legal scholarship. Of course, if the number of opinions declined at the same rate, we would expect a decline in citations, but it is almost certain that the number of opinions has, in fact, increased over the period studied.

See also When Rendering Decisions, Judges Are Finding Law Reviews Irrelevant (New York Times) which suggests that availability of blogs in which "law professors analyze legal developments with skill and flair almost immediately after they happen" may be contributing to the shift in influence.

Source: Slaw

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning the State Bar of Wisconsin distributed its first issue of a new electronic newsletter called WisBar InsideTrack. The newsletter, which will be published twice a month on the first and third Wednesdays, is available to State Bar members.

Content will include everything from "practice management tips to timely insight into legislative, court, and other legal developments, as well as the latest State Bar products and services designed to help you improve your practice. Through an alliance with West, each issue of InsideTrack also delivers select jury verdicts, bench decisions, settlements, and arbitration awards."

I'm pleased to share that I've been asked to be a regular contributor to InsideTrack for the Legal Research category. I'll be writing a short article for every other issue. My first article, entitled The Many Faces of Google, describes a few of the search engine's more specialized tools and how attorneys can use them. They include:

• Google Alerts
  
• Google News
  
• Google Blog Search
  
• Google Scholar
  
• Google Books
  
• Google U.S. Government Search

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was very pleased to share that Legal Research in Wisconsin, 2nd edition is finally available. The authors are Ted Potter (main author), Jane Colwin, Mary Koshollek, and UW Law Library's own Bill Ebbott and Sunil Rao.

Here's the abstract from Hein:

This new edition continues to offer a comprehensive reference tool about legal research in Wisconsin. It revises and updates chapters and also expands them to include electronic tools and other new sources. Basic research tools are discussed with an eye toward showing their best uses in locating useful information. It remains a guide for attorneys, judges, paralegals, law librarians, students and others needing ready access to information contained in Wisconsin legal materials.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was doing some research in HeinOnline this afternoon and was surprised to find that they now have an article citator. When viewing an article, there is a link to "Articles That Cite This Article" at the very top. Nice.

According to the HeinOnline Weblog, this feature was added in May.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran an interesting article about how SSRN rankings have affected legal academia.

Social Science Research Network [is] an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading... the texts include pensées, abstracts, informal arguments, outlines, rough drafts and working papers, up to the finished products you might find in academic journals. So far, more than 550,000 users have registered to download documents.

And with a precision common to the digital age, its rankings of downloads can be sliced and diced in many ways with only a click: most downloads over all or most downloads in the last 12 months, either by article, by author or by institution.

The network was not created to be a Top 40 list for academics, said Michael C. Jensen, its chairman and one of its founders, but it has turned out that way.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

From the press release:

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

Thanks to my UW Madison colleague, Dorothea Salo (of Caveat Lector fame) for the tip.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About a week ago, the Wisconsin Law Journal unveiled a new Web site. Besides a sleek new look, WLJ has introduced some sweet new features including several new blogs and a handful of RSS feeds.

In his introductory post, Managing Editor, Tony Anderson explains:

New features will include a variety of blogs touching on a range of topics relating to the practice of law and our courts. Readers will be able to comment directly on blog postings and stories, making our site a place to discuss the issues that are important to you. We also have added a daily update of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court calendar.

Bar associations and other non-profit groups are invited to visit our community calendar and post your upcoming events. And subscribers will be able to sign up for our daily e-mail news service - WLJ Today.

In addition to our Web site and daily e-mail updates, we will continue to provide our weekly legal newspaper with all the features you've trusted and relied upon for the past 25 years. Content that is more than seven days old will be limited to print or online subscribers only.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ABA Journal has recently redesigned their web site. According to a post in the ABA TechShow blog, there are three main features:

Law News Now: "The latest legal news stories, hand selected by our lawyer-journalists. It's updated continuously every business day."

The Blawg Directory: "More than 1,000 blogs written by lawyers who are experts in their practice areas, with more being added daily...You can sort the directory by subject, who writes the blog (partners, associates, judges, law professors, etc.), or by the state or court they blog about."

The Magazine: ABA Journal issues "back through 2005; issues from previous years will be posted soon."

Very nicely done. I took a closer look at the Blawg Directory and found a number of blogs that I hadn't seen before - including seven new law library blogs which I added to my list.

Posted by Bonnie Shucha at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)