Category Archives: Legal Writing

The Bluebook on Goodreads

“Books are kind of expensive. Do I really need to get this one?” It was the week of orientation and a 1L student, who had stopped by my office with a few questions, pointed to a book on my desk.

The Bluebook.  

1Ls ask the darndest questions. The first thing that came to mind was to recite a long, prepared speech I had made many times before in class about the importance of standardized legal citation, and helping others find sources efficiently and accurately. My next thought was to tell the student a few choice quotes about The Bluebook from Goodreads.

Wait a minute. Goodreads? You turn to Goodreads when BookTok recommends Ali Hazelwood’s vampyre-werewolf novel, and you wonder if it measures up to her STEMinist titles. But for law school textbooks?

Well, it turns out there are plenty of reviews of popular legal textbooks on Goodreads. 

Some students loved Civil Procedure (Glannon et al.): “So clear and well written. Would honestly read again.”  

Others were baffled by Criminal Law and Its Processes (Kadish et al.) and perhaps by some aspects of legal education: “this textbook felt like playing where’s waldo for every criminal law concept….like just tell us?”   

Yet others took the practical and likely still ethical approach to Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (Lerman et al.): “If I had to read a whole textbook about legal ethics, I’m FOR SURE going to count it in my Goodreads goal. 😤😤”

When it comes to The Bluebook, there’s plenty of love from some quarters: 

  • “It is well-organized, gives good examples and some of the examples are actually funny (e.g. Pink Cadillac).”  
  • “Okay, so I do like the Bluebook and I actually LOVE citations. I can’t help myself! I am a meticulous person who likes to have certain things follow a certain order.”  
  • “Yes, I am a nerd, but I LOVE the Bluebook.”   

Along with a bit of confusion when it comes to the recurring characters: “Like literally what is the deal with Id.? He’s everywhere and way too easy – totally seems like a player.” 

And it wouldn’t be law school without detractors, but even those reviewers often recognize the important role the Bluebook plays in legal education and beyond: “A necessary evil, it is the only book to which I have feelings of resentment. However, it is helpful and organized fairly well, I couldn’t have got through law school without it!”

In the end, I responded to the student with a pared-down version of the speech about becoming proficient in legal citation, and the importance of helping readers accurately identify sources and find them quickly. I emphasized that the Bluebook is used heavily in the 1L Gateway classes, and throughout one’s legal education at BLS. I didn’t cite any of the Goodreads quotes, though I may have paraphrased that last one about needing the Bluebook to get through law school. 

I also told the student that while they should procure their own copy, BLS Library does have several copies of the Bluebook on Reserve. These copies can be borrowed for two hours at a time from the Circulation Desk, and while they will not substitute for a personal copy, they can be used in a pinch.  

After we had chatted on the topic for several minutes, the student was convinced to get their own print copy. Who knows, maybe one day they will leave a review for The Bluebook on Goodreads?

New for you: Casebooks, Study Aids & Guides for Law School Courses & Bar Exams

This new resource highlights current editions of BLS Library’s casebooks, study aids and guides for law school courses and bar exams.  It describes sources on: Doing Well & Being Well; Preparing for Law School Exams & Bar Exams; Administrative Law; Civil Practice & Procedure; Conflict of Laws; Constitutional Law; Contracts; Corporations & Other Business Associations; Criminal Law & Procedure; Evidence; Family Law; Professional Responsibility; Property; Sales; Secured Transactions; Torts; & Wills, Trusts & Estates.  Sources are categorized by type and are listed “newest to oldest.” The home screen also includes BLS Library’s hours of access for BLS students.

TIPS: Our librarians continue to develop this research guide and Brooklyn Law School Library’s collection. When you access this guide in future, please reload the web page. If you need help accessing e-resources like CALI casebooks/exercises or study aids in the Understanding and Q&A series, please email us at askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or text us at 718-734-2432.

Current editions of print casebooks adopted by BLS faculty and many print study aids are in BLS Library’s first-floor Reserve collection.  Students can request these sources at BLS Library’s first-floor Circulation desk.  These sources circulate for two hours.  Many sources in BLS Library’s Cellar-level Main collection circulate for the semester.  

