Category Archives: SARA Catalog

US Copyright Office’s Fair Use Index

Fair Use IndexOn April 28, 2015, Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante announced the launch of the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use Index, designed to provide the public with searchable summaries of major fair use decisions. The Index was undertaken in support of the 2013 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement prepared by the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator within the Executive Office of the President.

Copyright and Fair Use are challenging areas of law with so many nuances and changes that make it difficult to know whether the use of an image or video is allowed or not and under what circumstances something can be used. The legal doctrine of Fair use promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.

Hopefully the Fair Use Index will help make the issue a little bit clearer. Users can search cases that deal exclusively with Fair Use and quickly see whether Fair Use was found or not. Users can narrow a search by jurisdiction and, importantly, by format (text, audio, computer, etc.) The Index is searchable by court and subject matter and provides a helpful starting point for those wishing to better understand how the federal courts have applied the fair use doctrine to particular categories of works or types of use, for example, music, internet/digitization, or parody.

The Index has been added to Brooklyn Law Library’s catalog and is available at this link.

Brooklyn’s Eastern District Federal Court: 150 Years

This Monday in the courthouse on Cadman Plaza East in Downtown Brooklyn, two Justices of the US Supreme Court, the Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, both of whom hold honorary degrees from Brooklyn Law School (Ginsburg receiving hers in 1987 and Sotomayor being awarded her Degree of Juris Doctor Honoris Causa in 2001), attended a ceremony celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Eastern District of New York (EDNY). The actual date of the first EDNY court session was March 22, 1865 after President Abraham Lincoln, on Feb. 25, 1865, signed the bill creating the Eastern District. Monday’s celebration looked back at the humble beginnings of the court, noting the progress towards diversity and the application of justice over the years. It also looked at a district that has become one of the most respected and revered federal courts in the country.

The courthouse for the Eastern District has occupied several sites over the years: its first session convened in a room at Brooklyn City Court; it then moved to two separate locations on Montague Street and in 1891 settled in the backyard of 40 Clinton St. At one point the court rented space in the “Brooklyn Daily Eagle Building …for overflow Chambers and offices,” noted a History of the United States Court for the Eastern District of New York, prepared by the Federal Bar Association of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
In her remarks, Justice Ginsburg, Brooklyn-born and an alumna of James Madison High School, said “The birth of this court, 150 years ago, is cause for celebration…In its early years…the court only had one judge.” For the first 46 years of the district’s existence, one judge handled all of the court’s business, and in 1910, a second judge was added to assist with the caseload. It was not until a high rate of litigation during and after World War I when more judgeships were created for the Eastern District.

The second female to sit as a justice in the highest court of the land, Ginsburg remarked on the diversity of the Eastern District bench, mentioning the first “woman to break that barrier in the Eastern District, Reena Raggi, in 1987.” Raggi now sits on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Ginsburg stated “For me, it is an incredible dream come true that the majority of the [EDNY] court’s active judges are women and that the composition of this bench mirrors the diversity of the communities the court serves.” There are currently 12 female district judges serving the Eastern District of New York,  all in active and not in senior status. Justice Sotomayor did not speak at Monday’s event but will officiate a naturalization ceremony in October to commemorate the court’s anniversary.Providing hope for another 150 years of the Eastern District, Ginsburg concluded, “May the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York continue to flourish, serving all of the people … [and] to serve and [provide] justice that is equal and accessible to all…We can’t let our history die with those who know it.”

Monday’s ceremonies included remarks by Former Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who recalled sitting on his parents’ shoulders as they watched Civil War veterans ride down Grand Central Parkway in the 1920s. He said: “Over the years, our judges and magistrate judges, despite a huge increase in number, have continued to share a deep affection—and an unwavering desire to provide the rule of law to all our people in this district.”

For a history of the Eastern District, see in the BLS Library the short 95 page book titled To Administer Justice on Behalf of All the People: The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York 1965-1990 by Jeffrey B. Morris (Call # KF8755.N49 M67 1992).

March is Women’s History Month: Women & the Law

images_106The month of March every year is Women’s History Month.  Each year the Library celebrates March with a book display in the first floor display case opposite the elevator.  These books will be back on the shelves and available for loan on April 1st. If you have an interest in any of them now, just go to the first floor reference desk and we’ll retrieve the book for you immediately.

During this month the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society are highlighted with professional conferences and social activities throughout the country.

Each year the President issues a proclamation reminding us of the contributions American women have made to American society.  See this year’s proclamation from President Obama here.

