By Joshua Kahn

Public domain image from Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing

Interested in the Supreme Court Nomination process?  The law library’s History of Supreme Court Nominations database gives you access to transcripts and reports on both successful and unsuccessful Supreme Court Nominations. [Off-Campus Link | On-Campus Link]

Or maybe you want to learn more about the Justices before they became Justices?  The archive includes their previous writing, decisions and even transcripts of oral arguments made as attorneys.

For example, you can find Justice Elena Kagan’s  old law review articles, briefs and oral arguments before the Supreme Court while working as Solicitor General.

Look smart in front of Professor Segall in next year’s Con Law class.

If you have paid attention to news outlets, television, or the radio at all in the past few weeks, you have probably heard about the potential federal government budget sequestration.  News has picked up steadily about potential across the board budget cuts that will take place if Congress fails to come to a deal by March 1, 2013.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the sequestration, the following resources should give you a better understanding of the timeline and the potential effects.

Overview of Budget Sequestration

• CNN Explains: Sequestration by Matt Smith (CNN)
• When does sequestration start? by Darren Samuelsohn (Politico)
• The sequester: A Q&A (CBS News)

Effects

• Estimated Impact of Automatic Budget Enforcement Procedures Specified in the Budget Control Act – Highlights (Congressional Budget Office)
• Estimated Impact of Automatic Budget Enforcement Procedures Specified in the Budget Control Act – Full Document (Congressional Budget Office)
• Impact of March 1st Cuts on Middle Class Families, Jobs and Economic Security: Georgia (The White House)

The Laws

• Budget Control Act of 2011, P.L. 112 – 25 (Government Printing Office) – This act created the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to produce deficit reduction legislation.  The act also stipulated that if Congress failed to produce a deficit reduction bill with at least $1.2 trillion in cuts, then it would trigger across the board cuts as of January 2, 2013.
• American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, P.L. 112-240 (Government Printing Office) – This act delayed the start of sequestration from January 2, 2013 to March 1, 2013.

Live Coverage

• C-SPAN – Live Senate and House coverage, along with archived videos of debates and hearings related to the budget sequestration.

First we started offering you free coffee during exams. Then we gave you tea during Library Abridged. Now, ladies and gents, the library has a hot and cold water fountain! As you can see from the lack of paint and the bits of drywall on the carpet, we didn’t wait long to tell you about it either. This swanky new contraption is located where the old drinking fountain used to be (just next to the Book Exchange and across from the Reference collection). You can get cool tap water and heated water for your tea and instant coffee. Heck, you could make your Ramen.

Enjoy!

The President’s Dream of a Successful Hunt, by Clifford Kennedy Berryman, 1907.

In the beginning of this year, the Federal Trade Commission concluded a 20-month-long investigation into whether Google violated federal antitrust laws, an action which has met with mixed reactions. When most people think of antitrust law, they think of trust-busting Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the Sherman and Clayton Acts, or more recent events such as the Microsoft case. They don’t really think of Alabama.

Which is unfortunate, because Alabama has a number of ties to antitrust law. Alabama holds the distinction of being the first state to pass an antitrust law in the United States, on February 23rd, 1883, seven years prior to the passage of the first federal antitrust law, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Alabama law prohibited railroads from forming agreements to divide the market and fix prices in the freight industry in Alabama.

Henry De Lamar Clayton, Jr., the sponsor and namesake of the Clayton Act of 1914, was a representative from Alabama. The Clayton Act added significant features to federal antitrust law, including restrictions on price discrimination and interlocking directorates.

Want more information on antitrust laws? The Law and University Libraries have some materials that may be of interest, such as:

• The Informant!, a film starring Matt Damon as the whistleblower in the Archer Daniels Midland lysine price fixing case.
• The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal
• The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T
• Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era

by Joshua Kahn

image by Flickr user x1brett

Spring semester means it’s time to for first years to write persuasive briefs for RWA and second years to craft oral arguments in Litigation.  Both require a heaping cup of persuasive ability, a skill that is totally different from simply knowing the law.  Not only that, but persuasion is one of the cornerstone skills for practicing attorneys.

Clearly, we’ve chosen a profession that demands persuasiveness—but that’s a skill they don’t teach you in Torts, Evidence or CivPro.  RWA shows you some examples of persuasive legal writing, and litigation throws you right into the pool, but neither really breaks down how to make a convincing argument.

So where can you learn how to communicate persuasively?  If you weren’t born with a silver tongue can you pick up the skill?

The GSU library system has a number of helpful tools for learning persuasion.  Even if you don’t have time to read them now, consider at least placing them on your summer reading list:

The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle – the classic work on persuasion and still deeply relevant today.  The law library has a translation at PA3893 .R3 1991

Thank You for Arguing : What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion – an excellent guide to the various tools of persuasion that essentially teaches classic rhetoric in a conversational, modern tone.

How to Win Every Argument : The Use and Abuse of Logic – a good guide to the various smoke and mirrors you often hear in arguments.

John Quincy Adams: Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory: Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University (1810) – A series of classes by given by John Quincy Adams a decade before he was elected President of the United States.  They’re considered a classic guide to persuasion and are online for free here.

