I was trying to decide if et al needed a serial comma – and I came across this:
In Bournemouth, England at least, “plain language” means you can’t use these: E.g., bona fide, and more (etc. too)
Excerpt from the story at Newstin dot com: Town halls ban staff from using Latin words, in case they confuse immigrants:
It’s almost Plum Book time again (see also here for links to previous Plum Books). If you’ve ever thought about becoming a belly-of-the-beast public servant (appointed) and working in Washington D.C. for a new Presidential administration, now is the time to get your resume out and buffed up.
Prepare to compete for jobs with the best and the brightest – very exciting!
We love all the hoopla about Public Resource dot com and their commitment to making the law accessible to all, without cost (or too many bells and whistles we don’t always need).
However, there is another legal research database that does almost the same thing, but seems quite happy to stay quietly under the radar:
The PLoL is a portion of the Fastcase database, and is offered freely by their owners.
Add the following to my previous post on Foreclosure research.
A USA Today story on Oct. 24, 2008, Programs are available to help struggling homeowners, by Anna Bahney and Barbara Hagenbaugh, tells of these national programs: Hope for Homeowners, Hope Now Alliance, Bank of America, and Indymac Federal Bank, and has web links to all.
Also, more foreclosure information can be found at the National Consumer Law Center, and, especially for non-lawyers, see their Consumer Education brochures.
I have a few extra Fastcase pilot project passwords to give out. (The application is at our webpage – at the bottom of the page, or here is the direct link.) You do not need to be an attorney to be eligible for this trial.
Washington County (Oregon) residents (and litigants with cases in Washington County courts) get priority but if passwords remain, other counties’ residents will be eligible, so send in your application, and tell me why you would like to participate. If I get a lot of applications, your database searching skills will be considered in determining eligibility, but curiosity and aptitude will be also.
This trial is NOT for the novice. I do NO hand-holding. The two of us who work in the Washington County Law Library serve a county with over 500,000 people: I do NOT offer Fastcase training for this pilot project. You will need to be comfortable with their excellent online tutorials and their telephone and email help services. (This level of (non) service on my part is intentional and part of the trial. Among other things, I want to know how easy it was for you to use this database.)
Public Resource dot com has started putting various state building, fire, mechanical, etc. codes online, at their codes dot com site.
Keep an eye on the site – and on everything else they are doing at Public Resource dot org – very exciting.
(But, please, be sure to check with your own jurisdiction’s code enforcement staff. Building codes are updated piecemeal and in full, and it takes time for third-party database vendors to update their own holdings from official sources. Links to my previous posts on Building Codes are here and here.)
How does one teach about the Three Branches of Government? Let us count the ways:
To continue my Oregon Legal Research blog post on Let’s Kill All the Law Libraries ….
What’s a “Virtual Law Library?” Lots of people throw the term around, but who knows?!
* Could it be Justia? The Public Library of Law? Would it be Findlaw? Could it be LexisOne?
Jack Bogs Blog points us to a NYT story, the latest on public access to law and the Oregon dispute:
He fought the law and … he won.
I posted about this Oregon Revised Statute dispute here and here.
For the past 20 years, at least, law school deans, legislators, law firm managers, lobbyists, jail and prison managers, among others, have been asking why their organizations need law libraries, and heaven forbid, law librarians. After all, “isn’t all the law online?”
My brief response is:
1) No, it’s not all online; only a fraction of it is, and most of that is just online versions of (allegedly official and current) primary sources and a lot of very bad “legal advice”. In other words, the easy-stuff is online, but not the right-stuff (that treatise, that superceded statute, that legislative history, etc.). And, if you don’t know how to use these primary sources in any format, print or otherwise (i.e. do legal research!), woe to those of you who try to make sense of these materials, e.g. the Oregon Laws, online.
Oregon Legal Research Blog