We are happy to announce that we have released a new site for researching and tracking federal judicial nominations.

The site is available at http://judges.law.yale.edu/ .And it includes data for every federal judicial nomination from the 103rd congress to the current day.

The site offers:

1. The ability to quickly and easily track down nominees based on a number of faceted criteria including congress, nominating president, and nomination result.
2. The ability to track nominees and nominations via RSS feeds.
3. Up to date contact information for sitting judges nominated and confirmed since the 103rd congress, and nominees from the 111th congress forward.

Possible future enhancements include:

1. Adding additional biographical data such as education (currently only Yale grads are tracked), gender, etc.
2. Adding the ability to narrow down nominations by date and sort congress information by date.
3. Better styled RSS feeds, RSS feeds for search results.
4. Enhanced search capabilities.
   

Why isn't Sonia Sotomayor listed as having been nominated to the Supreme Court?

As of the writing of this blog post, President Obama has announced his intent to nominate Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. When her nomination is made official and received in the senate, we will add this information to the nominations database. But you can track her nomination by using the RSS feed from her existing profile page, or using the RSS feeds for Recent Nominations on the home page.

Any additional questions, comments, suggestions (including corrections), should be sent to lawlib.webmaster at yale.edu

On 21 April 2009, the [European] Commission adopted a report and a green paper on the functioning of the existing rules on jurisdiction of the courts and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. It concludes that time has come to achieve a free circulation of judgments in civil and commercial matters in the European Union on the basis of mutual recognition of judgments among Member States.

In this context, the report limits itself to presenting the outcome of the evaluation of the operation of the Regulation. Instead, the green paper outlines possible avenues for moving forward on the points raised in the report. In summary, the report and green paper address the following issues:

• The removal of the remaining obstacles to a free circulation of judgments, i.e. the removal of "exequatur"^[6]
• The protection of European citizens and companies in case of disputes with parties domiciled in third States, in particular by ensuring equal access to the courts of the Member States and equal protection against judgments given by the courts of third States against European defendants;
• Finally, certain imperfections in the application of certain rules of the Regulation, such as avoiding parallel proceedings in different Member States and ensuring the sound application of contractual agreements as to which courts will deal with the case in the Union.

The report and the green paper aim at launching a broad public consultation of civil society and Member States on the possible ways to deal with the issues referred to above. The deadline for consultation is 30 June 2009. The Commission's work programme foresees that a proposal for revision of the Regulation may be adopted by the end of 2009.

A recent report by Consumers International has concluded that the UK is the worst among 16 leading nations at protecting the rights of the users.

"UK copyright law is the oldest but also the most out of date. It’s time our copyright law caught up with the real world," said Ed Mayo, chief executive of Consumer Focus. "The current system puts unrealistic limits on our listening and viewing habits and is rapidly losing credibility among consumers. A broad ‘fair use’ exception would bring us in line with consumer expectations, technology and the rest of the world."
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In addition, the UK government does not seem to see reform of copyright law as a priority.

More

This past Saturday, Yale Law School's Information Society Project hosted a fantastic symposium on "Library 2.0".  Materials from the conference, including video of the sessions and the concurrent twitter conversations is available at: http://yaleispblog.net/ .  Take a look, the issues are increadibly important: its no exageration to say that the future of society will, to a large extent, be driven by the resolution of these issues.  Also, it was great fun.

-more-

Posted by jnann.

New developments in legal publishing result in librarians encouragiong electronic publication of law journals.

About | Statement | Signatories

About

On 7 November 2008, the directors of the law libraries at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of Texas, and Yale University met in Durham, North Carolina at the Duke Law School. That meeting resulted in the "Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship," which calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.

Read more about this at the link above.

Posted by jnann.

The Yale Information Society Project will host the Library 2.0 Symposium on Saturday, April 4, 2009, at Yale Law School. The confluence of book digitization projects, user-generated content, and social networking applications is forcing us to rethink the role of libraries.

This symposium will bring together leading thinkers from libraries, academia, and legal practice to lay out a vision for the future of the library and digital collections; the ethical implications of Library 2.0, including data retention and patron privacy; intellectual property rights in user-generated and traditional digital library content; and the future of book digitization projects. Featured speakers will include Ann Wolpert, head of MIT libraries and the MIT press; John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School; Josh Greenberg of the New York Public Library; Jeff Cunard of Debevoise and Plimpton; and a host of other luminaries.   

The Library 2.0 Symposium will take place in Room 127 of Yale Law School located at 127 Wall Street, New Haven, Connecticut. This event is free and open to the public but is expected to fill up quickly. Please register at your earliest convenience at http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=705106.  More information about the symposium is available on the Yale ISP web site at http://isp.law.yale.edu.

The Library 2.0 Symposium is made possible by the generosity of the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School.

LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection now includes access to every published and unpublished Congressional hearing from 1824 through the present.  You can search the collection via Yale's legal databases page.

Are you working on a research project, gathering legal materials for a SAW, or trying to track down a series of articles for a law journal?  Reference librarians are here to help!  Librarians are available to provide in-depth one-on-one training and informal small group classes on a wide variety of research topics!  Interested students or faculty may fill out this form and one of the reference librarians will design a class specifically tailored to meet your needs.