Good luck completing end-of-term work and preparing for exams!

Finding Casebooks & Study Aids in BLS Library

Questions & Answers, Torts
by Prof. Anita Bernstein

In its first-floor Reserve collection, BLS Library provides current editions of casebooks/textbooks that are required for classes.  There also are current editions of many treatises, hornbooks and other study aids in the Reserve collection.  Note: Study aids are only supplements to required course readings.  These print books circulate for two hours.  You can search for a specific source by title, author or keywords in SARA catalog.  Feel free to email askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or to text (718) 734-2432 if you have questions about finding or accessing specific sources.

BLS Library’s guide 1L Resources, Tips and Tools highlights 1L casebooks and study aids available through BLS Library in both print and digital formats.  The top-level guide tab: 1L Course Study Aids provides a pull-down menu of subjects.  Click a subject, like: Civil Procedure.  There are “quick links” to boxes highlighting:

  • Selected CALI Lessons (online lessons on specific legal topics created by law professors/librarians – these lessons include review questions)
  • Casebooks
  • Treatises & Hornbooks
  • Study Aids Containing Multiple-Choice Questions
  • Additional Study Aids

In the 1L guide, sources in a box appear in reverse chronological order (“newest first”).  Guide pages also include a search feature (top right).  Recently, vendor EBSCO began supporting BLS Library’s desire to circulate Reserve copies of ebooks for two hours.  So, EBSCO ebooks like Mastering Multiple Choice for Federal Civil Procedure and A Short & Happy Guide to Torts circulate for two hours.  BLS Library’s e-copies of study aids in the Q&A, Understanding and Gilbert Law Summaries series (available through Lexis Digital Library) circulate for three days. 

Additionally, the 1L guide identifies print sources and online tools to support legal research and writing.  Top-level guide tab: Research, Writing & Citation provides a pull-down menu of resource pages on:

  • Legal Research
  • Legal Writing & Analysis
  • Legal Citation

Please reload the 1L guide’s web page when you visit this guide – BLS Library frequently adds new sources.  Reference librarians are happy to help you identify BLS Library’s sources!   

Do you need to write a seminar paper, but don’t know where to start? Get answers at the Seminar Paper Workshop

On Thursday January 30, Prof. Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil are holding their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper in Room 700. The workshop is from 4-5:30 PM.

Topics covered include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and strategies for effectively organizing and writing your paper.  If you are unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources discussed, and the writing and research presentations.  The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper.  From the guide’s main page, you can access the recording of the presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper.  If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.

Need Help with Your Seminar Paper? Come to the Seminar Paper Workshop

On Thursday September 20th, Prof. Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil are holding their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper in Room 402.  The workshop is from 4-5:30 PM. Topics covered include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and strategies for effectively organizing and writing your paper.  If you are unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources discussed, and the writing and research presentations.  The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper.  From the guide’s main page, you can access the recording of the presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper.  If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.

Need help with your seminar paper? Attend the workshop on February 7th!

Next Wednesday, February 7th, Prof. Betsy Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil are holding their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper in Room 501.  The workshop is from 4-5:30 PM. Topics covered include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and strategies for effectively organizing and writing your paper.  If you are unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources discussed, and the writing and research presentations.  The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper.  From the guide’s main page, you can access the recording of the presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper.  If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.

Beware the Bootleg Bluebook

Richard Posner doesn’t like the Bluebook. He has railed against it for years, devoting entire articles in the University of Chicago Law Review (1986) and the Yale Law Journal (2011) to the horrors of what he deems an ever-growing monstrosity. In a December 2016 article for Green Bag, Judge Posner stated that among the reforms he would implement at federal appellate courts, “the first thing to do is burn all copies of the Bluebook, in its latest edition 560 pages of rubbish”.

Well, one person’s rubbish is another person’s treasure.  Enter the Bootleg Bluebook.  

Say what? Of all the things to make knockoffs of, why the Bluebook? It isn’t a literary bestseller like Harry Potter and it sure as heck isn’t Louis Vuitton. Even the Kelley Blue Book would seem a likelier candidate for a fake. Then again, with over 35,000 students matriculating at ABA-accredited law schools annually, the built-in demand means that a lot of Bluebooks are sold every year.

