The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Tuesday in Rumsfeld v. FAIR (Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights).  The basic issue:  Does the federal statute popularly known as the Solomon Amendment (10 U.S.C. sec. 983) violate the First Amendment rights of law schools?  The Solomon Amendment basically requires that universities give military and non-military recruiters equal access to students and campus career resources.  If universities refuse to provide the military with such access, the statute permits the government to withdraw federal funds for research and other university activities.  Law schools with antidiscrimination policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation argue that, under the First Amendment, Congress should not be able to require universities to suspend their antidiscrimination policies by permitting military recruiters on campus.  For a selection of news articles about the case, see Howard Bashman's excellent blog, How Appealing.  For an audio file of oral arguments, visit the Oyez website.  You can access the parties' briefs at the ABA website.  As always, SCOTUSblog has a wealth of links, analyses, and other resources.

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.

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. 

Today’s Wall Street Journal declares that the "California bar exam has created misery for thousands of aspiring and practicing lawyers."  Wondering just how tough the California bar exam is?  The Wall Street Journal reports that Kathleen Sullivan, the former dean of Stanford Law School, did not pass the July 2005 California bar exam.  If you’re interested in reading the entire WSJ article, visit the law library’s newspaper collection right next to the circulation desk. 

If you’re a December graduate who is already worrying about the upcoming February bar exam, don’t miss Heafey’s recently updated "Guide to Bar Exam Resources."  We can’t take the California bar exam for you, but we’ve compiled a very handy list of print and online resources that you can use to prepare for the exam. 

The New York Times featured a story yesterday about the decline in law school applications.  According to the article, applications fell by 4.6% last year, and have declined by about 9.5% so far this year.  What’s behind the decline?  TV show creator David E. Kelley voiced a novel theory, speculating that the "more lawyers there are, the more people are out there to encourage others not to go to law school." 

The online version of the Wall Street Journal published an excellent story this week on the viability of law reviews, which is a "must-read" for law review editors and faculty.  According to the article, "law professors are looking beyond law reviews, moving relevant and timely commentary to the Internet and blogosphere."  As the article points out, the academic legal community is starting to take aim at law reviews.  By now, most of us have read Richard Posner’s piece, "Against the Law Reviews," in which he states that "too many articles are too long, too dull, and too heavily annotated, and . . . many interdisciplinary articles are published that have no merit at all."  And Professor Rosa Brooks at the University of Virginia asked in a recent LawCulture post, "Is there any good reason, post-tenure, not to eschew law reviews for books and other less stultifying genres, on the theory that people beyond my immediate family may then read what I write?"  Some journals are responding by moving content online, developing blog-like online communities such as The Pocket Part, and insisting on shorter articles.  I don’t think that the journals will vanish quickly -- after all, scholarly publications are part of law school tradition, and law schools tend to move fairly slowly when it comes to dispensing with traditional features of the law school experience.  However, I do believe that scholarly journals are going to have to become more tech-savvy if they want to appeal to a wider audience.  It seems like discussing some of the measures described in this article would be a great place to start.  

The House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations held a hearing last week on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?".  The hearing featured testimony from human rights and free speech advocates, such as Radio Free Asia and Human Rights in China.  Most of the American search engine companies doing business in China also testified, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Inc.  If you click on the link above, you can access a webcast of the hearing as well as PDF copies of all of the hearing testimony.

It seems like everyone’s discussing the results of a recent poll demonstrating that Americans know more about the TV show "The Simpsons" than they do about the United States Constitution.  According to the poll, less than one percent of respondents could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment, which the poll listed as freedom of press, speech, assembly, religion, and the right to petition the government.  However, 20 percent of respondents could identify all five members of the Simpsons family by name.  Some poll participants also believed that the Constitution protected an individual’s right to own a pet and drive a car.  As you can imagine, this news has generated quite a bit of chatter in the blogosphere.  For example, the Volokh Conspiracy’s Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota, challenges the poll author’s assumption that the First Amendment only enumerates five freedoms:  "By the way, I count six (not five) freedoms explicitly listed in the First Amendment: no establishment of religion, free exercise, free speech, press, assembly, and petition. If we added the unenumerated freedom of association we’d get to seven."  You can read more blog commentary on the poll here.