The Ginger (Law) Librarian

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...

As late as 2016, I was ready to join Justice Posner and  give up on The Bluebook . After research into the use of algorithms in the era of big data , however, my thinking has changed. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article articulating the concerns with following a particular citation style. The problem with the rules-heavy approach to teaching [citation] isn’t just the rigidity with which students are taught those rules or follow them. It’s that too often students are taught rules without any context or justification. That’s just "the way things are." Students are left following rules just because a [law review editor] told them to, none the wiser about their function or history. It’s a recipe for seeing writing as foreign or external — something a student is supposed to do but not necessarily understand. Just follow the rules, kid, and there won’t be any trouble. Instead of taking this approach to citation, the author leads a discussion  not abo...

After starting a new position, it's always a good idea to evaluate the programming at your new institution and possibly bring experiences and programming initiatives along from your previous institution. At my last institution, I was a reference librarian, and I also taught a full-length course on scholarly writing. When I arrived at my new institution, I noticed a hole in the curriculum when it came to instructing the students on best practices for scholarly writing.  Because many of our students take part in seminar courses or the journal write-on competitions each year, it seemed natural to start a scholarly writing initiative at my new institution.  Starting Fall 2016, two new scholarly writing programs were introduced by the law library. The first was a Scribes Student Legal Writing Society group. As the Executive Director of Scribes, I was tasked with starting local chapters of this group at the various law schools. The first year would be a pilot year wit...

In past posts, I have highlighted the importance of a well-optimized article  title and abstract  for discoverability. Titles, in particular, are important because researchers often use keyword searching in the title field to find articles that are highly relevant to their research. Not only is a title important for discoverability, it's also important to catch the attention of a potential reader and up article views and downloads for impact purposes. Brian Leiter over at the Law Professor Blogs Network recently highlighted a story illustrating how to game the article title to increase downloads. I have an article with the (admittedly extremely boring) title "Rethinking Assignor Estoppel" coming out in the Houston Law Review. It has been on SSRN for nine months. I have posted about it twice on Facebook and Twitter, and it has shown up in all the SSRN journals. In that nine months it has garnered 982 views and 172 SSRN downloads. Late Friday afternoon, prompt...

Check out my new RIPS Law Librarian Blog post on open access initiatives in legal scholarly publishing.

The Law Librarians blog posted about a paper by James Donovan, Carol Watson, and Caroline Osborne on SSRN called The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews . From the article: In answer to law faculty questions about how participation in an open access repository will affect the works’ impact, the present research offers a definitive reply. When looking at citation by other law reviews to all the author’s work, the averaged increase in citations in flagship journals is 53%. In general, half of these cites will be dispensed in the first six years after the article’s publication. OA articles will attract more attention earlier in the lifecycle of the publication, and endure longer on the intellectual stage. … For authors, the message is clear: The open access advantage is real, sizable, and consistent. The minimal effort to upload an article onto an OA platform such as SSRN or a school’s repository pays rich dividends in the currency of subsequent citations in law reviews a...

The things we spend our time on: Two librarians at Yale Law School have found that Yale Law School created The Bluebook , not The Harvard Law Review. As noted in the NYTimes article : Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable. True, true, and true. And the creation of this behemoth was originally credited to The Harvard Law Review. The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.”  The standard account of the origins of The Bluebook is reflected in a 1987 speech by Erwin N. Griswold, who had been president of The Harvard Law Rev...

The Atlantic ran an article recently that is near and dear to the heart of Scribes --The American Society of Legal Writers ' mission (disclosure: I am executive director of the organization). The article works to promote plain language. As noted, the problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. Take this example: The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected ...

