Cite-checks for law review can be terribly tedious, but Heafey’s reference librarians have a few tips for making the process easier:

• First, if you’re pulling your hair out trying to find your sources, ask one of the reference librarians for help.  We are happy to help you track down hard-to-find materials.
• If you’re a new cite-checker and it’s been awhile since you’ve encountered an online library catalog, review our online OSCAR tutorial before you begin looking for sources.  The tutorial has both basic and advanced OSCAR search tips that will save you lots of searching frustration! 

• HeinOnline is a great resource for cite-checkers.  This database contains exact page images of law reviews and journals, U.S. Reports, the Federal Register, and other primary and secondary legal sources.  When we demonstrate HeinOnline at the reference desk, students often exclaim, "We can’t use electronic resources for cite-checking!"  But because there’s absolutely no difference between looking at a PDF version of a law review volume and the actual print volume, law review editors should not object to using HeinOnline to check article citations.  For this reason, Heafey’s staff will not pull a print volume from remote storage if the volume is available electronically in PDF on HeinOnline.

• LINK+ is another useful resource for cite-checking.  LINK+ is essentially a pooled catalog of books available from participating academic and public libraries in California and Nevada. If you encounter a nonperiodical source that is not available at SCU, you may request the material through LINK+.  There is no charge to patrons for this service, and you usually receive your material within 3-5 business days.  Two key things to remember about LINK+:  1) you must first confirm that the book that you need is not available at SCU in order to obtain the material from LINK+; and 2) Heafey Law Library patrons will need to pick up LINK+ materials at the Orradre Circulation Desk.

For those of you working on papers or other research projects, we thought we’d dispense a few legal research tips:

• If you don’t know about LLRX.com yet, you definitely need to bookmark this page.  In the words of LLRX’s founders, the site is "a unique, free Web journal" that is devoted entirely to providing tips on legal research and legal technology.  This site can solve a lot of tough legal research problems with its reliable research guides on a wide variety of topics.  LLRX.com is especially valuable for foreign and international legal research topics.  It also has a handy search engine that you can use to find state and federal court rules, forms, and dockets. 
  
• Law librarians develop a wide range of detailed and useful legal research guides and post them on law library websites for the whole world to see.  Heafey’s research guides can be found here, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t seek out research guides from other law school libraries.  If you take the time to find these guides, you’ll find a wealth of legal research knowledge at your fingertips.  If you’re new to an area of law, you can usually find law library research guides using a simple Google search.  Just type in the area of law that you’re researching, then type the phrase "research guide" in quotations, and restrict your search by typing "site:.edu" without quotations (this portion of the search query restricts your search to URLs that end in ".edu").  For example, if you’re looking for guides on art law, your search query will look like this: 
  
  art law "research guide" site:.edu  
  
  Try this search the next time that you’re researching a brand new area -- you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the resources that you turn up. 

From the palpable tension in the library, the reference librarians can tell that exam time is almost here, and we thought this would be a good time to offer a few helpful exam preparation resources.  We've created a comprehensive guide to all of the exciting exam prep resources available at Heafey, including our popular collection of past SCU Law exams.  Our guide also tells you how to find sample essay and multiple-choice questions in Heafey's collection.  To access the guide, click on this link to Heafey's ClaraNet resources, then click on the fifth research guide in the list entitled "Exam Guide and Tips."

Don't forget about CALI exercises!  The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction offers a wide array of Web-based, interactive exercises that can help you master all of those tricky legal concepts from your first-year classes.  And CALI exercises are available for lots of upper-level classes, too, including evidence, intellectual property, tax, wills and trusts, and more!  Just ask one of Heafey's reference librarians for the SCU authorization code to access the CALI exercises.

Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute just announced the debut of a legal research wiki called Wex, "a collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia."  Some of you may be wondering what the heck a "wiki" is -- it's essentially a collaborative website that allows a bunch of different people to add or edit the information that's displayed on the site.  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is perhaps the most widely-known example of a wiki -- anyone can propose a new Wikipedia entry or edit the content of an existing entry.

Wex's creators plan to be much more selective.  According to this page on editorial contributions, Wex contributors will be pre-screened before they can start writing Wex content. 

For those of you interested in reading more about wikis and how they can be used by attorneys, check out this post from Joy London's excellent blawg, excited utterances.

Thanks to Bonnie Shucha at WisBlawg for the tip about Wex.

A recent opinion from the Third District, California Court of Appeal sheds light on which documents can be considered part of a California statute’s legislative history.  In Kaufman & Broad Communities, Inc. v. Performance Plastering, Inc., 133 Cal. App. 4th 26 (2005), Judge Sims notes wryly that "many attorneys apparently believe that every scrap of paper that is generated in the legislative process constitutes the proper subject of judicial notice . . . [t]his must stop."  Id. at 29. Judge Sims proceeds to devote a substantial portion of his opinion to a discussion of exactly which "documents . . . constitute cognizable legislative history."  Id.  A few examples of documents discussed in the opinion that obviously do not constitute legislative history:  magazine articles, letters to the governor in favor of a bill, and documents of unknown author or origin. 

Thanks to Nanna Frye, law librarian with the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, for highlighting this opinion.

The librarians at Duke University School of Law  and UC Berkeley School of Law recently completed an online tutorial, which is designed to teach law students about international legal research.  The tutorial covers both print and electronic resources, and it includes review questions so that students can test their mastery of the material throughout the tutorial.  Heafey has a permanent link to the tutorial on our international law Internet resources page.

Welcome to Heafey Law Library’s blog and online newsletter!  We’ve retired our print version of Heafey Headnotes, and we’ll use this blog to keep our patrons apprised of the latest developments in legal research, legal news, and law library events. 

If you have comments about our posts, please use the comments feature on this blog to let us know what you think!  We’d love to hear from you!