Articles Posted in April, 2006

Podcast Internal Revenue Code: Librarians everywhere know that there are many people in the world who can’t read the printed page, for any number of reasons. While an audio ORS is probably a long way off, thanks to Jack Bogdanski, a podcast of the Internal Revenue Code is already here. Here is his description of the project, here is the link to the podcast, and here is the home page of his blog. Hmmm … maybe he can round up a few law students to podcast the ORS. It has a two-year shelf-life, so the effort might not be in vain. One can dream. Organizing a podcast of the index might be a bit tricky, but not impossible. I know a lot of really smart taxonomists who could probably come up with a zillion ways to do it.

May 2006 Election Judicial Candidates: TheOSB has posted its Judicial Voter’s Guide to its web site.

Dog Law blog: Nolo Press has teamed up with Little Sheba and others to create a Dog Law blog. It has links to law and legislation, books, travel tips, and much more. Check it out, here.

OSB Elimination of Bias Advisory Vote: Corrected posting (thank you to the commentator!): The Advisory Vote to the OSB BOG on whether or not to eliminate the Elimination of Bias credit requirements, was 2512 in favor – 1236 against elimination. See poll results here and other OSB links on the issue here.

Thinking about Measure 37: The latest issue of Lewis & Clark Law School’s Environmental Law Review (volume 36, no. 1, 2006) is a Measure 37 Symposium Issue. Check it out.

Legal Information vs Legal Advice: An excellent place to look for articles and guides on how non-attorneys in courts, legal offices and libraries can serve members of the public productively and lawfully is at the American Judicature Society’s website. Their Pro Se forum resource pages are full of useful documents.

Citing unpublished opinions in the federal courts: It’s a Yes. The Supreme Court has not surprisingly approved citing to unpublished cases next year. beSpacific and How Appealing, among others, have been tracking this issue for years and link to a Tony Mauro story on the latest development, here.

Legal Reference Question #1 (see April 11th posting for details): Does the prohibition against helping patrons select/complete forms include IRS forms? The short answer is: YES, YES, YES!! The longer answer: Please do not EVER select or help a patron select a tax form, local, state, federal or foreign. You do not know what tax form they need so how could you select one – right? Even if you are a tax attorney, an enrolled agent, or a CPA, the patron is not your client, you do not know anything about their household or finances, and you have no professional relationship to them giving you the right to make their financial decisions.

For Library Reference Staff Only (not really, but you’re forewarned): We’re going to do something a little different here for a couple of weeks (or more depending on how busy we all are). During our OLA presentation in April to a group of public reference library staff on how to answer legal reference questions, several excellent questions were asked and we ran out of time for answering them. So we (the county law librarians) are going to try and answer them here. It’s an unusual use of a blog, but very low tech, easy, and accessible to program participants. So here goes. The next posting will be the first question.