Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

Perhaps because I was born and raised in Boston, I have always been very interested in President John F. Kennedy. His election is the first I remember–I will never forget it. We watched every minute of the Inauguration on television, and were moved by the inaugural address. It was a time of hope and promise. Who could have predicted it would all end in tragedy when Kennedy was assassinated? We watched every minute of the coverage of the assassination, and were shocked when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, seemingly in front of our very eyes.

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The Boston Globe had an article today, “Information Overload, the early years,” by Ann Blair. I have to say I began to read it with some reluctance. We have all seen a number of articles along similar lines, where they go back in history and pull up fascinating quotes that prove that Erasmus was disheartened by the sudden plethora of books, and thought it was all just too much. This article does exactly that, of course, showing that when the printing press emerged, yes indeedy, people began to feel swamped in books. Ms. Blair also provides the stunning statistics about how much data is being produced each year, along with quotes from Nicholas Carr worrying (as I do, in fact) that we are changing the way we read.

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Ken Strutin has written extensively for LLRX.com on criminal law issues. He argues that false confessions, bad eyewitness identifications, and faulty forensics, among other problems, have shown that seemingly iron clad adjudications can reach the wrong result. A ‘guilty’ verdict only indicates that the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed each and every element of the crime, and not that the defendant actually committed the crime. A freestanding claim of actual innocence is a potentially powerful tool to assail a verdict that points to the wrong person. Still, courts have made only small gains in recognizing actual innocence generally as a basis for contesting a wrongful conviction. This article collects selected scholarship on “actual innocence” and litigating post-conviction claims that go beyond the procedural metrics of the trial process.

At Plymouth yesterday, a varied group of Native Americans gathered for the 41st National Day of Mourning. The Boston Globe has a nice article by Erin Ailworth. Each Thanksgiving Day since 1970, they have been gathering to commemorate the day in a different ceremony. From the perspective of the Wampanoag and other native peoples, the arrival of pilgrims which we celebrate at the Plymouth living museum and with the Thanksgiving holiday, was really the beginning of a catastrophe. The tribal peoples lost their lands and their traditional ways of living as European settlers moved to the Americas in greater numbers.

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In recent weeks, there has been a huge backlash against the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) over full-body scanners and pat downs at select airports across the country. Attorneys and co-host Bob Ambrogi welcomes Patrick Smith, airline pilot, author, and air travel columnist, who writes the column, Ask the Pilot, for Salon.com and Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, to discuss the latest on this nationwide controversy. They take a look at the fallout from travelers, the potential legal issues, the impact on traveling and what the future holds for security and the TSA on their quest to fight terrorism.

On this edition of The Paralegal Voice, co-hosts Lynne DeVenny and Vicki Voisin welcome Sue Ann Jaffarian, a paralegal for Hooper, Lundy & Bookman in Los Angeles, and author of the best-selling Odelia Grey mysteries. Sue Ann talks about balancing dual careers as a very busy corporate paralegal and successful fiction writer; her large and in charge fictional paralegal, Odelia Patience Grey; and whats next for both Sue Ann and Odelia. Throw in vampires, writing advice, and dealing with weight prejudice - and you have a lively discussion not to be missed!

The story about the 2-L law student at Ohio State who was stealing books from the campus library and selling them online, allegedly netting more than $10,000, has got me steaming. There are also links at Above the Law and local news outlets: Columbus Dispatch. As of late October, campus police had discovered 1,351 books listed online for sale by the individual, whose name has not been released because he has not (yet) been charged. The police were alerted by a Brazilian lawyer who bought one of the books from “Orion Bookstore” through Amazon.com, and wondered about a library stamp which had been marked through with black marker. She contacted the university by e-mail. They checked and found the volume missing from the shelf. And things rolled on from there, apparently.

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On this edition of The ESI Report, host Gina Jytyla, Managing Staff Attorney in the Legal Technologies division at Kroll Ontrack welcomes Wayne Wong, Managing Consultant in Kroll Ontracks ESI Consulting Group and Tom McCaffrey, Director of Archiving at Kroll Ontrack, to discuss the benefits of utilizing a hosted discovery repository service as a crucial tool to support e-discovery efficiently and effectively. In the Bits & Bytes Legal Analysis segment, Kroll Ontrack Legal Correspondent Kelly Kubacki looks at a recent case that addressed significant sanctions in Leor Exploration & Production, LLC v. Aguiar.

Dear OOTJers: In August, 2009, we featured a post about a website, Typography for Lawyers. Matthew Butterick, a civil litigator from L.A., runs the website. But before his life in the law, Butterick got a fine arts degree focusing on typography and graphic design. So this is something the man thinks about. The post at OOTJ, for instance, was looking at ballot design. But there are lots of other applications for lawyers to think about as well: pleadings, memos, contracts and other legal documents would all be easier (or maybe harder!) to understand when laid out thoughtfully. I think statutes and regulations should be published with consultations from this guy or somebody like him.

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Helane Davis passed along this ABA Journal news item, Does It Pay to HIre a Law Firm Librarian?. Patrick Lamb of the Valorem Law Group writes in the New Normal series his take on this question. Few firms now would need the physical space of a library since so much of what they use is online. (My firm friends actually say they are keeping a small number of print titles, usually a careful selection of secondary resources). But, Lamb doesn’t know about this. So, then, he asks, if you don’t have books, and you therefore don’t have a library, do you need a librarian? I was very happy to watch him work this one out:

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