Articles Posted in Library Reference and Research

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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The National Archives has created a new online public website that features more than 3,000 historic documents, photos and videos available for download, along with applications for teachers to create and share history lessons about the items, officials announced.

The new website, DocsTeach.org, offers historic items such as a short newsreel of American war planes attacking Japan in 1944, photos of President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration and a court document on the conviction of activist Susan B. Anthony for voting before it was legal for women to vote….

Click here to see complete article.

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A selected list of CRS Reports posted between August 11, 2010 and September 10, 2010. Although almost all of the CRS Reports in the following list relate in some way to crime and criminal justice, a few addressing other topics where readers have expressed an interest have also been included.:

Deprivation of Honest Services as a Basis for Federal Mail and Wire Fraud Convictions

Report No. R40852 Subjects: Criminal Justice CRS Reports, 111th Congress (7/28/2010; Posted: 8/11/2010)

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Jaclyn McKewan, Virtual Services and Training Librarian at the Western New York Library Resources Council in Buffalo writes:”People not picking up instant messages is continuing to be a problem, so I created a 7-minute Camtasia video that shows people what to do when they get that message on the screen saying “New IM has arrived.” It covers receiving the message, sending, and a bit of info on transferring patrons. I originally created it for our Ask Us 24/7 librarians, but figured that everyone else may find it useful as well”

Actually Jaclyn is being very modest regarding her efforts. As important as the Instant Messaging component is it is only a small part of this fine resource that she has created. Areas covered include receiving and sending instant messages (IM), finding articles online, finding books online, reference sources, and search techniques. It is a multi-featured resource, useful to all librarians (both experienced and inexperienced) involved in any type of virtual reference and research. After reviewing her material I contacted Jaclyn and am posting it here with her permission.

David Badertscher

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CRS Report No. R41222; 4/30/2010; Posted 5/7/2010 Author(s): Charles Doyle, Senior Specialist in American Public Law Subject(s): Criminal Justice; Law

No. of Pages: 9

Summary Zacarias Moussaoui, members of the Colombian drug cartels, members of organized crime, and some of the former Enron executives have at least one thing in common: they all have federal conspiracy convictions. The essence of conspiracy is an agreement of two or more persons to engage in some form of prohibited misconduct. The crime is complete upon agreement, although some statutes require prosecutors to show that at least one of the conspirators has taken some concrete step or committed some overt act in furtherance of the scheme. There are dozens of federal conspiracy statutes. One, 18 U.S.C. 371, outlaws conspiracy to commit some other federal crime. The others outlaw conspiracy to engage in various specific forms of proscribed conduct.General Section 371 conspiracies are punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years; drug trafficking, terrorist, and racketeering conspiracies all carry the same penalties as their underlying substantive offenses, and thus are punished more severely than are Section 371 conspiracies. All are subject to fines of not more than $250,000 (not more than $500,000 for organizations), most may serve as the basis for a restitution order, and some for a forfeiture order.

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