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Jan. 10, 2005.
Kristy Moon, editor.
SmartCILP: E-mail Alert for New Law Review Articles
by Jonathan Franklin
SmartCILP is now available
to all UW law school faculty, staff, and students. SmartCILP, produced by
the Gallagher Law Library, is a service that provides a weekly e-mail
listing of recent law review articles on particular topics. It is great for
tracking articles on your note topic or to make sure you are not written
out. If you want to see the tables of contents from particular journals,
you can do that, too. Even better, SmartCILP has embedded links to Lexis
and Westlaw, so if the article is online, you can be reading it in one
click.
A sample SmartCILP e-mail
is at
http://lib.law.washington.edu/cilp/sample.html.
After setting up a
SmartCILP profile, subscribers receive an e-mail message each week that
focuses only on the subject headings and journals they selected. This e-mail
message is clearly marked as "SmartCILP" to allow easy identification and
review of results. SmartCILP profiles can be changed each week, allowing
subscribers to tailor the delivery of CILP to their changing research needs.
If you are interested in
setting up a SmartCILP profile, come to the Reference Office, call (206)
543-6794, or send an email to
lawref@u.washington.edu to get the password.
Once you have the
password, you can set up your profile at
http://staff.washington.edu/adt/scilp3.cgi.
Library Records Are Confidential
by Mary Whisner
Recently a law student was surprised
that the staff person at the Circulation Desk wouldn’t say who had checked
out the book the student wanted. After all, it was probably somebody in her
class, and they were all friendly, so why not?
Well, privacy is a funny thing. Some
people feel more strongly than others that certain information is private.
And sometimes it depends on the context.
Maybe a student doesn’t care if his
classmates know he has looked at Civil Procedure in a Nutshell. But
maybe he does, and he’d like to sit quietly with the book and not have
people tapping him on his shoulder asking to see it.
Suppose a woman checks out a few
books on divorce and asks for information about restraining orders against
violent partners. Should we tell the man who comes in a little later what
she was researching?
What about when attorneys are in
litigation – will they want opposing counsel to be able to tell what books
they’ve checked out?
There are many situations where
library users would want their borrowing and their reference questions kept
confidential, and so our policy is not to tell anyone anything about others’
library records, unless presented with a warrant or a subpoena to do so.
Book of the Week: The Law School Trip
by Mary Whisner
January is often a tough month
around here. December exams are challenging, and then there never seems to
be a long enough break before the start of winter quarter classes. Getting
grades is sometimes disappointing for students who were stars in college.
(Amazingly, 9 out of 10 students do not end up in the top 10%
here.) And to top it all off, it is doggone dark in
Seattle in January. So this seems like a good time to highlight a book
that’s just for fun.
Andrew J. McClurg
is a very funny guy as well as a law professor. The Law School Trip: The
Insider’s Guide to Law School is a compendium of “advice” about
everything from applications to job interviews. The tone reminds me the
Mad Magazine of my childhood. (The book’s title comes from comparing the
law school experience to taking LSD, after all.) McClurg pokes fun at
everyone and everything, from pompous professors to obsessive students to
goof-off students to Palsgraf v. Long
Island Railroad. He devotes an entire chapter
to The Bluebook.
Torts students, newly alert to
product warnings, might be amused by McClurg’s suggested additions to actual
warnings. For example, a fish hook package warns: “All fish hooks are
inherently dangerous!” McClurg adds: “Years of study have finally disclosed
the cause: they’re pointy. We tried making them without points, but the fish
started stealing them and using them to hang coffee mugs on.” p. 160. Silly?
Well, yeah. But sometimes in the midst of law school, you could use a few
pages of silliness.
McClurg does strike a serious note
in his preface, when he says that he has found that “the nation’s law
schools are exciting learning environments brimming with bright,
hard-working and ethical students taught by distinguished professionals.”
The humor is just for fun.
The book is available at PN6231.L4M32 2001 in Reference Area.
You can see more of McClurg’s
humor at his website,
http://lawhaha.com/. The site includes classroom anecdotes submitted by
readers from 49 law schools – but not the UW (so far). Has anything funny
happened to you?
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