Dec. 6, 2004
Mary Whisner, Editor
Preparing for Exams
To get here, you probably showed great skill at taking
exams in your field, whether it was history or biology. But the typical law
school exam is very different from exams in other disciplines. (It’s also not
like the LSAT, another test you mastered.)
Some resources for preparing:
- The Library has the videotape of Prof. Aronson’s lecture,
“Preparing for and Taking Law School Exams,” Examsvid 11/18/04 at Course
Reserve. (Remember, each group study room has a VCR.)
- Prof. Andersen’s CALI lesson, “Writing Better Law School Exams:
The Importance of Structure,” is available at
www.cali.org. You can get our school’s access code from Computing Services
(lawhelp@u.washington.edu)
or the Reference Office (come in or use the email reference form at
http://lib.law.washington.edu/ref/askform.html).
- Old exams from many law school courses are loaded on the Library’s website, at
http://lib.law.washington.edu/exams/. (You will need to enter your UW NetID.)
What if your professor is new and doesn’t have any exams posted? Search for the
course name – you might find it helpful to review exams from other professors.
For more resources, see our guide on Law School Exams.
Where’d It Go? It Was on the Web Last Time I Looked!
Have you ever tried to find a document that was on the Web
but just isn’t at that URL anymore? What implications does this have for
scholarly writing?
See Mary Rumsey, Runaway Train: Problems of Permanence,
Accessibility, and Stability in the Use of Web Sources in Law Review Citations,
94 Law Libr. J. 27 (2002),
available at
http://www.aallnet.org/products/2002-02.pdf. Some of Ms. Rumsey’s findings
are:
- More articles cite to the web in each successive year studied (1995-2000).
- Many links no longer work, and the news is worse the older the article. In May-June 2001:
- only 62% of the links in articles published in 2001 were working.
- only 30% of the links in articles published in 1997 were working.
Here’s a tip for when you encounter defunct links (a/k/a
“link rot”): try the Internet Archive,
http://www.archive.org. There you can use the Wayback Machine to find a
site as it was archived at different times. Want to see what
www.johnkerry.com had on Feb. 1, 2002? You can do it. How about what was on
www.whitehouse.gov on Sept. 13, 2001? You can do that, too. Just try the
Wayback Machine.
Same-Sex Marriage
The Seattle University Law Library has an excellent online exhibit about same-sex marriage, including both the national context and the
Washington statutes and cases. See
http://www.law.seattleu.edu/library/samesexmarriage/home.asp.
Book of the Week: Would You Convict? Seventeen Cases That Challenged the Law
-- Mary Whisner
In Would You Convict?, Paul H. Robinson uses cases -- some contemporary, some old -- to illustrate different themes, such as
punishing intent versus punishing harm; knowing the law's commands; and whether
doing the wrong thing can ever be blameless.
Here's an example: A drug user and petty thief is hanging
out at a crowded beach in Tel Aviv. He sees a backpack left unattended, grabs
it, and leaves the beach. He takes it to an abandoned building to see what's in
it and discovers wires and explosives. Leaving the bag, he runs to call the
police. A bomb squad dismantles the bomb while the thief clears the street and
keeps passersby away from the building. Scores of people are saved. Would you
convict him of theft? If so, how would you sentence him?
The vignettes are illustrated (for instance, we see a
picture of the beach and a picture of the thief's mother kissing him after he
saved all those lives). The author also includes relevant legal provisions and
guides the reader through the legal analysis. A long appendix gathers the
applicable statutory and case law rules for each case -- sometimes noting
changes in the law (e.g., giving the statutes in force at the time of an
illustrative case and the statutes in force today).
This book is in the Classified Stacks at KF9218 .R634 1999.
|
