Lawyers, law students, and law librarians enjoy a good story.  Even better is when that story combines our interest in the law with a bit of escapism.  Here are a couple of ways you can take a break from studying without having to forget about law school entirely.

You may be familiar with some lawyer authors—John Grisham, Brad Meltzer, Lisa Scottoline—who write books for adults—and other lawyers, like Louis Sachar who write for younger readers.  These authors know how to capture an audience’s attention:  Write about issues of justice, power, and the law.

Legal academics entertain themselves and others by considering legal themes in popular culture.  In print, for example, The Law and Harry Potter analyses legal concepts and issues seen in the Harry Potter series.  New York judge Karen Morris wrote Law Made Fun Through Harry Potter’s Adventure:  99 Lessons in Law from the Wizarding World for Fans of All Ages.

And, just this past weekend many celebrated the DVD release of X-Men: First Class.  As described in the Law and the Multiverse blog, the latest X-Men movie addresses international law, as well as civil rights-employment law.  Other blogs also address superheroes and the law.

While you are enjoying law school—whether you’re in your first or your final year—remember that this new way of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ enables you to consider your popular culture consumption in a new way.  You, too, can consume and create fiction—books, movies, blogs, and more—with a focus on truth, justice, and the American way!

by Katie Ginnane

As many of us law students contemplate the end of law school and the beginning of our legal career, we all have moments of doubt.  Whether you are a first year student just getting started or a third year student ready to get out, we have all asked ourselves the same question.

Why am I in law school?

Because firm life is the main trajectory of recent law school grads, we law students all assume it is the right career for us without researching our alternatives.  Looking at all your options throughout law school may help you realize how much you want to work at a firm, or it may start you down a path you never thought about prior to beginning law school. With the legal market the way it is, it may be worthwhile to research careers outside of firm work. Either way, here are some great resources about “life after law school” careers that may be worthwhile for those moments of uncertainty.

Here are some useful books available in the law library:

Non-legal Careers for Lawyers

• Non-legal Careers for Lawyers is published by the American Bar Association.  It includes three sections.  The first section offers general advice on pursuing a non-legal career.  The second section is divided into several chapters addressing specific subject-area and the non-traditional opportunities within each.  Finally, it contains a list of additional resources for more comprehensive and personal research.

Should You Really Be a Lawyer? 

• Should You Really Be a Lawyer is also divided into three subsections, two of which involve deciding to attend law and staying in law school.  The last section, Should You Really Practice Law?, addresses the decision of whether or not you should practice, including a self-assessment.  This book is useful for determining what you want to do, not necessarily at finding the right career alternative for yourself.

The Lawyer’s Career Change Handbook: More than 300 things you can do with your law degree 

• The Lawyer’s Career Change Handbook offers insights into changing legal careers; however, it also provides a great list of opportunities within different fields of the law and resources to find out more about them.  This book provides helpful hints on honing in on marketable skills.  It is more focused on broad strategies for finding jobs than on individual career paths.

The Lawyer’s Guide to Finding Success in Any Job Market 

• The Lawyer’s Guide to Finding Success in Any Job Market has one chapter specifically devoted to alternative law school careers.  In this book, the careers are divided into 8 subsections with information on who does it, what it is, what it pays and breaking into the industry.  It also lists pros and cons of alternative career choices, with some pros being few geographic restrictions, possibly increased job security and better life-work balance and some cons being reduced earning potential, loss of prestige and possible difficulty of returning to mainstream practice.

Outside of the library, Westlaw and Lexis have several articles outlining some alternative careers in their news sections.

Finally, the career services office is a great source for questions and advice about what to plan for if looking at alternative opportunities after law school and later in your career.

By now you all know, of course, that the Law Library has a pretty great DVD collection, and you also know where it is. (Oh, you don’t? Well, go down to the Federal Reporter and hang a left.) And we’ve done some work over the summer to make it better, including adding some interesting depictions of real life (and some not-so-real-life, of course) lawyers.

For instance, we already owned the Criterion Collection’s DVD release of Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda as a young travelling lawyer named Abraham Lincoln; we’ve also recently added the DVD of Henry Fonda’s acclaimed one-man show about Clarence Darrow, in which he recounts the trials of  John Scopes and Leopold and Loeb.

We’ve also added a documentary on a much more recent and controversial attorney, William Kunstler, who died on September 4th, 1995, while preparing to represent another in a long line of controversial defendants.

Don’t need all of that reality? Well, we have you covered, too. Check out The Defender, starring a very young William Shatner as an attorney defending Steve McQueen, or the more recent (and hilarious) Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. Who knows? You might just get an idea for your outfit for next year’s Dragon*Con!

The days before the fist bump.

Though you still shouldn’t use it in your 1L writing assignment, fist bump is now recognized as a word in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary for 2011.  Fist bump is one of approximately 150 words added to the new edition.

Dictionaries add new words to reflect changing times, thoughts, and ideas.  You might wonder: the Obamas made the fist bump famous in 2008, why recognize the word now?  Well, the editorial staff who write dictionaries want to be sure that new words are truly part of the vocabulary before adding words—so there is a bit of delay between the introduction of a new word to spoken vocabulary and the formal addition of a new word to the dictionary.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary also recently issued a 12^th edition, commemorating 100 years since the first edition.  Approximately 400 new words are included in the new edition, so parents can defensibly take teens to task for sexting, cougars can hunt men without using their claws, and we can all woot with enthusiasm.

