Articles Posted in Library Reference and Research

During this past week (week ending June 16, 2023) we have received listings of 37 Government and Administrative Law Summaries,  84 Constitutional Law summaries,  89 Criminal Law Summaries and 3 U.S. Supreme Court Summaries.  We plan is to continue posting opinion summaries, under corresponding areas of law, weekly whenever possible in order to keep blog readers updated.  To gain access to these case summaries, click on the corresponding links below:

Opinion Summaries Posted for Week Ending June 16, 2023:

Criminal Law Opinion Summaries

INTRODUCTION:

Established in 1974, The Congressional Budget Office is a federal agency within the legislative branch of the United States government.  It is charged with providing  members of Congress  non partisan, objective  analysis of budgeting and economic issues to support the congressional budget process. Each year, CBO economists and budget analysts produce dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates for proposed legislation.

For the past several months I have been receiving  directly from CBO links to  which I now plan to begin posting  selectively on this blog in the interest of information sharing.  If there appears to be sufficient interest among readers of this blog over a period of time, I plan to continue posting selections I receive from CBO.

Received : June 13, 2023.

Summary:

H.R. 1165 would amend title V of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) to expand and equally apply protections for consumers and customers with respect to the use of data by financial institutions. The bill would redefine the terms consumer and customer and would require financial institutions to provide opportunities for consumers and customers to opt out of having their personal data disclosed to third parties. H.R. 1165 would require financial institutions to notify people about the information they collect and hold and, upon request, delete nonpublic personal information held by the institution. Finally, the bill would direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to report to the Congress on whether the GLBA’s data safeguards adequately protect people’s nonpublic personal information.

Being a retired law librarian of a certain age, I am now often asked to reflect upon my 50 years serving in various capacities as a law librarian. I have noticed that most questions asked can be grouped into discrete categories. For example, people want to know what lessons I have learned along the way as a law librarian, what I found most rewarding being a law librarian, what changes in law librarianship I have observed since I started approximately 50 years ago, and who have been my mentors or people who have greatly influenced me along the way. In this posting, I offer responses to these questions based on my current views.

What are some of the lessons you have learned as a professional in your field and in life?

I have come to appreciate the importance of understanding that change as it relates to all aspects of work and life is constant. And in order to be truly successful and to avoid stagnation, we must learn to become highly adaptable and flexible. Of utmost importance is the need to maintain enduring and useful connections with others.

We recently received an announcement from the American Bar Association regarding a collaborative effort to mobilize  lawyers to work with and assist poll workers during  the upcoming 2022 election. The ABA announcement reads in part:

”  The American Bar Association is collaborating with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) to once again issue a call aimed at mobilizing lawyers to assist as poll workers for the upcoming 2022 election. The Poll Worker, Esq. Initiative encourages lawyers, law students and other legal professionals to assist in upcoming elections by serving as poll workers… ”

Reading this announcement prompted us to search  for some other examples of lawyers organizing, assisting and advising poll workers involved in the upcoming midterm elections. On a more general level we have also identified sources which should provide lawyers and others with useful information related to working at the polls.

INTRODUCTION

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) HR 5376 was signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 16, 2022, after a tortuous route through the legislative process.

HR 5376 grew out of the Build Back Better Act (BBB) which passed the House on September 27, 2021,  but failed to pass in the Senate. The provisions of BBB did, however, become the vehicle for helping move President Biden’s legislative initiatives forward.

INTRODUCTION

Court personnel, litigants and their attorneys clearly felt the impact of Covid-19 as they were struggling to stand upright in a world turned upside down.  Personal lives were disrupted.  Court operations were chaotic.  Filings, motions, depositions, hearings, trials were massively upset with many defaults and dismissals.  The self-represented faced closed help centers. Everyone faced initial challenges of life under emergency directives. and the implementation of a variety of new ways to operate while reducing in person contact.

How prepared were we for such an unanticipated event? How well did we do?  How can we avoid chaos in the future and minimize fallout? Like picking up the rubble after a tornado has blown through your house, everyone is struggling to return to a new normal.  The impact of Covid-19 was so widespread and the plethora of issues provoked so complex, that it’s going to take a while. Yet now, more than two years later, the pandemic is waning Recovery has begun.

The Historical Society of the New York State Courts offers a look back at Covid-19’s impact in Dispensing Justice  From a Distance: Journal of the NYS Courts During the 2020-2021 Pandemic. 

A host of additional resources highlight that problems are being recognized and solutions being formulated.  Several of these have been organized in, COVID-19’s Impact on the New York State Courts, Legal Community, and Litigants – The following Selected Bibliography, compiles articles, reports and websites reflecting the state of the literature available with a specific focus on issues affecting the New York State Courts.

 

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David Badertscher

The New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County) is pleased to announce a major enhancement regarding access to those Temporary Commission on Revision of New York Penal Law and Criminal Code (1961-1970) papers held by the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County). During the past year we in the library have been working with professional interns, archivists, and especially Philip Yow and his web design team at the State of New York Unified Court System to find ways to preserving these materials, many of which were beginning to deteriorate significantly. After confronting various obstacles, technical and otherwise, we settled on digitizing the material as a number of separate and searchable pdf files and then placing all of them on the library website with an overlay of google searchability. Although this may not be perfect it does make the documents accessible on the web in a cost effective manner.

A word of further explanation. these papers primarily consisting of documents submitted to and documents produced by the Temporary Commission on Revision of Penal Laws and Criminal Code (1961-1970) were collected by our former Administrative Judge Peter Mcquillan who served on the staff of the Commission. Justice Mcquillan left the Papers in my custody when he retired and we first put up an index to the papers on the web and now the full text of these materials. In addition we have included The Proposed New York Criminal Procedure Law of 1969 because in addition to the text of the proposed law, it includes valuable additional materials related to the work of the Commission and derivation tables for use in comparing the current Code with the earlier Code. Special permission was obtained from Thomson Reuters before publishing the latter segment.

Leading Executives in the Legal Research Industry Join Bloomberg Law

Lou Andreozzi and Larry D. Thompson to Lead Expansion of Bloomberg’s Web-Based Legal Platform

New York, October 18, 2010 – Bloomberg today announced that Lou Andreozzi has joined the Company as chairman of Bloomberg Law and Larry D. Thompson, PhD, has joined as chief operating officer. Andreozzi and Thompson will play key leadership roles in the growth of Bloomberg Law, the innovative real-time legal research system from the world leader in data and information services.

Theodore Pollack, Senior Law Librarian at our public access law library writes: “Here is an interesting feature for Google Scholar regarding attempting to locate journal articles that are not easily available in Westlaw, Lexis, or HeinOnline. If you set the preferences in Google Scholar to libraries that you have access to, Scholar is supposed to inform if the article is available online thorough a digital subscription.”
http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/librarylinks.html

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