Festschrifts and Melanges

A new resource, Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, was added to QuickClicks today.  The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is a multilingual index to articles and book reviews published worldwide. Also analyzed are the contents of legal essays, festschrifts, melanges, and congress reports. The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals covers international (public and private), comparative, and municipal law of countries other than the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. With coverage from 1985 to the present, the Index is updated quarterly.  

Yes, I wrote festschrifts and melanges.

http://0-web5s.silverplatter.com.cardcatalog.piercelaw.edu/webspirs/start.ws?customer=c195468&databases=IFLP

Google Blog Search Engine

Google now has a blog search engine that is, well, easy as Google!  

http://google.com/blogsearch

Info on John Glover Roberts, Jr. Supreme Court Nominee

The University of Michigan Law Library has a web page with links to everything and anything you ever wanted to know about President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Glover Roberts, Jr.

http://www.law.umich.edu/library/news/topics/roberts/robertsindex.htm

* NEW * Electronic Resources

NEW electronic information available.  Pierce Law Library is proud to announce remote access to CCH Copyright Law Report, CCH IP Library and CCH Trademark Law Guide.  We have limited "seats" for these resources and you may get an error message to that effect.  So, please be considerate and after using the material log off so others can log on.

Also, for those fortunate enough to be connected to the Pierce Law Network, i.e. within our IP range, you now have access to Loislaw's wonderful treatise library.

http://0-www.business.cch.com.cardcatalog.piercelaw.edu/ipnetwork
http://www.loislaw.com/nellco/

Legislative Histories in NH and Maine

Susan Paschell from the local law firm of Gallagher, Callahan and Gartrell recently authored an online article on Legislative Histories in New Hampshire and Maine. What I like about it is its currency. Until I read Paschell's article I didn't realize that NH Session Laws from 1989 forward were available online.

Paschell's best advice is in the section called Insider Knowledge. Here she writes, "Knowing what was going on politically in a given year, in the capital, in the agencies, and in the courts, in addition to the legislature, is often key to providing a really comprehensive legislative history."
http://www.gcglaw.com/resources/govt/legislative_history.html

Pierce Law Journal IDEA Changes Name

Dean John Hutson at the Franklin Pierce Law Center announced today the approval of the change of the name of the Pierce Law intellectual Property Journal. IDEA: The Journal of Law and Technology will now be called IDEA: The Journal of Intellectual Property.

The change was part of an effort to reflect the ongoing focus of the Journal on IP matters. Over the last several years many other law schools have published JOLTs (Journal of Law and Technology). These journals do not focus on IP matters.

Historically, IDEA has not been a law review, per se. It has consistently published interdisciplinary articles. For those interested in history, IDEA was first published in 1957 as the Patent, Trademark and Copyright Journal of Research and Education. The tile IDEA was added with volume 8. At that time IDEA was published by George Washington University. IDEA was later published by Pierce Law by agreement with the Pierce Law founder Dr. Robert Rines.

IDEA has become the preeminent academic IP Journal. It has been cited in many reported cases. See http://www.idea.piercelaw.edu/cited

You can find IDEA in print, on Lexis and Westlaw and on the Pierce Law Web at http://www.idea.piercelaw.edu/

GPO Access OR Thomas?

An article on LLRX describes the difference between two nifty government web sites: GPO Access and THOMAS. Both sites are federal government owned and operated and offer sometimes overlapping content, which can be a blessing when one site is experiencing technical difficulties.

The article points out the strengths of the two online services as follows:

• GPO's focus, and its strength, is providing online versions of official documents.
  
• THOMAS's strength is the integration of data and documents from many legislative sources, including GPO Access.

Author Peggy Garvin recommends GPO Access when your needs are for straightforward document retrieval, but uses THOMAS when more extensive research is needed.

Also included at the end of the article is a summary of the features of GovTrack, a privately run legislative information site. When I clicked the link, it timed out and I didn't get a look at the site. Not sure if it takes a long time to load or if it was merely web gremlins.

http://www.llrx.com/columns/govdomain6.htm
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/
http://thomas.loc.gov/
http://www.govtrack.us/

Alphabet Soup Unraveled

We've all had this experience: you're having what you consider an intelligent conversation with someone you don't know all that well except in a professional sense. All of a sudden the other person slips in an acronym that you've never heard and, worse, you don't stop the conversation in its tracks to ask the meaning of the acronym. Coming to the aid of everyone who's come across an acronym but doesn't know what it might mean is the website Acronyma. Go ahead, learn the difference between SGML and XML. Great site for those of us who aren't using a PDA or prefer PURLs to pearls.

http://www.acronyma.com/