Image Creative Commons licensed from Barack Obama’s Flickr account

Last night, President Obama delivered the annual State of the Union address. Today, a transcript of that speech is available in the Congressional Record. Speeches made to a Joint Session of Congress are not the only presidential statements you can find on the Government Printing Office’s website, FDsys. The GPO website also hosts the Compilation of Presidential Documents collection. The Compilation used to be published once a week, but with President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, it became a daily publication. In this collection, you can find all kinds of documents, from the President’s Weekly Address to commemorative statements about historical acts or historical events to proclamations honoring national heroes.

You can access the Compilation of Presidential Documents going back to 1993 on the GPO website — and you may be interested to note that the first item available is actually a statement made by a press secretary, noting the US’s recognition of the new Czech and Slovak republics.

Mentalfloss.com, online purveyors in bizarre, quirky, and nerdy trivia, recently published an interesting library-themed blog list – 9 Very Specific Rules From Real Libraries.

Looking beyond the unimaginative stock photo of a bun-sporting, cardigan-draped,  grandma frames-spectacled, corrective shoes-hobbled,  and eternally shush-ing librarian stereotype that alerts the reader, “this post is about libraries and the author is too lazy to move beyond an outdated and trite sitcom convention”

–come on mental_floss, you are better than that–

the post makes a good, albeit unintended,  point.

Libraries and particularly smaller, specialized libraries like ours often create policies that at first glance may seem silly or annoying, but are necessary to ensure welcoming and comfortable space as well as reliable resources for group and individual study and research.

I am linking below to a list of policies governing patrons use of the Law Library.  Each of these polices was created with the best of intentions to better support you and your fellow researchers.  As always we welcome your questions and ideas on how better to do so -including sunsetting outdated or irrelevant policies (or heaven forbid, the creation of new ones).

Law Library Policies: http://law.gsu.edu/library/2047.html

By Meghan Starr

If you are researching the legislative history of an early American bill or trying to ascertain original intent, the Library of Congress has a website called A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation that focuses on U.S. Congressional documents from 1774-1875.

One focus of the website is Debates of Congress.  This section contains four separate journals.  Each can be browsed by volume, by page heading/speech title, or you can run a search for a specific term or phrase.  The site also contains a Citation Guide and a historical timeline.

Annals of Congress

Researching the Louisiana Purchase or the treaties with the Creek and Cherokee?

Formally known as The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, the Annals cover the 1st Congress through the first session of the 18th Congress, from 1789 to 1824.  They were actually compiled between 1834 and 1856 using records and newspaper accounts to paraphrase the speeches.  It is considered to be a fuller record than the House and Senate Journals from that period.

The debates over expanding the railroads or renewing the charter for the Bank of the United States can be found in the Register of Debates.  This journal runs from the second session of the 18^th Congress through the first session of the 25^th Congress (1824-37).

Although published contemporaneously with the proceedings, the journal provides a summary of “leading debates and incidents” of the period rather than a verbatim record.

Each volume has an index, but you can also use the indexes of the House and Senate Journals during the relevant session of Congress to find the date you are looking for, then search by the date in the Register.

Look for speeches to impeach Andrew Johnson and abolition petitions in the Globe which covers congressional speeches from 1833-73 (23^rd Congress through 42^nd Congress).

The first five volumes overlap with the Register of Debates.  While initially containing an abstract of the debates, by the 32^nd Congress (1851) the Globe has more of a verbatim transcription.

The Congressional Record, printed by the Government Printing Office beginning in 1873, is the final publication of debates of Congress.  While this website only provides debates up to 1875, more recent versions can be found on the Library of Congress’ THOMAS website.

Flicker photo by stevendepolo

While a steroid controversy has embroiled two of America’s favorite sports, football and baseball, Europe’s favorite sport soccer has been plagued by a different culprit: match-fixing.

Match-fixing occurs when a match is played to an already pre-determined outcome.  Gambling syndicates and organized crime are often to blame for influencing the outcome of these matches for purposes of sports betting.

Europol, the European Union’s agency that handles criminal intelligence, recently reported that they have deemed suspicious a total of 380 soccer matches played in Europe.  Furthermore, Europol identified 425 corrupt officials, players, and serious criminals involved with match-fixing, spanning across 15 different countries.   Europol even believes some of the matches implicated were World Cup qualifying matches and UEFA Champions League matches, arguably the most prestigious competitions in all of world soccer.  The investigators estimate that the criminals made around €8 million – with the highest bribe coming in at €140,000.

It’s not clear how this will affect fans’ perception of soccer, but it will seriously undermine the integrity of the game, much like steroids have in baseball and football.

For more information on the current match-fixing scandal plaguing European soccer, check out the following articles:

•  FIFA: Governments must help in match-fixing fight (CNN)
• Investigation unveils scale of match-fixing (ESPN)
• Europol: investigators identify 380 fixed football matches (The Guardian)

You look like you could use a cookie. Maybe some free coffee. Sound good? Then plan to join us for Library Abridged starting on Monday! Each week between Feb. 4 and Spring Break, you’ll find librarians out in the first floor lobby to offer you free snacks and lots of good information. We’ll be letting you in on several new things this semester, including a Library Rewards program. Look for us during these times:

Mondays: 10-11 a.m.

Wednesdays: 4:30-5:30 p.m.

The full schedule and list of topics is available on our website.