Moritz Legal Information Blog

Although the Constitution has been around for more than 200 years, Constitution Day is a relatively new phenomenon.  As the Senate explains: "To encourage all Americans to learn more about the Constitution, Congress in 1956 established Constitution Week, to begin each year on September 17th, the date in 1787 when delegates to the Convention signed the Constitution. In 2004, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia included key provisions in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of Fiscal Year 2005 designating September 17th of each year as Constitution Day and requiring public schools and governmental offices to provide educational programs to promote a better understanding of the Constitution." If you'd like to explore this legislative history in more detail, start with the historical and revision notes for 36 U.S.C. § 106 .  Not historical enough for you?  The ABA notes that we are nearing the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, contributing to this year's des

We have one more story to add to the list of attorneys with mental health and addiction issues. Unfortunately, it's less frequent that we have stories of recovery to post, though a blog post from a few months back did highlight one attorney's success after getting help. In that post, we identified several resources here locally that are designed to keep you on track or get you back on track if you suffer a personal or professional setback. If you'd prefer to do some reading up before reaching out, we also have several books on wellness. In fact, we've pull all of our wellness books into a small collection in the Reserve Room, so you can quickly access them. We've written here in the past about exam stress, but really, law school can be stressful year round. It's not just the challenge of class; it's the challenge of figuring out a job or a career, perhaps for the first time. Don't worry if you're worried. Just ask for help.

Librarians, researchers, and attorneys have come to love PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the online database of federal pleadings. It's a terrific resource for those following cases or who need examples of real complaints or motions for summary judgment. When BloombergLaw came along, it made searching federal dockets even easier. Alas, PACER has disabled online access to selected court records for several appellate courts, and commercial databases (i.e., Bloomberg, Westlaw, and Lexis) will only carry what they have downloaded. In other words, they are not a complete substitute. For the latest updates on access, check out these excellent blog posts by librarians at the Kathrine R. Everett Law Library at UNC: Changes to Online Access to Federal Court Records  and What Happened to the Information Removed from PACER?

The Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction has been awarded to John Grisham for Sycamore Row . We have the book in our collection if you need some light reading to take your mind off of studying. If that novel is off the shelf, you're welcome to any of the other John Grisham novels we have available: The Appeal The Associate The Birthday The Brethren The Broker The Chamber The Client The Confession The Firm The Innocent Man The King of Torts The Last Juror The Litigators The Partner The Pelican Brief The Racketeer The Rainmaker The Runaway Jury The Street Lawyer The Summons The Testament A Time to Kill Inspired by Mr. Grisham's success? Request a copy of How to Write and Sell Mystery Fiction . Simply click on the catalog link provided through the book title, then select "Request this Item" from the menu bar above the catalog record.

Copyright is my bailiwick, so I was intrigued when Slate.com posted an article stating although        "[e]very day, movie and TV producers succeed in getting videos that have been posted without their consent taken down from major websites," celebrities cannot get photos they have taken with their own cameras taken down. In other words, copyright infringement is a claim available to some content owners but not others. What's up with that ? According to Slate, "Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act , or at least the courts’ sweeping reading of it, arguably allows them to publish these photos legally." What's one way to find this "sweeping" case law? Log in to Lexis.com and type "1996 Communications Decency Act" in the search bar. Select the "Legis" tab on the search results screen. Scroll down to 47 USCS 230. Scroll down and you can see cases decided on this section of the Act.

Confusion often marks the plight of the law student, especially in the first few weeks of this new endeavor.  Sometimes confusion may stem not from misunderstanding a case but from inconstant judicial logic. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean at the UC Irvine School of Law, identifies logical variations in three recent Supreme Court opinions dealing with bankruptcy:  "All come to reasonable conclusions. But they are markedly inconsistent in their approach to interpreting the bankruptcy act and to statutory interpretation more generally."  Judicial inconsistency may be more common than you'd like , but some argue that it is not necessarily an evil.  Justin Driver , for example, discusses inconsistencies in one judge's work, Justice Stevens, deeming inconsistency a "virtue."  So if you see ambiguities, think about reasons underlying them as well as what advantages and disadvantages you see in them.

The ABA Law Journal brings us this headline: Prisoner exonerations are at an all-time high, and it’s not because of DNA testing , which states "Of the 87 known exonerations in 2013, 27 were cases in which no crimes had taken place. Almost half of the no-crime exonerations were for nonviolent-crime charges, mostly drug convictions." Law professor Samuel Gross have created a National Registry of Exonerations . Professor Gross and his colleagues primarily find exoneration cases through news articles. Curious to try your hand at finding cases with exonerated defendants by looking at newspaper articles? We have a number of resources here in the law library for electronic versions of newspapers. In our Accuracy Check Resource research guide, for example, we've listed a number of them . The research guide also includes a link to all of the newspaper databases to which OSU has subscribed. Factiva , Press Display ,  LexisNexis , Westlaw , and BloombergLaw are also online sourc