Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names

Renata E.B. Strause of Yale Law School, and colleagues, have published How Federal Statutes Are Named, Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013).

Here is a summary of the article:

The naming of [U.S.] federal statutes for individuals has received surprisingly little systematic attention. The purposes of this article are to trace the history of federal statutory naming conventions and to identify as authoritatively and as completely as possible the persons and political issues Congress has decided to honor or highlight in this fashion, as well as the proliferation of abbreviations as a further shortening of the short title.

In their research the authors used the Yale Law School Library’s Database of Federal Statute Names.

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library told us that, according to Strause et al. (2013), page 12, a key source of data for the Database of Federal Statute Names was the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s Table of Popular Names (HT also Thom Neale of the Sunlight Foundation).

Other sources of popular name data for U.S. federal statutes include:

• The Legal Information Institute’s Table of Popular Names, developed by LII Director Tom Bruce
• the united states GitHub repository’s Bill Nicknames database, created by Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation
• THOMAS’s List of Bill Popular and Short Titles (HT Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation)
• Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska and Adrian White‘s Concordance of Federal Legislation (HT Richard Leiter)

Stephane Cottin of Secrétariat général du Gouvernement and ADIJ tells us that Legifrance publishes a similar list of popular names for French statutes, the Lois Dites….

The Yale Database of Federal Statute Names includes the following fields:

• Popular Name Statutized?:
• Type:
• Date Enacted:
• Short Title:
• Public Law citation:
• Statute At Large citation:
• Named For?:
• Link/Source:
• Notes:

According to Jason, the library does not currently provide an API or bulk access to the database, but is considering providing them in the future.

HT @maricheney and @jeiseman here and here, and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network

Widener on Making Law Journal Content More Accessible to the Public

Michael N. Widener, JD, MS, has published Driving Pedestrian Traffic to Law Journals, Law Library Journal, 14(4), 569-575 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Recent technological advances enable the legal academy and law student editors to embed aids to understanding the law journal’s content in the articles and student notes published there. As there are compelling social purposes for making the content of law journals more accessible to lay inquirers, the author advocates incorporating into law journals devices such as QR codes and content summaries written for the layperson.

The Use of Non-MARC Metadata in AALL Libraries: A Baseline Study

My article, The Use of Non-MARC Metadata in AALL Libraries: A Baseline Study, has been published in Law Library Journal, 103: 631-658 (2011). Here is the abstract:

This article reports results of a 2009 survey of AALL libraries respecting non-MARC metadata practices, with a focus on interoperability. Results cover types of collections described with non-MARC metadata, as well as metadata standards, platforms, and tools. Results suggest substantial, though incomplete, awareness among respondents of metadata interoperability and the factors that enable it. This study is intended as a preliminary inquiry that affords some sense of law libraries’ recent non-MARC metadata activity and offers findings that may furnish a baseline for future studies of such activity.

Here are the major findings:

Non-MARC metadata are being used most often to describe manuscript or archival collections, resources in portals or subject-specific collections, and collections of primary legal resources, and are being used to describe unpublished and published materials in approximately equal proportions. [...]

The platforms, systems, or components thereof utilized most commonly in connection with non-MARC metadata activity are generic web servers, followed by PHP, Microsoft Access, Linux plus Apache, MySQL, and locally created systems. [...]

Use of open, standard descriptive metadata schemas, or of systems that can output metadata in such schemas, appears to be widespread. However, nearly thirty-five percent of respondents reported using no or minimal non-MARC descriptive metadata for at least one digital collection or project, and almost one-fifth of respondents reported utilizing locally created schemas in systems that could not output descriptive metadata in open, standard schemas. [...]

Dublin Core is the most frequently employed descriptive metadata schema, followed by locally created schemas, HTML or XHTML “Title” or “Meta” tags, and EAD. [...]

More than half of respondents reported utilizing mapping between descriptive metadata schemas, most commonly from qualified to unqualified Dublin Core, a mapping that is consistent with the OAI-PMH specification. [...]

The most frequently identified structural metadata format was PDF, followed by HTML/XHTML and EAD. [....]

Nearly two-thirds of respondents report using systems that do not comply with OAI-PMH, in connection with at least one current collection or project. [...]

Taken together, these findings seem to reflect substantial, though incomplete, awareness among respondents of metadata interoperability and the factors that enable it. In addition, these findings point to two factors as possible obstacles to wider and swifter adoption of practices that foster metadata interoperability: the legacy of early digitization activities—which involved the creation of large collections of “flat” HTML or XHTML documents containing little or no descriptive metadata—and the maintenance of databases of current primary legal resources, which require fast and inexpensive metadata processing techniques.

I’m most grateful to the survey respondents — who requested confidentiality — to Kathleen Cowan of bepress for furnishing information about the Legal Repository and DigitalCommons platforms; to Leslie Carr of eprints for answering questions about that platform; and to Janet Sinder of Law Library Journal for comments on earlier drafts of the article.

Briscoe on Law Library Catalog Quality & Information Retrieval

Georgia K. Briscoe of the University of Colorado Law Library has published The Quality of Academic Law Library Online Catalogs
and Its Effect on Information Retrieval, Law Library Journal, v. 102, no. 4 (2010) [article 34]. Here is the abstract:

Quality in online catalogs is generally presumed to be high. Ms. Briscoe examined a number of online catalog entries and documented the accuracy of selected bibliographic records. After finding a high level of errors, she surveyed reference librarians to determine if they believed that these errors would affect their ability to answer reference questions.