Also see the American Bar Association’s report entitled A Current Glance at Women in the Law, published in July 2014, which gives statistics on the number of women in the legal profession, the number of women in the judiciary, the number of women in law schools, the number of women on law reviews, etc.  The report can be found here.  Great strides have been made, but more progress is needed.

To read about how far women have come in the legal profession and some of the issues that they still encounter, see the selected titles below about women and the law in the Library.

Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present

The Rhetoric of Supreme Court Women

Women and the Law Stories

Learning to Lead: What Really Works for Women in Law

Women Attorneys Speak Out! How Practicing Law is Different for Women than for Men

Women on Top—The Woman’s Guide to Leadership and Power in Law Firms

Sisters-in-Law: An Uncensored Guide for Women Practicing Law in the Real World

It’s Harder in Heels: Essays by Women Lawyers Achieving Work-Life Balance

Legally Mom: Real Women’s Stories of Balancing Motherhood & Law Practice

And finally, there is a quarterly publication from the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Professions:  Perspectives – A Magazine For and About Women Lawyers.

 

 

 

February New Books List

The Brooklyn Law School Library February 2015 New Books List is out with 98 new titles in both print and e-book versions. The items cover a wide range of subjects including copyright law (Cultures of Copyright, Call #KF2996 .C85 2015), legal composition (How to Write Law Essays & Exams, Call #KD404 .S77 2014 and Putting Skills into Practice: Legal Problem Solving and Writing for New Lawyers, Call #KF250 .B375 2014), freedom of speech (Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law, Call #BJ1421 .S554 2014 and Whistleblowers, Leaks, and the Media: The First Amendment and National Security, Call #KF3471 .W49 2014), and others.

Article VOn the subject of what seems to be the nation’s broken politics and government, two books on the list are Too Weak to Govern: Majority Party Power and Appropriations in the U.S. Senate (Call #KF4987.A67 H36 2014) and The Article V Amendatory Constitutional Convention: Keeping the Republic in the Twenty-First Century (Call #KF4555 .B69 2014) by former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court Thomas E. Brennan, founder of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School and of Convention USA, a citizens’ initiative to promote an Article V convention. The latter book describes how a number of citizens groups are trying to get an Article V convention, coming to several conclusions:

  • Congress will never voluntarily call a convention no matter how many petitions are received, because a convention might propose amendments which would decrease the powers or prerogatives of Congress.
  • States have the right to call an Article V convention without the concurrence of the Congress whenever two-thirds of the states wish to participate.
  • Citizens of the several states have the constitutional right to organize a convention for proposing amendments, without the call of Congress or the approval of the state legislatures.
  • No amendment proposed by a convention, of any kind, will become a part of the federal constitution unless it is ratified by three quarters of the states, as required by Article V.

On this subject, BLS Professor of Law Nelson Tebbe and former BLS Professor Frederic Bloom have written and posted on SSRN a paper called Countersupermajoritarianism. The abstract for the 24 page paper, due for publication in an upcoming edition of the Michigan Law Review, reads:

How should the Constitution change? In Originalism and the Good Constitution, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport argue that it ought to change in only one way: through the formal mechanisms set out in the Constitution’s own Article V. This is so, they claim, because provisions adopted by supermajority vote are more likely to be substantively good. The original Constitution was ratified in just that way, they say, and subsequent changes should be implemented similarly. McGinnis and Rappaport also contend that this substantive goodness is preserved best by a mode of originalist interpretation.

In this Review, we press two main arguments. First, we contend that McGinnis and Rappaport’s core thesis sidesteps critical problems with elevated voting rules. We also explain how at a crucial point in the book — concerning Reconstruction — the authors trade their commitments to supermajoritarianism and formalism away. Second, we broaden the analysis and suggest that constitutional change can and should occur not just through formal amendment, but also by means of social movements, political mobilizations, media campaigns, legislative agendas, regulatory movement, and much more. Changing the Constitution has always been a variegated process that engages the citizenry through many institutions, by way of many voting thresholds, and using many modes of argument. And that variety helps to make the Constitution good.

Episode 093: Interview with Prof. Christopher Beauchamp

Episode 093: Interview with Prof. Christopher Beauchamp.mp3

In this interview. Brooklyn Law School’s Associate Professor of Law Invented by LawChristopher Beauchamp speaks about his first book, Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Changed America (Call# KF 3116.B43 2015). Published by Harvard University Press, the book explores questions of ownership and legal power raised by the invention of the telephone, and tells of a forgotten history with wide relevance for today’s patent crisis. Using the  invention of the telephone in 1876 as one of the great touchstones of American technological achievement, Beauchamp sheds new light on that history, and examines the legal battles that raged over Bell’s telephone patent, perhaps the most consequential patent right ever granted. Prof. Beauchamp shows that the telephone was as much a creation of American law as of scientific innovation.

