- Emergency Volunteer Healthcare Practioners Act;
- Uniform Anatomical Gift Act;
- Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act;
- Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act;
- Uniform Power of Attorney Act;
- Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act;
- Uniform Representation of Children in Abuse, Neglect and Custody Proceedings Act; and
- Model Registered Agents Act.

The Conference - composed of over 300 law professors, judges, attorneys, and legislators from all 50 states and territories - meets annually to discuss proposed uniform laws that address issues where disparity among states’ law is a concern. Approved uniform laws are then ready for consideration by the individual states with an eye to the eventual adoption by state legislatures. A widely adopted example - a perennial favorite among law students - is the Uniform Commercial Code.

The text of these new acts, as well as previously approved acts, is available at the Conference website. In addition, the site provides a search engine that allows researchers to track the status of acts in the individual states, as well as to review archives of material related to the passage of previously approved acts.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered aired a story this week about a Canadian contract dispute that turns on the placement of a single comma in a 14-page contract between a cable television company and a telephone company. Robert Siegel’s interview with Richard Janda, a McGill University law professor, is available online at the NPR website. Additional coverage appears in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Telecom Decision CRTC 2006-45 concerning the dispute between Aliant Telecom Inc. and Rogers Cable Communications Inc. is available at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission website. Rogers has appealed the decision with help from Kenneth A. Adams whose recent book on contract language is available at the Heafey Law Library.

Since its establishment in 2001, the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology has sponsored studies and conferences on agricultural biotechnology. Reports, conference proceedings and issue briefs are available at the Pew Initiative’s website, which also includes both factsheets summarizing federal and state legislative activity related to agricultural biotechnology and a federal and state legislation tracker for 2001 through 2005.

Friday - we will close at 8pm
Saturday - we will close at 6pm

Printing and study facilities are available at the University Interim Library (by the parking structure) and in the new study space on the first floor of Nobili Hall (the tall building behind the Mission Church) until 10pm both days. (Their machines no longer accept disks, you must have a USB key/flash drive to print files.)

We will be open regular hours on Sunday, Oct. 21 (9am to Midnight) and anticipate being open regular hours next week.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In response to a faculty research assistant’s request for guidance on locating non-proprietary copies of faculty articles for posting to the SSRN, I talked with Prof. Brad Joondeph (x4726) to get more details on how the SSRN posting process works:

1. Someone finds a non-proprietary copy of the article, and captures it as a Word document (preferred) or a PDF. In either format it can’t have the proprietary watermark on the pages (so no downloads from Lexis, Westlaw or HeinOnline).

- tip: some journals post their articles on their websites, you might also approach other journals to provide the document in electronic format (but often they never respond), and some faculty may still have their original files
- detail: few things on SSRN are older than 2000
- detail: ordinary scanning to create a PDF does NOT produce a file of adequate quality for posting to SSRN
- suggestion for RAs: consult with your faculty member/s to see how much time they want you to put into searching for fnon-proprietary full-text files of the articles, perhaps there are particular articles they would really like to post full-text and abstracts are sufficient for the rest

2. The faculty member writes an abstract for each article/chapter/book they want to put up on SSRN, (also as a Word file).

3. These files are then submitted to Christina Johnson, x4443, who completes the process of posting them to the SSRN.

4. If the articles aren’t available in a clean electronic file, faculty members can still write and post an abstract to the SSRN.

- fact: you will see many faculty listings have abstracts, but no full-text access on SSRN
- fact: academic law journal articles are widely and easily available to members of the academic community once they have the citation found in the SSRN database
- detail: most academic law journals and many law schools are already Partners in Publication with the SSRN, so the process of posting materials should go very smoothly

As noted in today’s San Jose Mercury News, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow in an appeal from the United States Court of Appeals from the Ninth Circuit. Carey v. Musladin will examine whether jurors in a murder trial were prejudiced against a defendant because the deceased man’s family members sat in the front row of the courtroom wearing buttons bearing his photograph and whether the Ninth Circuit exceeded its authority under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act when it overturned the defendant’s conviction.

Three Santa Clara law professors are included among the more than 300 law professors listed in the latest Law Professor Blogger Census from Concurring Opinions. Professor Stephen Diamond has three blogs: Vallywood which explores the effects of technology and finance on media and entertainment, Corporate Law and the Global Economy, and Global Labor and the Global Economy. Blogs from Professors Eric Goldman (Technology & Marketing Law Blog and Goldman’s Observations) and David Friedman (Ideas) have been noted in earlier Heafey Headnotes postings.

Your participation in this survey will help us improve our services.  The anonymous survey takes just a few minutes to complete. 

At the end of the survey you can submit your name and email to enter a participant’s drawing.  We will be raffling multiple amounts of $5, $10, and $25 to be added to your ACCESS card.  There will also be one grand prize of $50.

So take a few moments to share your thoughts and maybe you will be have a coffee or lunch on us!

“Non Human Animals and the Law: A Bibliography of Animal Law Resources at the Stanford Law Library” by Rita and Paul Lomio is available on Stanford Law School’s Robert Crown Library website. The 40-page, annotated bibliography includes books, reports, articles, recordings and films, and web resources. It is among the 14 papers in the Robert Crown Library’s Legal Research Paper Series.

Recent news stories in the New York Times about animal law include a September 3, 2006, article by Warren St. John, “New Breed of Lawyers Gives Every Dog His Day in Court” and Jesse McKinley’s October 2 article about recent pro-animal legislation in California, “Series of Laws Toughen Animal Protection in California.” St. John’s article describes the kind of legal work involved in representing the interests of pet owners and pets themselves: fighting eviction notices; drafting and defending a trust for the care of an animal after its owner’s death. Pro-animal legislation from California’s 2005-2006 legislative session includes:

SB1578 prohibiting dog tethering
SB1806 concerning leaving animals unattended in vehicles
SB1349 increasing the penalties for illegal animal fights

The New York Times is available on both Westlaw (NYT) and Lexis (NEWS;NYT).  California.bestfriends.org is a website that provides animal news, including an item about the California animal welfare bills, above. The Animal Legal Defense Fund is in Cotati, California.  

The Clerkship Notification Blog provides clerkship applicants with information about the hiring process. The blog solicits anonymous comments from applicants for clerkships in federal and state courts. Comments from 2005 are archived.