Rhodes on The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability

Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University Law Library and the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive, has published Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability, Law Library Journal, v. 102, no. 4 (2010) [article 33]. Here is the abstract:

[This paper] explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites.

Davidson on Understanding the Research Habits of Legal Scholars

Professor Stephanie Davidson of the University of Illinois College of Law has published Way Beyond Legal Research: Understanding the Research Process of Legal Scholars, Law Library Journal, vol. 102, no. 4, pp. 561-579 (article no. 2010-32). Here is the abstract:

How do legal scholars seek, discover, and manage information while conducting scholarly research? While the methods of legal research have been well-covered in the literature, few studies have explored the habits and practices that legal scholars actually employ when doing scholarly research. For librarians who support scholarly work through collection development, instruction, and personalized services, understanding scholars’ research practices is vital. This article addresses gaps between models of legal research and actual research practices, and urges movement toward an empirically grounded understanding of the research habits of legal scholars in order to bridge some of those gaps.

Custer on a Survey Respecting Lawyers’ Use of the West Digest System

Joseph A. Custer of the University of Kansas School of Law Library has published The Universe of Thinkable Thoughts Versus the Facts of Empirical Research, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 251-268 (2010). Here is a summary:

In this paper, the author questions assertions about the West Key Number System and the West Digest System made in Daniel Dabney, The Universe of Thinkable Thoughts: Literary Warrant and West’s Key Number System, 99 Law Libr. J. 229, 2007 Law Libr. J. 14., and particularly the claims that “[t]he languages we use to describe the law, including the Key Number System, matter to the law itself. They come to be infused with the law, telling us what ideas are important ideas and what questions are important to ask,” and that the West Key Number System influences lawyers by “bringing certain questions to the fore by including them in the scheme’s classification logic” and by “determining what basic ideas [lawyers] can ask questions about.”

Custer conducts a test of assertions made about the West Key Number System and the West Digest System in Peter C. Schanck, Taking Up Barkan’s Challenge: Looking at the Judicial Process and Legal Research, 82 Law Libr. J. 1 (1990).

Using a survey of lawyers in one county in the state of Kansas, USA, Custer tests the following assertions made in Schanck’s article:

1. “[W]hen conducting their research, attorneys tend to use more than one system, and often several . . . . expos[ing] the researcher to a variety of nondigest classifications.”

2. A “number of lawyers . . . claim never to use digests.”

3. “[L]awyers tend to concentrate more on the facts . . . than on abstract doctrines. In so doing, they prefer searching descriptive word indexes over topical analyses, and they search the indexes as much for factual terms as for legal concepts.”

4. Even if lawyers use the West Digest exclusively they “tend to scan all or most of the cases under several key numbers and, in the process, pay little attention to the designations assigned to the categories. . . . By this final stage, the West structure is long forgotten and its effects negligible.” [footnotes omitted]

After analyzing the survey results, Custer draws the following conclusions:

The results tallied in my survey supported Schanck’s contentions and challenged Dabney’s assertions. The data suggests that lawyers are not dependent on intellectual indexing, using a “variety of nondigest classifications” to perform their research. In addition, the results implied that the West Digest System is not infused in the law, as a majority of lawyers don’t even use the digest in their research. Regarding Schanck’s third contention, the survey results suggest that lawyers are more likely to search in the [Descriptive Word Index, a component of each West Digest] for terms such as “dogs” rather than use topical analysis. In relation to the fourth Schanck assertion, the survey results imply that the West digest structure is not being used by attorneys to discover what law is important or what are the important questions to ask, since most lawyers don’t appear to be paying any attention to the structure when scanning most or all of the cases under several key numbers when researching.

My research suggests that neither does the Key Number System influence the law nor does the law influence the Key Number System. In the end, the digest is a minor player in a legal culture where lawyers will go everywhere to find the law. Free-text searching brings the flexibility that lawyers need to effectively research in today’s legal culture. Lawyers will look at the localities, practices, languages, symbols, and images surrounding legal society to find and gain an understanding of the law…. [footnotes omitted]

Keele on Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements

Benjamin J. Keele of Indiana University-Bloomington has published Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 269-283 (2010). Here is the abstract:

Mr. Keele examined copyright provisions of law journal publication agreements and found that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit authors to self-archive articles. He recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

Palfrey on Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus

Vice Dean John Palfrey of the Harvard Law School has published Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 171-190 (2010). Here is the abstract:

Law librarians would be well served by sharing a vision for the future of legal information, one that is informed by the methods of multiple disciplines and that will promote democratic ideals. This shared vision could guide us as we continue to lay the cornerstones for law libraries in a “digital-plus” era.

Nevelov Mart, A Study of West’s Headnotes and Key Numbers and LexisNexis’s Headnotes and Topics

Susan Nevelow Mart of the University of California Hastings College of Law has published The Relevance of Results Generated by Human Indexing and Computer Algorithms: A Study of West’s Headnotes and Key Numbers and LexisNexis’s Headnotes and Topics, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 221-249 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This article begins the investigation into the different ways results are generated in West’s “Custom Digest” and in LexisNexis’s “Search by Topic or Headnote” and by KeyCite and Shepard’s. The author took ten pairs of matching headnotes from important federal and California cases and reviewed the results sets generated by each classification and citator system for relevance. The differences in the results sets for classification systems and for citator systems raise interesting issues about the efficiency and comprehensiveness of any one system, and the need to adjust research strategies accordingly.