Moritz Legal Information Blog

Whether you are writing a brief or a seminar paper, take care to avoid plagiarism. Your legal readers, from judges to fellow scholars, expect to be able to identify which words and ideas are yours and which come from others, in part to evaluate the evidence underlying your arguments. The Moritz Law Library offers resources on identifying and avoiding plagiarism in the guide to Legal Writing and Research Success. Here are a few tips: Keep track of your research. Use a research log to note useful resources, identify proper citations for each source, and trace your process.  Put quotation marks around quoted language as you work. It is too easy to copy and paste and forget to cite later.  Do not worry about overciting. In both practical and academic legal writing, because all nonoriginal content must be credited, you will see more citation than often appears in the work of other disciplines. If you need to review Bluebook basics, take a look at Peter W. Martin’s free ebook, I

Want to search for Moritz alums who practice in Cleveland? Local lawyers who specialize in health law? Prepare for networking and interviews, informational and otherwise, by brushing up on your people searching skills. The library’s Career Resources guide includes some resources and strategy for finding out about people. Since many of our students practice in Ohio, we’d like to highlight a few local bar associations with online directories: the Columbus Bar Association , the Cincinnati Bar Association , and the Toledo Bar Association . These freely available tools offer limited search options, so for a more nuanced search, you’ll need to use other tools. For example, this link illustrates a search for Moritz or "Ohio State" J.D. alums who practice health law in Cleveland, as listed by Westlaw's Profiler. Why did our search terms include Moritz and "Ohio State"? The law school adopted the name Moritz after a 2001 donation, so some alums may not use th

The Moritz Law Library seeks qualified candidates for a Reference Librarian position. This position will support the work of the Moritz College of Law's new Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DPEC) . Other duties include providing sophisticated research and reference assistance to faculty, students, and other users of the Moritz Law Library and teaching the required first-year Legal Analysis and Writing I (LAW I) course or an advanced legal research course. The successful candidate will possess a Master of Library Science from an ALA accredited (or foreign equivalent) school and a JD from an ABA accredited (or foreign equivalent) institution; in-depth knowledge of legal sources and legal research; strong service orientation; excellent oral and written communications skills; and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively. The Moritz College of Law is an integral part of one of the world’s great educational institutions. Founded in 1891 and consistently the top-ranke

The Internet has a wealth of free online information, but it isn’t always easy to tell what’s authentic. When supporting assertions based on federal law, data, reports, and other materials, it’s imperative that you know you are citing information that has not been altered. Happily, the Government Publishing Office’s (GPO) latest website, www.govinfo.gov , designed to house all known federal government information that originated in print or was born digital, is now live and no longer in beta form. The site will continue to provide authenticated and certified PDF documents , so researchers can trust that the documents have not been altered since they were disseminated by the GPO. You may be wondering, “But what about FDSys ?” FDSys still exists for now (it’s scheduled to be retired at the end of 2018), but the replacement website, govinfo.gov, is designed to be more up-to-date and user friendly, operating in the way most online researchers today expect sophisticated databases to oper

Doing in-depth research on a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in the last 30-40 years? Try using the ProQuest Supreme Court Insight database now subscribed to by the Moritz Law Library. Beyond the opinion and oral argument transcript, the database includes party and amicus briefs filed at both the petition and merit stages. Also included are joint appendices, which consist of important items from the lower court record such as trial court filings, transcripts of witness testimony, key exhibits, and lower court rulings. Researchers can search for documents by keyword, authoring Justice, brief author, subject, popular law name, date, or a combination of these. The database also integrates well with related resources like the Legislative Insight database, where researchers can browse or search all the legislative history documents associated with a particular federal legislative Act. Like nearly all Moritz Law Library databases, Supreme Court Insight can be accessed on-campus or off-camp