As the fall law-review submission season winds down, it is great to be reminded of some of the practicalities of the submission process. Here are previous posts on point: The Art of the Law Review Article Title The Art of the Abstract A Well-Optimized Abstract Long Jargon-Filled Abstracts Win Citation Count Scholarly Article: Publishing Strategies Posts with Scholarly Writing tag While all of these posts are helpful for the law-review submissions process, there is still a lot about the process that boils down to timing and luck. Do not fret about the lack of an offer to publish. Remember to revise and resubmit , and with some 2,000 general and special-interest law reviews out there, there is a good chance that your article will eventually be picked up. 

See my new RIPS Law Librarian Blog post  about promoting faculty scholarship.

Salon recently posted a fairly comprehensive article discussing the generally universal recommended reforms to legal education. From the article: Almost thirty years ago, the New York Times ran a Sunday magazine feature titled, “The Trouble with America’s Law Schools.” The piece highlighted many of the curricular concerns common today, particularly the lack of practical training, the inattention to issues of professional responsibility, and the disengagement of upper-level law students. And as noted, we're still dealing with many of the same issues today. Here are some of the highlights from the recommended reforms: Finances: Schools also need to look for more ways to cut costs and to diversify their revenue streams. More programs for nonlawyers, undergraduates, practicing attorneys, and foreign graduate students are obvious options. Debt burdens for students could also be reduced by allowing them to attend after three years of college, as a few law schools now do. Stru...

Is your faculty's scholarship reaching its intended audience? Is it truly having an impact? Most law schools are in the zero-sum game of the USNews ranking system . The quality assessment by peers and lawyers/judges makes up nearly 40% of the overall score. One of the ways to help this score is by upping the reputation of the school - say, through the promotion of impactful faculty scholarship. Currently, we have impact factors for the individual journals , but there is no widespread system of comparing the schools' overall faculty scholarship. One (of a few) impact factors for the individual journals is from the Washington & Lee Law Journal Submissions & Rankings Database is based on "the average number of annual citations to articles in each journal (rounded to two decimal places)." One (imperfect) method of comparing scholarship for an entire school's faculty is to base it on the number of downloads from SSRN &/or the institutional repos...

The 20th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (ISBN 978-0-692-40019-7) is now available for purchase! Click the "Purchase" link in the top menu of The Bluebook's website to buy the book in print or to buy a subscription or renewal to the Bluebook Online . From the website: We are no longer able to sell the 19th edition (ISBN 978-0-615-36116-1) through our website. If you wish to purchase the 19th edition, send an email to orders@legalbluebook.com. Please indicate if you are a bookstore, how many copies of the book you wish to purchase, and the billing and shipping addresses. You may also fax your order with your credit card number and expiration date to 617-495-2748. Make sure you indicate clearly whether you wish to purchase the 19th or 20th edition on the fax. We do not accept orders over the phone. Sorry for any inconvenience. If you purchased a subscription to the Bluebook Online before the release of the 20th edition, you will have access t...

Practical legal education is all the rage right now. After years of complaints by practitioners that law students were graduating without the skills necessary to actually practice, law schools en masse have finally started listening.  This trend also coincided with the fact that fewer firms were willing to mentor law graduates in the practical side of practice. With so many law students graduating into a depressed market, law firms could pick and choose those graduates who needed less formal mentoring and could "hit the ground running" so to speak.  This begs the question, if we make legal education more experiential, would it really matter? This was the exact title of a post on the Law Professor's Blog last year , and Bill Henderson thinks that the answer to this question is yes. "A competent lawyer needs domain knowledge + practical skills + a fiduciary disposition (i.e., the lawyer’s needs are subservient to the needs of clients and the rule of law).  Since...

After years of teaching scholarly writing - specifically for law reviews - I have come to the conclusion that structure is often the biggest hurdle for students (and authors, in general) when it comes to writing lengthy articles. In class, we discuss outlining and organizing early so that the students can lay a good foundation to write their articles. But the thing about writing is that an organization that you thought logical in the beginning may run amok once the article starts to take shape. A post on Chronicle Vitae discusses helpful hints to overcome this issue: Reverse outlining:  Print out the entire draft of your text and break out your red pen. In the margins, jot down each paragraph’s main idea. If it has more than one, flag it. If it doesn’t seem to have a concrete purpose, flag that, too.  The Humpty Dumpty Method: Requires a full printout of your text. It also requires a large, flat space—either a conference room table or a floor will do. Step one: Take a ...

