President Obama came into office pledging greater openness, and his latest executive order seems to directly speak to that pledge — though it will likely benefit historical investigations especially.
Cocky Law Blawg brings us this note: The Legal Information Services to the Public (LISP) Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) just completed its latest version of How to Research a Legal Problem: A Guide for Non-Lawyers. It’s available in PDF and Word formats from the LISP website.
Dec 282009
As part of a recent attempt to update my personal information online, I decided to update my personal site to better reflect my current activities and background. As part of my content update, I ideally wanted my site to be more dynamic, so that I did not need to touch it very often, yet to still have it be more up-to-date and fresh. My idea was to rely on updates I would make to other sites anyway, and to leverage those updates to drive my personal site too.
Researchers in Spain recently published an examination of scientific citation practices, and discovered the obvious: scientists don’t use citations purely for altruistic reasons.
I’ve been debating this since I started a PhD program this fall. (I’m talking about the humanities and social sciences — I don’t know if this applies in other fields!) Granted, grad school is a huge amount of difficult and complex reading. Since it’s essentially professional training for academics, it also means learning a new working environment, a new kind of jargon, and a new bureaucracy. What it isn’t — and what law school is — is a whole new way of thinking about and approaching the world.
Dec 202009
I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the weekend to the problem of finding good content buried amidst all the noise on the Internet, especially when it comes to blog articles from lesser-known sources. (This is true for readers looking for quality content, but it’s also true for authors seeking readers.)
Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Robert Merton, in “The Normative Structure of Science” (from The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations), posits four sets of “institutional imperatives” that together “comprise the ethos of modern science”: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. How well do these four sets of imperatives describe the “ethos of modern law”?
Dec 172009
Carolyn Elefant recently provided her list of free tools for starting a law firm. In this same spirit, I would like to present my list of top tools, all of which I’ve used at various times myself.
Dec 152009
As I noted a few days ago, there has been increasing attention to the idea of authors moving away from traditional publishers when it comes to e-books. Here’s more from the New York Times about one author doing just that:
Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses have [...]
I’m generally in favor of holding companies liable for their actions — after all, if we treat corporations as “persons” under the law, then they should have responsibilities as well as protections and benefits. But I’m not sure about holding executives criminally liable — perhaps in the case of knowing pollution or conspiracy to cover up product dangers — but not, I think, for actions they are not directly responsible for, as in this case from Italy.
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