by Gerard Fowke

Resource Highlight: HeinOnline’s Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law

In case you haven’t read the news, scholarly research into slavery’s influence on our legal system is highly relevant to many ongoing debates. The law library can help with your research in many ways, but today I’m going to highlight HeinOnline’s Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law. Whether you are doing legal research that relates to slavery, or interdisciplinary research on other aspects of slavery that touches upon the law, this rich collection gathers a wide range of useful primary and secondary sources that might otherwise be cumbersome to identify and locate.

When it comes to primary legal sources, Slavery in America and the World aims to be comprehensive. It includes:

Every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery;
Every federal statute dealing with slavery; and
All reported state and federal cases.

The way the collection organizes these sources by jurisdiction and then presents them chronologically is obviously a great match for a research project focused on historical developments; however, even if the historical timeline itself is not a major focus of your research, this organization still provides some valuable context. It’s quite useful.

This database also cuts a wide swath when it comes to gathering primary historical sources (i.e., contemporary accounts of slavery). HeinOnline says it includes every pre-1920 English-language legal commentary on slavery, including many obscure articles and journals that are otherwise difficult to find. It supplements those legal commentaries with hundreds of newspapers and pamphlets discussing slavery from a variety of perspectives.

A photograph of former slaves in the time period following the Emancipation Proclamation. — Via wikimedia.

Slavery in America and the World also helps to contextualize this impressive range of primary sources with useful secondary materials. It includes a fairly thorough and relatively up-to-date collection of modern legal scholarship on slavery, as well as an extensive bibliography of books on the topic.

Slavery looms large over American history and American law, and there is no shortage of sources on the topic, which can make research feel overwhelming, even for the experienced researcher. Slavery in America and the World helps to make it more manageable by gathering so many of the most important resources in a single place and organizing them in an intuitive and approachable manner. If you are just getting started, the collection has a clear and easy-to-navigate LibGuide to help point you in the right direction. Of course, as with any of the GSU Law Library’s many resources, librarians are also here to help you use them effectively in your research.

01.26.22

by Terrance Manion

PowerNotes Helps Manage Research Across Multiple Research Services

The GSU College of Law Library recently added PowerNotes (Premium) to its Database List. This is perhaps somewhat misleading as PowerNotes is not a research database, per se, but rather a research outlining and management tool. There is a stripped-down free version of PowerNotes; however, the law library acquired institutional access to its premium service (including unlimited projects and other upgrades) for the GSU College of Law community.

PowerNotes uses a browser extension to help with online research, specifically gathering and keeping track of source materials, and organizing and creating a writing outline. Users can install either the Chrome or Firefox browser extension; these are the only browser options at the moment. Once installed, use your campus email address to create an account. Now, you can create a project and begin searching on a preferred research platform or across the web, generally. PowerNotes works with any webpage you browse, including legal subscription services such as Westlaw Edge, Lexis+, and HeinOnline (which provides a LibGuide on how to use PowerNotes on its platform). This is perhaps its most significant feature– centralizing your research regardless of where the source material resides online.

When users find relevant information, they can highlight the text, save it, assign a topic to it and annotate it. The text is saved with a link back to the source. Citation information is automatically collected and put in a preferred citation format, say bluebook. At any time during the research process, users can revisit their projects and reorganize, rename, or expand their topics and quotes.

PowerNotes has compiled a helpful instructional video library. Also, the law library will host training on PowerNotes on Tuesday, March 1 @ 3:15 PM and Wednesday, March 2 @ 5:10 PM. Both sessions will be 45 minutes and satisfy a topic session for the Law Library’s Applied Legal Experience, Research, & Technology (ALERT) Program.

In the interim, if you have questions or problems accessing PowerNotes, contact Librarian Manion. Do good research.

08.31.20

by Patrick Parsons

Featured Database – Proquest Congressional

Looking for government documents is an important part of Legal Research. Whether you’re sourcing for a journal, trying to find an old committee report, or looking for some legislative history, most law students don’t escape the clutches of legal education without having to look through some federal government publications.

While there are free sources that provide access to government documents, coverage, availability, and location can be challenging to navigate. Publications can be spread across several different sites, each containing different coverage and search interfaces. This is why, when a student swings by the reference desk to ask about researching federal government documents, I send them to Proquest Congressional.

Proquest Congressional is an expansive collection of government documents. It includes historic congressional bills, member records, hearings, debates, executive orders, and much much more. Typically the coverage goes back to the 1700’s to the initial publications of the United States and sometimes even before. If it is a government document cited in a brief, article, or case, I would bet that Proquest Congressional has it.

Beyond containing a lot of information, it also has simple, intuitive navigation. The advanced search allows you to pick which collection to search without presenting an overwhelming number of options. It also provides several fields which are incredibly useful if you’re looking for a particular person, date, or piece of legislation. The “search by number” function, available in the Legislative and Executive Publications dropdown menu, makes searching for a citation a breeze. Search by number provides prompts for almost any congressional document with fields designed to change with the selected publication. This way, there is never a question about how to enter a citation, where to put a dash, or how to abbreviate a publication.

Proquest Congressional makes finding citations easy.

Proquest Congressional is something everyone should explore. While you might not need it on a day to day basis, knowing the navigational basics makes you a much more powerful researcher. The day that a government publication question comes, and trust me it will, a basic knowledge will let you find what you’re looking for in minutes instead of hours. You’ll look like a gov docs whiz and impress the boots off of your editor, professor, or boss.