Summer Reading Staff Picks

Whether you're hunting for an audiobook for long commutes or seeking out a perfect beach vacation read, it can be daunting to pick the right title. After all, no one wants to be stuck on a long plane ride with a book that turns out to be a dud! To help you find something good to read this summer, the Goodson Law Library staff are once again sharing their recent recommendations. You can see some of these titles in person at the service desk display this month, along with special summer reading bookmarks.

Magic for Beginners: Stories, by Kelly Link (2005). (Request a print copy or read the e-book!). "Based on the recommendation from a friend and fellow librarian, I began reading this book as an escape from the everyday, and it has not disappointed. Kelly Link's short stories paint of world of magic that lurks behind the mask of the ordinary." –Julie Wooldridge, Research Services Librarian and Senior Lecturing Fellow

 

The Firm, by John Grisham (1991). (Borrow a print copy or DVD of the movie version!). "Star Harvard Law student Mitch McDeere is recruited to join a small tax firm based in Memphis. Although the firm presents itself as a family...the term 'family' is clearly a double entendre, as Mitch learns about the high body count among partners. As he uncovers more and more secrets, he finds himself literally running for his life, all while (perhaps more fear-inducing) studying for the bar. Who knew that being a tax lawyer was this kind of exciting?" – Wick Shreve, Head of Scholarly Services and Senior Lecturing Fellow

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, by Harry Markopolos (2010). (Borrow a print copy  or access the e-book!) "Before Bernie Madoff’s $64 billion Ponzi scheme finally collapsed, quantitative analyst Harry Markopolos warned the S.E.C. repeatedly--five times over nine years!--that Madoff’s supposed investment strategy simply didn’t add up. No One Would Listen is at once a tick-tock of Markopolos and his team's fruitless attempts to expose Madoff's fraud, an insider's view of life at investment companies, and a scathing (and surprisingly funny) account of regulatory capture. For a fascinating bigger-picture analysis of Madoff and his scheme, The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust (request a print copy!) by award-winning financial journalist Diana Henriques is also highly recommended." – Laura Scott, Assistant Director for Reference, Clinics, and Outreach and Senior Lecturing Fellow

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, by Sarah Ogilvie (2023). (Borrow a print copy!) "Every 1L consults the Oxford English Dictionary during LARW appellate brief research, and most probably don't think about how it came into being. The OED's original publication was a massive, decades-long undertaking that crowdsourced definitions and usage examples from thousands of members of the public. One particularly notorious contributor's story has been told in places ranging from The Professor and the Madman to Drunk History, but The Dictionary People delves into the biographies of many, many more individuals who helped to shape the first edition of the OED. A delightful read for word nerds!" –Jennifer L. Behrens, Associate Director for Administration and Scholarship and Senior Lecturing Fellow

No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy (2019). (Request a print copy, borrow the audiobook, or access the e-book!) "No Hard Feelings is one of the most relatable and useful books about work that I have read. The authors deal with emotional intelligence, productivity, and work/life balance in a way that is humorous, practical, self-aware, and kind. I loved that the authors give advice in a way that made me feel understood, helped me to understand others, and felt like I was receiving advice from a mentor." –Chelsey McKimmy, Research Services Librarian and Lecturing Fellow

To locate additional recommended readings this summer, try the NoveList Plus database, which provides curated lists on specific genres as well as an "appeal mixer" tool to generate customized recommendations based on your parameters about the book's pace, characters, tone, and storyline. The New York Times has also recently released an interactive timeline of The Book Review's Best Books Since 2000. (Remember that current Law School community members can join the NYTimes.com group subscription by following the steps described at https://law.duke.edu/lib/legal-databases.) To see if recommended titles are available in the Duke campus libraries, search the online catalog.

For help with accessing these resources or obtaining additional information, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Summer Access to Research Resources

Hard to believe that summer is almost here! Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this month or continuing your legal studies next year, your access to legal research services and other campus databases may change this summer. Below is a summary of policies for the major legal research databases that you might wish to access in the next few months.