Unfortunately some BLS students who bought Bluebooks through third party vendors have been victimized by these fakes.  We’ve heard that students at other law schools have run into this problem too.

Imagine a student at Any Law School, U.S.A., meticulously poring over the Bluebook to make sure everything is cited correctly for their first legal writing assignment. Only to get his or her paper back, marked up to the hilt with corrections in red ink.

“But I cited to page 16 of the Bluebook. Id at 100, no period after Id”

“That’s not correct and not what it says in my copy. Let me see your Bluebook.”

Sorry. It’s fake.

I feel for students who are using the Bluebook for the first time only to find out that their trusted source was a bootleg.  Fake news we can handle. But fake Bluebooks?

One of the BLS students was kind enough to lend us their bootleg copy.  It’s basically a case of OCR gone bad.  Periods vanished, text out of sync, commas turned to periods and vice versa, blurry text, off-kilter page numbers, and the most common error: missing spaces. New jersey losing its capitalization and making you think of swag rather than state — while the III for Illinois makes you want to yell “My kingdom for a horse!” Interestingly, the Chinese and Japanese characters seemed to be in good shape, though the bootleggers couldn’t decide what color print to use and kept switching back and forth between black and blue.    

 

 

      

So the Public Service Announcement for today: It’s best to get your Bluebook directly from the publisher or from a trusted retailer, rather than through a third party vendor.

It’s nice to know, though, that the bootleggers got this citation on page 510 right:

Richard A. Posner, The Bluebook Blues, 120 Yale L.J. 850 (2011).

 

 

Congressional Legislative Research

With paper deadlines fast approaching, many of you may need to identify relevant Congressional documents for your paper.  Often legislative history research is cumbersome and time consuming.  The Brooklyn Law School Library licenses two useful databases to ease this process: Legislative Insight and Proquest Congressional.

Legislative Insight streamlines the research process by digitizing the majority of full text publications associated with an enacted statute’s legislative history.  These documents include all versions of enacted and related bills, Congressional Record excerpts, and committee hearings, reports, and documents.  Legislative Insight also contains other relevant material such as committee prints, CRS reports, and Presidential signing statements.

Unlike Legislative Insight, Proquest Congressional carries documents pertaining to both enacted legislation as well as the bills that do not become law.  This includes the text of bills, transcripts of unpublished and published hearings, Congressional reports, the Congressional Record, Congressional Research Service reports, voting records, etc.  The indexing of some of the material goes back to the signing of the Constitution.   A useful feature of Proquest Congressional is the Congressional Profiles which provide the historical context of each Congressional term, including an overview of party divisions and leadership, economic conditions, conflicts, major laws, Landmark Supreme Court cases and major event

To access Legislative Insight or Proquest Congressional from off-campus, you first need to implement the proxy instructions.

Stressed about your seminar paper? Attend the Seminar Paper Workshop this Thursday

This Thursday Prof. Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil are holding their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper in Room 502.  The workshop is from 4-5:30 PM. Topics covered include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and strategies for effectively organizing and writing your paper.  If you are unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources discussed, and the writing and research presentations.  The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper.  From the guide’s main page, you can access the recording of the presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper.  If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.

Researching Legislative History?

Whether you are tracing a statute’s history for your summer internship or for a paper you are writing, you will want to use a new tool the library recently acquired, Proquest’s Legislative Insight.  Often researching legislative histories can be cumbersome and time consuming.   Legislative Insight promises to streamline the process by digitizing and by publishing online the majority of full text publications associated with a legislative history.  These documents include all versions of enacted and related bills, Congressional Record excerpts, and committee hearings, reports, and documents.  Legislative Insight also includes other related material such as committee prints, CRS reports and Presidential signing statements. Furthermore, Legislative Insight offers a research citation page that not only links to the full text of the associated primary source publications, but allows the user to do a Search Within from that very page that searches the full text of all the associated publications with one-click.

To access Legislative Insight from off-campus, you first need to implement the proxy instructions.