On March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office approved Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for Improvement of Telegraphy (No. 174,465) in an unusually fast approval process, with three applications hand-delivered by Bell’s lawyer on February 14, mere hours before a competing application was submitted by engineer Elisha Gray. Bell’s legal maneuvering strongly suggested that an unknown informant within the PTO was assisting efforts to beat Gray to the telephone patent. Subsequent litigation reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice in 1888, first with The Telephone Cases (126 U.S. 1), and then with United States v. American Bell Telephone Corp. (128 U.S. 315). Prof. Beauchamp untangles these lawsuits and analyzes their aftermath in a way that should appeal to both intellectual property experts and novices.

Reconstructing the world of nineteenth-century patent law, replete with inventors, capitalists, and charlatans, where rival claimants and political maneuvering loomed large in the contests that erupted over new technologies, the book challenges the popular myth of Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers. More than anyone else, it was the courts that anointed Bell father of the telephone, granting him a patent monopoly that decisively shaped the American telecommunications industry for a century to come. Prof. Beauchamp investigates the sources of Bell’s legal primacy in the United States, and looks across the Atlantic to Britain to consider how another legal system handled the same technology in very different ways.

Valentine’s Day: Titles from the BLS Library on Love & the Law

imagesNOSVKOX2Valentine’s Day, celebrated this year on Saturday, February 14th, is considered a day of romance to celebrate love and spending time with that special someone.  Hearts, candy, flowers, and dinner dates are all symbols and activities of this special day.  Valentine’s Day can even lead to proposals, engagements and marriages, which hopefully will lead to long and happy lives for the lucky couples.

Below are titles from the BLS Library about marriage, same-sex marriage, marital agreements, etc., including one entitled Should You Marry a Lawyer? and an article from BLS Law Notes about “Lawyers in Love: Alumni Who Met at BLS and Married.”

Marriage:

Cott, Nancy, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)

Lind, Goran, Common Law Marriage: A Legal Institution for Cohabitation (2008)

Maillard, Kevin, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex and Marriage (2012)

Same-Sex Marriage:

Klarman, Michael, From the Closet to the Altar (2012)

Mello, Michael, Legalizing Gay Marriage (2004)

Moats, David, Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage (2004)

Pierceson, Jason, Same-Sex Marriage in the United States (2013)

Pinello, Daniel, America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (2006)

Premarital Agreements:

Dublin, Arlene, Prenups for Lovers: A Romantic Guide to Prenuptial Agreements (1993)

Hertz, Frederick, Counseling Unmarried Couples (2014)

Ravdin, Linda, Premarital Agreements: Drafting and Negotiation (2011)

Winer, Edward, Premarital and Marital Contracts (1993)

Divorce:

Abraham, Jed, From Courtship to Courtroom (1999)

Gold-Bikin, Lynne, The Divorce Trial Manual (2003)

Herman, Gregg, The Joy of Settlement (1997)

Turner, Brett, Attacking and Defending Marital Agreements (2012)

Marriage and the Lawyer:

Travis, Fiona, Should You Marry a Lawyer? (2004)

BLS Law Notes, Mergers & Acquisitions: Lawyers in Love: Alumni Who Met at BLS and Married, by Angela Strong (Spring 2010)

Have a Happy Valentine’s Day!

BLS Library New Books List

PostconvictionThe Brooklyn Law School Library New Books List for January 14, 2015 includes 88 items recently added to the collection. Among them is State and Federal Postconviction Remedies: Last Hopes by BLS Professor Ursula Bentele and Professor of Law Emerita Mary R. Falk (Call #KF9690 .B46 2014). It is available on Reserve at the Circulation Desk. The book is a useful text for courses on postconviction remedies (whether comprehensive or focused on either state remedies or federal habeas, as each area benefits from some knowledge of the other), for appellate practice courses that include such remedies, as well as for law school clinics devoted to seeking relief for indigent prisoners. This text will also be of assistance to those involved in postconviction litigation, whether as advocates for prisoners seeking postconviction relief, as prosecutors responding to postconviction applications, or as law clerks in the chambers of judges adjudicating these claims.

Chapter 1 provides a brief history of postconviction remedies and an overview of the various procedures available in state and federal courts.

Chapters Two and Three survey the state postconviction scene, providing cases that illustrate the most common grounds for relief and describing the procedural hurdles an applicant must overcome.