Continuing Students

• Westlaw allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw Precision and Practical Law, over the summer for non-commercial research (i.e., "to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills, but you cannot use them in situations where you are billing a client"). Examples of permissible uses for your academic Westlaw password include the following:
  
  • Summer coursework
  • Research assistant assignments
  • Law review or journal research
  • Moot Court research
  • Non-profit work
  • Clinical work
  • Externship sponsored by the school
  Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on your part.
• Lexis: All returning students have automatic, unlimited access to their Lexis law school IDs for the entire summer. Law School Lexis IDs may be used for non-commercial purposes, as well as commercial purposes if your employer permits such use.
• Bloomberg Law: Your Bloomberg Law access continues over the summer automatically. IDs may be used for non-commercial purposes, as well as commercial purposes if your employer permits such use.

Graduating Students

• Westlaw: You may opt in to Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw and Practical Law, for six months after graduation for non-commercial use. This "Grad Elite" access allows 60 hours of usage per month to gain understanding of legal topics, build your research skills, and prepare for your bar exam.
  In order to activate Grad Elite access, follow the instructions on the email received directly from West, or register online by logging into https://lawschool.thomsonreuters.com/ and clicking on your name to access Grad Elite. Please note that if you reach your 60-hour Grad Elite limit before the end of a calendar month, you will not be able to access Westlaw again until the start of the following calendar month. Use folders within Westlaw and email the contents to yourself before logging off if you are close to your 60-hour limit for a particular month.
• Lexis: Spring 2024 graduates will have automatic access to Lexis+ via their Lexis law school IDs until December 31, 2024. Spring graduates have access to most of the same content and features available during law school, excluding public records, Law360, Practical Guidance and Lexis for Microsoft Office.
  Graduates working in the non-profit sector may also apply for a LexisNexis ASPIRE ID which lasts for 12 months beyond graduation. Learn more about the LexisNexis Graduate programs and/or apply for an ASPIRE ID at https://lexisnexis.com/grad-access.
• Bloomberg Law: Access to Bloomberg Law continues automatically for six months after graduation. Graduated students may be limited in their ability to retrieve docket filings marked "Request," update dockets, or set up docket tracking. Graduates may download docket items already uploaded in the Bloomberg system (labeled "View").

Access to most other Duke University research databases will expire upon graduation, when your status in Duke's directory changes to "Alumni." Recent graduates who register with the Duke Alumni Association for a OneLink account receive remote access to selected databases (including ProQuest ABI Inform, EBSCO Academic Search Alumni Edition, JSTOR, RefWorks citation management, and several major university press scholarship collections).

For questions about using legal research services or other Law Library/University electronic resources this summer, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

West Academic Casebooks Archive Now Available in HeinOnline

Curious about how casebooks and study aids have treated a particular court opinion or doctrine over time? The Goodson Law Library now has access to a brand-new collection in HeinOnline: the West Academic Casebooks Archive, available to the Duke University community with NetID and password. This collection contains nearly 4,000 historical West casebooks and study aids, including the American and University Casebook series, Hornbooks, and Nutshells. Contents of this collection date from the 1830s to 2018. Hundreds of additional titles will be added in the near future.

However, don't go looking for the latest editions of casebooks and study aids here: The two most recent editions of any series are held back from the collection until a newer one arrives to push the third-oldest title into the archive. (Recent West Academic study aids series can be found in the separate database of West Academic Study Aids, while recent West casebooks assigned in Duke Law courses can be found in the Library’s Course Reserve self-checkout cabinets.)

The collection allows users to browse by series or title, or to search across the archive. Curious to see how a particular court opinion or legal doctrine was treated by various casebooks over time? The search feature provides numerous possibilities. For example, the seminal 1928 New York Court of Appeals case Palsgraf v. Long Island, read by first-year law students across America for nearly a century now, quickly landed into Torts textbooks by 1929, first appearing here in James Barr Ames's A Selection of Cases on the Law of Torts; a search for the case name in quotation marks results in close to 500 hits in the database. While the recent deadly bridge collapse in Baltimore has brought maritime law principles back into the public conversation, the database's Date filter for search results shows a clear spike for the concept of "general average" in the first half of the 20th century, as opposed to other eras. And if you thought that legislative research for your LARW appellate brief was confusing, spare a thought for the law student of the 1940s puzzling through the legislative research chapter in How to Find the Law, 3d edition.