As spring law-review submission season winds down, many law faculty are busy submitting to journals. Here is a compilation of the Top 50 law reviews as ranked by Washington & Lee (current combined score 2013) and the submission criteria for each of those law reviews compiled from Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews and Journals (Jan. 22, 2105). 1. Stanford Law Review [Submit] Must use their online submission form. Do not include any identifying information in the submission. Include a brief abstract [Citations] Bluebook format [Word Requirements] word limit of 30,000 words (including footnotes). Remove name or other identifying information [Processing Period] They will consider requests for expedited review. Use their online form 2. Harvard Law Review [Format] Word document [Submit] Through their online system or by mail (Articles Office, Harvard Law Review, Gannett House, 1511 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138). Only include identifying information on ...

University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Law (and former SCOTUS Law Clerk), William Baude, wrote a fascinating NYTimes article about SCOTUS's secret decisions. Professor Baude illustrated these secret decisions with the following story: A convicted murderer, Charles F. Warner, was executed in Oklahoma last month after the United States Supreme Court denied his request for a last-minute stay. Mr. Warner and other death-row inmates had challenged the state’s lethal injection procedures as unconstitutional. In a strange twist, the court agreed to hear his claims — a week after Mr. Warner had been executed. Traditionally, the court postpones an execution once it has decided to hear an inmate’s case. Why did the court wait to accept the case until it was too late for Mr. Warner? Did it decide for some reason to depart from tradition? The court gave no explanation. Four justices dissented from the refusal to stay the execution, but the majority issued only a one-sentence ...

For years, there has been criticism that no one reads law review articles . Lawyers, judges, and mainly law professors spend a lot of time writing these in-depth articles for a very, very small audience. Blogs, or blawgs as they are known in the legal world, have taken over as the vehicle for instantaneously informing the public of a new case or analysis on a particular area of law. At this point, law reviews can't really compete with the instant dissemination of a blog because, generally, law reviews still use the old model of print publication. And print takes time. There has even been talk that blogs are more valuable than law review articles to land jobs. Pat Ellis, spoke to his alma mater, Michigan State University School of Law, about his employment success that he attributes, in part, to his blog . "Ellis told the audience that one blog post of his shared on social media brought far more attention and conversations with lawyers and law professors than a law review...

For those interested in human rights legal research, you should be aware of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Database . The Organization of American States established the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1979 to enforce and interpret the provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights. Its two main functions are thus adjudicatory and advisory. Under the former, it hears and rules on the specific cases of human rights violations referred to it. Under the latter, it issues opinions on matters of legal interpretation brought to its attention by other OAS bodies or member states. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) Project of the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review has released its Inter-American Court of Human Rights Database. This freely-available database produced by the editors and staff of the IACHR Project under the supervision of Professor Cesare Romano allows users to search Inter-American Court decisions by case nam...

Is it true? Is The Bluebook really in the public domain?  The Lawyerist reported that "Harvard Law Review who has been aggressively protecting the copyright of the Bluebook against all those who would let legal citation free into the wild forgot to renew the copyright on the 10th Edition." Professor Christopher Jon Sprigman from New York University School of Law sent a letter stating that his client, Public Resource, intends to publish an electronic version of the 10th edition in light of its public domain status.  In addition, Professor Sprigman calls the copyright protection of the 19th edition into question. "[N]umerous courts have mandated use of The Bluebook. As a consequence, The Bluebook has been adopted as an edict of government and its contents are in the public domain. But even if we lay that point aside (which, of course, we would not), very little of the 19th edition can be construed as material protected by copyright. Many portions of the 19th ...