Chapters Four, Five and Six address federal habeas corpus, first noting the restrictions on grounds for relief, then detailing the procedural requirements, and finally, illustrating how habeas works in practice through five opinions capturing some of the most significant principles at work in this area.

Chapter Seven highlights ethical issues that are particularly likely to arise for counsel in postconviction practice, whether defense attorneys or prosecutors.

Appendix A contains the principal postconviction statutes and rules of four states, illustrating a variety of approaches. Finally, Appendix B contains the major federal statutes and rules, as well as the form application to be used by state prisoners seeking federal habeas relief.

Episode 092: Interview with Prof. Susan Herman

Episode 092: Interview with Prof. Susan Herman.mp3

A New York Law Journal article Law Students Speak Out Against Grand Jury Decisions reports that law students and faculty across the state are speaking out against the recent grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers involved in the deaths of unarmed black men in New York and Missouri. The events come in the wake of last week’s announcement that New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo would not face charges in the chokehold death of Eric Garner on Staten Island which followed last month’s decision by a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown.

Students from New York University School of Law, New York Law School, Columbia Law School, Fordham University School of Law, City University of New York School of Law and Brooklyn Law School have taken to the streets in between studying for finals, which began this week. Last week, Columbia Law demanded postponements of final exams for any student experiencing trauma over the grand jury decisions and recent national conversations on race. Today, in the court yard in front of the school, about two dozen BLS law students who are in the midst of final exam staged a four and half minute die-in. BLS Law Professors Susan Herman and Beryl Jones-Woodin are hosting a number of faculty members in a Town Hall (“After Ferguson? After Garner? After __?”) at 12:45 on Wednesday, January 28, after classes resume, to discuss the legal and policy issues presented by the recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and many other locations. Professor Herman speaks about the upcoming event in the podcast at the link at the top of this post.

Grand JuryThe BLS Library has a number of titles in its collection on the subject of grand juries including Grand Jury 2.0: Modern Perspectives on the Grand Jury by Roger A. Fairfax (Call # KF9642 .G73 2011). The book brings together essays written by leading legal scholars and jurists to re-examine the role of the American grand jury, one of the oldest protections known to the American constitutional order and challenges the American legal culture to re-imagine the grand jury and proposes ways to adapt the grand jury’s proud heritage to the needs and realities of modern criminal justice. The book’s synthesis of criminal law and procedure theory and analysis along with concrete policy proposals makes it required reading for any scholar, student, jurist or lawyer interested in the past, present, or future of the American grand jury.

Records Management and Retention

RecordsStudents at Brooklyn Law School are focused on their upcoming exams. Soon enough they will be in the legal work force and will need to exercise best practices in records management. The BLS Library has in its most recent New Books List a useful resource on that very topic: The Lawyer’s Guide to Records Management and Retention by George C. Cunningham (Call # KF320.R42 C86 2014). Although most lawyers know how important timely access to the right information is to their work, many have little knowledge in filing systems, databases and other information management tools. This book is designed to help lawyers develop an effective strategy for coping with the daily barrage of email, data and documents.

The second edition of this ABA Book Publishing guide is a comprehensive 442 page resource that helps lawyers create and maintain an effective and well-organized records management and retention system at their firms, including administration and storage of client files and administrative records in all types of media. It shows how to reduce costs, access information quickly and accurately, and use staff and technology resources more economically and efficiently. Special sections address issues facing new lawyers, solo practitioners, and small firms. The accompanying CD-ROM features useful checklists, forms, guidelines, and more such as how to:

  • Understand the practical and ethical reasons for adopting a workable strategy for records information management and information governance;
  • Gain an understanding of the records and information management tools currently available;
  • Devise solutions and strategies to manage a law office’s records without taking up too much time;
  • Group paper documents and e-mail in order easily to locate them later;
  • Determine what you must keep, what you should keep, and for how long you should keep them;
  • Find the best software and electronic records management tools; and
  • Develop strategies that will please both technophobes and technophiles.

When is an online post a threat?

This week the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Elonis v. United States. The issue before the high court is what level of intent does the prosecution have to show in order to convict someone of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c). Must the prosecution demonstrate that the defendant intended to cause fear? Or must the prosecution show that a reasonable person would regard the statement as threatening?   The case involves Facebook posts a husband made to his wife, who recently left him. His posts detailed ways to kill her. To access the case’s Supreme Court docket, transcript, and the amicus briefs, read the SCOTUS blog posting.

To learn more about free speech and/or how it intersects with criminal law, consult the library resources highlighted below.