Title-level catalog records for this collection should appear in the Duke Libraries Catalog later this spring. In the meantime, you can access the West Academic Casebooks Archive via HeinOnline or from its own entry in the Legal Databases & Links page. For help with using the new collection, or for locating historical casebooks and study aids in the library collection, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Free Access to US Case Law

Last month marked a milestone for the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), an ambitious project from the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab to digitize centuries of U.S. federal and state case law for free public access. Launched in 2016 with the financial backing of online legal research company Ravel Law (now owned by LexisNexis), the Caselaw Access Project involved the digitization of more than 36 million pages of printed case reporters. The original agreement contained a commercial use restriction for eight years, which has now expired. The Innovation Lab commemorated the occasion with a conference on March 8, highlighting the history of the project and use cases for the future. For more information on the history of the project, see Adam Ziegler's guest post at Bob Ambrogi's Law Sites.

The Search feature on the legacy version of the CAP website links to CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search, which has incorporated the CAP content. The beta version of the CAP website still provides direct access to individual case scans in the reporter volumes and bulk data downloads.

As the CAP About page explains, PDF scans of case law in the project date up to 2018 and are limited to precedential cases published in official case reporters. Jurisdictions that have designated a commercial reporter as the "official" publication of primary case law are included, but generally the parallel commercial/regional reporter publications will not be found here; when they are, their copyrighted material (such as West headnotes) will be omitted. Case law dating up to 2020 is also available in HTML-only format through a partnership with the legal research service Fastcase.

The public release of CAP is likely the biggest step forward for free access to case law since Google incorporated court opinions into its Google Scholar search back in 2009. CAP fills in much of the historical case law that is omitted from Google Scholar, whose help page notes that state appellate cases date back generally to 1950, and most federal court cases back to 1923 (the U.S. Supreme Court back to 1791). CAP's digitization project dates back much farther, making CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search a great place to begin a search of the free web for American court opinions.

Only time will tell what new projects and services will grow from the release of this data from commercial use restrictions, or how existing services might be enhanced by this body of case law. Some existing projects can be found on the Gallery section of the CAP site. In the meantime, add the CourtListener Advanced Case Law search to your research toolbox for access to free court opinions. For help locating other options for case law research, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Municode Municipal Law Research Library Now Available

The Goodson Law Library has just subscribed to MuniPro MuniCode Library, a database with nearly 4,000 municipal codes. While many municipal and local ordinances are freely readable and searchable online (such as Durham, NC), MuniPro allows researchers to search across multiple codes and jurisdictions, as well as create saved searches and alerts for topics of interest. For more details, visit the vendor help page. 

 

Municode is available to current members of the Duke University community and is linked from the Legal Databases & Links and campus libraries Databases A-Z list. If using off-campus, connect via the Library Resources Only group of the Duke VPN. At the Municode home page, select "Sign in" in the header area and then click "Log in with site-wide subscription."

Additional resources for researching municipal codes include:

• Fastcase (University) includes city codes for Durham, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem in its North Carolina Statutes and Legislative Codes section, although these are updated only to 2021.
• Lexis (Law only): The All Municipal Codes database allows for searching across thousands of municipal codes and ordinances. Individual code databases for states are also available. Secondary sources of interest within Lexis include Antieau on Local Government Law, 2d, accessible from the main Lexis search bar.
• Nexis Uni (University): The campus-wide version of Lexis includes a US Municipal Codes database. To reach it, click Advanced Search, then select Legal > Statutes and Legislation > US Municipal Codes. State-specific municipal code databases are also accessible from the All Sources menu.
• Westlaw (Law only): The Municipal Law section focuses less on specific local codes and more on the sections of state codes that describe the powers and functions of municipal government. Available secondary sources in this section include the drafting guide Matthews Municipal Ordinances and the treatise McQuillin on The Law of Municipal Corporations.

For help using these resources or researching other municipal law issues, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Fighting Fraud

Last week, the talk of the Internet was an essay called "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger." The Cut's financial-advice columnist Charlotte Cowles details the elaborate telephone scam that led her to withdraw five figures of savings and surrender the cash to someone she believed to be an undercover CIA agent. Social media chatter debated whether Cowles's predicament was the relatable reaction of a frazzled mom who had been targeted by experienced con artists, or the public admission of a surprising lapse in common sense.

