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

With throngs of Georgia State University Law Librarian, both past and present, cheering in appreciation, Nancy Johnson was inducted into the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Hall of Fame at the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting and Conference.  The Georgia State University Associate Dean for Library and Information Services and Professor of Law is part of the 2011 class of hall of fame inductees and joins other  pioneers and leaders of the profession.

Johnson built the Georgia State Law Library collection from the ground up.

The following announcement is from the June issue of AALL Spectrum:

Nancy P. Johnson, associate dean for library and information services and professor of law, Georgia State University, has been active nationally in AALL and especially the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section (ALL-SIS). On the local level, she has been active with the Atlanta Law Libraries Association (ALLA) and the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries (SEALL), serving as president of ALLA in 1990-91 and of SEALL in 2003-04. She was chair of the ALL-SIS in 1992-93 and served as Special Interest Section Council chair in 1993-94. She was a member of the AALL Executive Board in 1996-99 and chaired the AALL Economic Study Advisory Committee on Law Book Pricing, for which she received a Presidential Certificate of Appreciation in 2001. In 2009 she was honored by the ALL-SIS with the Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarian ship, and in 2010 she received the SIS’s award for best article of the year for “What First-Year Students Should Learn in a Legal Research Class,” published in Legal Reference Services Quarterly.

Johnson’s strengths can be seen in her writing, her teaching responsibilities, and her support as a mentor. She has guided many former staff members to new positions as directors and associate directors in law libraries. She has spoken at and has served as a moderator at AALL Annual Meetings as well as SEALL and CALI programs. She was one of the early founders of CALI’s Legal Research Community Authoring Project, which reached a milestone in 2010 with 100 legal research lessons. Georgia Legal Research, co-authored with Elizabeth Adelman and Nancy Adams, is the definitive publication on the subject. Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories has been published with regular updates since 1979 and is now available on Hein Online. Johnson has been a co-author of Legal Research Exercises, most recently with Susan Phillips, since 1986.

Congratulations Nancy. It is well deserved.

Each year, law librarians from around the country — and even the world on occasions — gather for the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual conference. This year’s conference is taking place in Philadelphia from July 23-26. Six of the GSU law librarians will be attending this year. In addition to the general agenda of training, meeting with colleagues and gathering new ideas to enhance our services,  each librarian is playing a slightly different role in the conference.

• Nancy Johnson will be inducted into the AALL Hall of Fame, which recognizes members whose contributions have been “significant, substantial and long-standing”.
• Pam Brannon and Deborah Schander may — or may not — be speaking in an improvisation-style session. If their names are selected from a hat, they’ll be speaking using a Powerpoint slide set they’ve never seen before.
• Trina Holloway is participating in a special workshop on electronic resource management software.
• Meg Butler is presenting her new paper on teaching pedagogy, which won one of the categories in the 2011 AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers competition.
• Austin Williams is participating in a pre-conference training session for new librarians.
• And the whole group will be recognized for their winning “Day in the Life” photo, which depicts the evolution of library technology.

How many times have you caught yourself catapulting angry birds across your iPad thinking, “if only CALI lessons were not in flash and available for the iPad, I could be having just as much fun while learning secondary considerations used in assessing the nonobviousness requirement in patent law.”

Well that time is almost here.

Starting in the fall CALI lessons will be available to students with mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones. The new viewer dubbed CALI 5 uses HTML and Jquery to bring their library of lessons to mobile devices. For more information visit the CALI website announcement.

Faculty can preview the iPad-iPhone compatible viewer over the summer. To learn more about the new viewer faculty can register for an upcoming webcast: New lesson viewer webcast on July 12.  Also faculty can view a CALI conference session on the CALI 5 viewer.