It’s the time of year when many of us head up to the Sierras for a little skiing and snowboarding, so it seems appropriate to highlight a recent California appellate opinion, Lackner v. North, 2006 DJDAR 950, a torts case involving allegations of reckless snowboarding.  The plaintiff, Teri Lackner, was resting at the bottom of a steep ski run at Mammoth when the defendant, Cassidy North, crashed into her on his snowboard.  Lackner suffered severe injuries, including a shattered ankle and 16 different fractures in her lower leg alone.  She sued North and the ski resort, but the trial court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, finding that primary assumption of the risk barred liability to Lackner.  She appealed, contending that there were triable issues of fact on the question of whether North’s conduct was reckless.  The Third District agreed with her on the issue of North’s recklessness, declaring that "North’s conduct is analogous to a freeway driver who exits the freeway without slowing down or looking for other cars that are also exiting."  If you’re hitting the slopes this weekend, you may want to read this case!

Law students don’t often think of law librarianship as a career choice while they’re in law school.  After all, to become a law librarian, you usually have to earn an additional graduate degree (a master’s in library and information science), and the pay for librarians isn’t anywhere close to a first year associate’s salary at a large Bay Area law firm.  However, law librarianship can be a great career choice for law school graduates who truly enjoy research and want a job with a slightly more manageable pace.  If you’re a soon-to-be law school graduate who isn’t sure if practicing law is for you, you might want to consider law librarianship.  There are some attractive fellowship programs that allow you to work part-time while you earn your Master’s in Library Science, such as this recently announced fellowship for aspiring law librarians at the University of Arizona:

The University of Arizona, School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) and the Law Library of the James E. Rogers College of Law offer a two-year fellowship in law librarianship for lawyers seeking to become law librarians. Successful applicants will work 20 hours a week in the law library while pursuing an M.L.S.

Requirements: 1) J.D. degree from an ABA accredited school; and 2) Admission to the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science.

Preference given to students with Spanish language skills.

SIRLS Application Process: Application for Admission to Graduate Study; written statement of Introduction; official Transcript from each college or university attended;
resume of educational and work experience; and two letters of recommendation.

Fellowship Application: Cover letter and resume. Cover letter should describe interest in law librarianship. Deadline April 1, 2006.

Send applications to:

Professor Mike Chiorazzi, Assoc. Dean Information Services
Law Library
University Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law
1201. E. Speedway Blvd.
Tucson, AZ 85721

Fellowship Information: The successful applicant will work 20 hours a week in the law library. The first year will focus on technical and access services, the second year will focus on public services. The salary is $11,000 a year, plus benefits and tuition remission. (In the current fiscal year the fellowship recipient would pay a program fee of $79 per semester and have the remaining tuition and other fees waived.)

FirstGov, the federal government’s official web portal, has undergone a face lift.  It now features a revamped search engine that uses Vivisimo’s clustering technology to group search results by subject -- you can click here for an example of a clustered search result from FirstGov. According to news sources, the old FirstGov search engine only searched approximately 8 million government publications.  Currently, the search engine accesses 40 million government documents, some of which are not available on other commercial search engines.  Be sure to explore the extensive topic-specific links to government resources on FirstGov’s home page as well!

We’ve just received word of a rave review for Exploring Tort Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a collection of essays edited by SCU School of Law visiting professor, M. Stuart Madden.  (Professor Madden’s contribution is a chapter entitled "Tort Law Through Time and Culture: Themes of Economic Efficiency.")  The essays that appear in Exploring Tort Law are based on papers presented at a November 2003 Pace University School of Law colloquium, "The Future of Torts." The review by Michael Rustad and Thomas Lambert notes that "it is rare to see conference papers morph into an instant classic of original scholarship."  In Rustad and Lambert’s view, Exploring Tort Law "represents some of the best modern tort original scholarship."  Rustad and Lambert describe Professor Madden’s essay as an "exquisitely written" study of tort law in ancient civilizations, which "unveil[s] a treasure trove of concepts prefiguring tort law in the ancient law."  Rustad and Lambert’s review will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Bimonthly Review of Law Books.  Exploring Tort Law is available at Heafey Law Library.

Librarians use search engines like Google dozens of times a day, and we also care deeply about issues like library patron privacy.  That’s why we were heartened to see that Google is refusing to comply with a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena, which asked Google to supply the goverment with a list of every search term entered by Google users during a specified week.  DOJ filed a motion to compel compliance with the subpoena on January 18.  Google’s associate general counsel Nicole Wong stated that Google plans to fight the DOJ request "vigorously."  For a sampling of news coverage of this controversy, see these links from Google News. 

Yale has devised an interesting approach to encouraging online discussion of the articles that appear in The Yale Law Journal.  The journal has introduced The Pocket Part, an "online companion to The Yale Law Journal."  The Pocket Part features shorter versions of articles from the journal, along with responses and commentary from policymakers and legal scholars.  The most recent issue features lively commentary about law and politics in judicial confirmation hearings from Randy Barnett, Erwin Chemerinksy, Robert Post, Reva Siegel, and Laurence Tribe.  You can also read Samuel Alito’s law review note from 1974 and post a comment about it, if you’re so inclined.

As legal scholarship becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, researchers often need to find reports or other materials published by public policy research institutes or "think tanks."  Of course, legal researchers must keep in mind that most think tanks have a distinct political philosophy and agenda.  Not surprisingly, materials published by partisan think tanks tend to support the think tanks’ agenda.  Nevertheless, they can be useful resources for legal scholars who are exploring the intersection of law and public policy.  Here are several websites that furnish links to think tanks in the United States and abroad:

• Harvard University’s Kennedy School Library also furnishes an impressive alphabetical list of links to think tanks located in the United States and abroad.
• The University of Michigan’s "Political Science Resources: Think Tanks" maintains links to a large number of individual think tank websites.
• Project Vote Smart’s page also features links to individual think tanks.
• Foreign Affairs Online has compiled an alphabetical listing of domestic and foreign policy think tanks.

Thanks to Inter Alia, we’ve discovered another handy legal research resource from the Washington Post.  The newspaper has created a free Votes Database, which allows users to browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991.  You can browse late-night votes for sessions from 1991 until present, and you can also review a list of members who have missed the most votes in each session.  The site even publishes an RSS feed of recent votes by individual members of Congress.  This is an extremely handy tool for anyone tracking federal legislation or the voting record of particular members.

The Washington Post has created a page devoted to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you’re looking for hearing transcripts, photos, or Alito biographical information, this page provides one-stop shopping.

Thanks to beSpacific for originally pointing out the Washington Post’s coverage of the hearings.