However one may feel about Cowles's particular experience, one thing is certain: she is hardly alone in falling for a scam. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that American consumers lost more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023. While almost half of these losses came from investment fraud, imposter scams (like the one Cowles faced) represented nearly $3 billion of this figure. The FTC news release details some of the steps the Commission is taking to combat fraud, including finalizing a proposed rule on increased enforcement mechanisms for impersonation scams. But there are other actions that consumers can take to better understand common scams and avoid being victimized.

Awareness is the consumer's sharpest weapon in this battle. The most common scams can be categorized into general themes, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau provides a helpful list, alongside guidance about what to do if you encounter one. The FTC's Consumer Advice section provides news alerts and other helpful content on common scams; check out How to Avoid a Scam for a succinct guide to spotting a fraudster. (This page identifies four signs of a scam that are helpful to remember: PRETENDING to be a recognized business or other organization; claiming the target has either a serious legal PROBLEM or a PRIZE to be claimed; PRESSURING the target to act quickly; and demanding PAYMENT in a highly specific way, like cryptocurrency or gift cards. The advice given for avoiding scams – including resisting pressure to act immediately and to tell a trusted person what is happening before you withdraw any money – would most likely have averted disaster in Cowles's situation, as she notes throughout her essay.)

Other government agencies and non-government organizations often maintain info pages about common scams related to their subject areas, such as the IRS's Tax Scams page. The Better Business Bureau similarly provides helpful articles on spotting scams. Individual companies may also provide warnings on their help pages, such as Venmo's guide to common mobile payment scam techniques. Reviewing pages like these in advance, or conducting a quick web search after receiving a suspicious call or email, could help you or a loved one determine the likelihood of a scam.

If you or someone you know does encounter a scammer, reporting is an important step. The FTC maintains an easy-to-use page for Reporting Fraud. At the state level, the attorney general's office is the appropriate place to report consumer complaints. In North Carolina, the AG maintains an info page for Protecting Consumers; for other states, visit the Association of State Attorneys General to locate your local AG office. The Better Business Bureau also offers a ScamTracker reporting option.

Other steps that you can take to cut down on scam attempts include adding your phone number to the Do Not Call Registry and regularly checking your three free annual credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com. Duke University's Information Technology Security Office also offers security guides designed to help you stay safe online, including Safe Browsing and Phishing.

Scams will continue to evolve with technology, and it's important to stay educated and vigilant. By becoming familiar with these consumer protection resources, and sharing them with friends and family (especially senior citizens, who are frequent targets of scammers), you too can help fight fraud. For help with locating other consumer protection resources, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Researching U.S. State Commitments with Foreign Governments

Most legal researchers are familiar with the federal government's treaty powers (for an overview, check out the Constitution Annotated discussion of Article II, section 2, clause 2 or the three-part 2023 Congressional Research Service report series on International Agreements). Likely less familiar to many are state-level commitments with foreign governments. After all, the Constitution expressly prohibits states from entering into their own treaties, and requires congressional consent for states to enter into agreements or compacts with foreign governments. However, individual U.S. states can and do enter into memoranda of understanding and other commitments with foreign entities. Due to their more ad hoc nature as compared to the highly formal federal process, locating the text or information about these state-level commitments can be difficult. 

A new library within the HeinOnline research database called U.S. State Commitments with Foreign Governments, now available to the Duke University community, sheds some light on this practice. The collection was curated by Marquette Law professor Ryan Scoville and his former research assistant Mitchell Knief, now a trademark attorney. Using state Freedom of Information laws, the authors requested "all operative commitments … currently in force between the State…and any foreign government" in all fifty states. The effort generated copies of more than 750 individual state-level documents on a variety of topics, although the authors' introduction cautions that the collection is likely far from comprehensive, and most likely also includes documents that are no longer in force. 

The Hein library permits users to search or browse these documents by country, state, or topic area under the "Commitment Index" section. Some results are largely ceremonial pledges to strengthen relations and understanding between a state and a foreign government. Others are more substantial, such as the agreements between states along the Canadian border and the government of Quebec to share law enforcement information, or climate-related agreements between various states and countries. 

Access the new HeinOnline library via the library catalog or Legal Databases & Links page; from the main HeinOnline database list, select "U.S. State Commitments with Foreign Governments." For help with using the new module or in locating other materials, be sure to Ask a Librarian.