Online Legal Research Instruction

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Please see the RIPS Law Librarian blog for a post I wrote about online legal research instruction.

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These College Majors Do Well On LSAT

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The ABA Journal  reported on the recent "findings of Pepperdine University School of Law professor Derek Muller, who studied data from the Law School Admission Council on 2013 law school applicants. TaxProf Blog notes his findings, released on Muller’s blog Excess of Democracy ." According to Muller's data, the top 10 college majors, by LSAT score, were: 1) Classics 2) Policy studies 3) International relations 4) Art history 5) Mathematics 6) Philosophy 7) International studies 8) Government, service 9) Economics 10) Biology, specialized In an interesting twist, "[t]he worst major for LSAT scores was criminal justice. It was followed by social work, business management and business administration, pre-law and law. Muller's full list is here ." As Muller points out, correlation does not equal causation, but students interested in law school may want to take a long look at the majors listed here. There may be something to these major...
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Courts Use Urban Dictionary To Define Slang

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Courts are using  Urban Dictionary  in court opinions to define slang terms. The definition of a single word can turn a case, and courts are often stumped with slang. "Slang has always been a challenge for the courts in cases that involve vulgar or insulting language. Conventional dictionaries lag the spoken word by design. That has lawyers and judges turning to a more fluid source of definitions: Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced collection of slang words on the Internet." As noted, traditional dictionaries are often behind when it comes to slang terms. "It can take years for slang terms to be included in traditional dictionaries, whose editors want to be certain that the words have staying power. By contrast, some new words rush into Urban Dictionary in less than a day. As a result, the site has cropped up in dozens of court cases in recent years." In fact, "[i]n the last year alone, [Urban Dictionary] was used by courts to define iron (“handgun”);...
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US News Scholarship Impact Issues

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In spring 2017, I briefly discussed the issues  with scholarship impact factor in law as a response to a recommendation by a law professor to create a rankings methodology based on Google Scholar citation. Now US News is trying to get in the game of creating a ranking of law faculty by scholarship impact factor using Hein publication metrics. US News is asking each law school for the names and other details of its fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. US News plans to link the names of each individual law school's faculty to citations and publications that were published in the previous five years and are available in HeinOnline. Using this data, HeinOnline will compile faculty scholarly impact indicators for each law school . This will include such measures as mean citations per faculty member, median citations per faculty member, and total number of publications. Those measures will then be provided to US News for use in eventually creating a comprehensiv...
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