If you’re trying to find the meaning of a new word—that’s not yet in the traditional dictionary sources—don’t forget that you can check slang dictionaries.  One online source for that is urbandictionary.com.  When you want an explanation of jeggings, you can find one in a slang dictionary.

Dictionaries also eliminate words that are no longer common parlance.  Sadly, no longer can we use a growlery—“a place to ‘growl’ in; jocularly applied to a person’s private sitting room,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary online—that may happen instead in a man cave.  You can access the Oxford English Dictionary online through the University Library’s database list.

Right now you may be stressed out because you cannot find the last answer to your legal bibliography assignment. What can you do?  Who can help?  Who you gonna call?

Unfortunately the Ghostbusters cannot help you locate American Jurisprudence or United States Reports, but a reference librarian or graduate reference assistant (GRA) can provide you with some assistance.

The Reference Desk is open Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. until 8:00 p.m.  For those of you who prefer to get most of your work done on the weekend, the Reference Desk is open on Friday from 8:30 a.m until 5:00 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.  During these times you can do any of the following:

1. Stop by and talk to a reference librarian or GRA in person
2. Utilize chat reference (chat box located on http://law.gsu.edu/library/)
3. Call the reference desk at 404-413-9102

Have you noticed a new bookshelf near the entrance to the library? Been wondering what it is? The law library has added a Book Exchange this year, which allows you to exchange leisure reading books with your fellow library users. These books don’t belong to the library, so there’s no need to check them out. If you see a book you’d like, just take it. From there, it’s up to you whether you’d like to return it, give it to a friend or toss it (shame on you).

The general principle of the Book Exchange is “give one/take one” – you don’t have to make a one-to-one exchange each time, but please do contribute to the selection as well as take books.

And remember, this is for leisure reading, so please don’t start tossing all your old textbooks up there.

The Internet was burning last week with stories about Missouri’s new law banning Facebook friendships between students and teachers.  The talk on the web suggests that teachers and students can’t be friends on Facebook.  But is that really what the law says?

The easiest way to answer that question is to go directly to the law.  What’s the best way to do that?  We could try to find the law by turning to the Missouri statutes database on Lexis or Westlaw, but that won’t work.  Why not?  The statute is too new.  The easiest way to begin tracking a new law, one that is the talk of the town, is to begin with Google.  The search <<Missouri facebook teachers friends>> brings up over 34 million results, including reputable news sites.

News stories, such as the National Public Radio story, include background information about the law.  The story includes the number for the bill (SB 54), the name of the bill’s sponsor (Missouri State Representative Chris Kelly), and the approximate date of the bill (“signed into law last month [July].”

The NPR researchers and writers make it easy for us to look at the exact language of the law—they link directly to the Missouri Senate website containing the language of the bill.  Fantastic!  A free legal research tool for those who are interested in Missouri law.

Reviewing the bill summary provided by the Missouri site, we can see that the bill was divided into sections, each section numbered to indicate where the law will be found in the state code, once codified.  The section of interest for teachers, students, and bloggers is Missouri state statute section 162.069.  The exact language of the law: “Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child’s legal custodian, physical custodian or legal guardian.  Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.”

Although Facebook is not mentioned, the law appears to prohibit teachers from maintaining social network sites that allow for private communication with a student.

Whether the law would withstand constitutional challenges is another question!

In your research, you may be asked by an attorney or law professor to locate congressional materials produced by Congress as the law was introduced, studied, and debated.  This research task is called legislative history research.  It can be a very tedious process, particularly for older laws.  Although, today there is an abundance of hearings, debates, and reports available in free online sources (Thomas and FDsys), it can still be a complicated task of focusing on both locating all the congressional documents and then focusing on key phrases.

At this point, you may ask yourself why anyone would want to read all those congressional materials.  Those congressional documents are often used by attorneys and courts in an attempt to determine Congressional intent or to clarify vague or ambiguous statutory language.  For example, in Dawson Chemical Co. V. Rohm & Haas Co., 448 U.S. 176 (1980), the question turned on whether the chemical manufacturer had engaged in patent misuse.  The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the hearings prior to the enactment of the law and held that the respondent was within his rights because his behavior did not fall outside of the intended scope of Pubic Law 82-593.  Many cases fall on the exact definition of statutory terms and the courts look to legislative history.

Fortunately, members of the Georgia State University College of Law community have access to excellent legislative history resources.  Nancy P. Johnson’s Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories (part of Hein Online) is an excellent starting point for legislative history research.  Two other subscription databases are ProQuest Congressional and ProQuest Legislative Insight.  You can locate these databases, along with others, on the Law Library website – Electronic Resources.

ProQuest Congressional includes all congressional documents, including oversight hearings and annual reports.  ProQuest Legislative Insight is excellent for extended legislative history research.  Legislative Insight includes those congressional documents linked directly to a public law.  The outstanding feature of Legislative Insight is that a researcher can easily locate key terms in the full texts of documents.  This feature can save many hours of researching detailed documents.

Currently, Legislative Insight is a work in progress, but by 2012, it will include 18,000 legislative histories covering laws from 1929 to the present.  PDF documents include the public law, all versions of the bills, reports, documents, CRS reports, committee prints, debates in the Congressional Record, and presidential signing documents.

By Professor Nancy P. Johnson