Moritz Legal Information Blog

As you swipe your BuckID to enter the law library, look to your left at the legislation display we’ve created. The law librarians have highlighted three legislation-related matters that affect your professional life. The first set of panels provides a visual representation of the legislative process and some online sources you can consult for research. When a professor or supervising attorney or judge asks you to provide “the legislative history” for the Affordable Care Act, consider this display a starting point for your research. If you need a bit more help, stop by the reference desk ( or call, email, or chat ) for some quick tips to get your research moving in the right direction and completed accurately and efficiently. Second, our law school community is comprised of professors who have testified before the U.S. and Ohio Congresses. Not only are they exceptional teachers and scholars, they are often on the front lines of legislative decision-making. Professors Dakota Rudesill ,

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 eb

Websites “disappear” for any number of reasons. Presidential transitions , general link rot , or site design errors can all contribute to Internet content vanishing. What’s a researcher to do? Consider whether you can find a permanent url (also referred to as a “purl”) for the website; adding them to citations is becoming an increasingly common practice for authors who cite online content. In fact, the Moritz Law Library provides access to perma.cc, a tool for creating an archived document with a permanent url. If you are reading a law review article, for example, and it links to content that seems to no longer exist, consider searching Lexis Advance, Westlaw, or HeinOnline for the source/URL to see whether another scholar used perma.cc to preserve the web page’s content. If you are curious about using perma.cc for your own scholarship, please speak with one of the law librarians. Here is an example of the use of perma.cc (a “purl”) in a law review citation: See Kathleen Short,

As we begin a new semester, you might be interested in checking out two of the Moritz Law Library’s newer databases: Kluwer Arbitration and Kluwer IP Law. Kluwer Arbitration has resources on international arbitration, offering both primary sources and commentary by experts. These include full-text books and journals, as well as practice tools that can narrow research based on jurisdiction and topic. Full-text books and journals can also be found on Kluwer IP Law, along with selected U.S. trade secret cases and “smart charts” to compare specific aspects of IP law across jurisdictions. The two databases have near-identical interfaces. You can find access (including off-campus access) to both of them at the A-Z list of databases at the Law Library website.

The Moritz Law Library offers students access to web-based legal tutorials and other resources through the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), a non-profit consortium. CALI provides law students at member schools access to nearly 1000 interactive, web-based “lessons” in many subject areas including first-year topics like torts, criminal law, and contracts. These lessons, created by law professors and librarians at U.S. law schools, are useful as a supplemental learning tool. CALI also features a growing ebook collection , which now includes casebooks, rules of procedure and evidence, and law-related coloring books. To access CALI lessons, new Moritz users must first click the “Register” link in the upper right corner of the cali.org site and enter the Moritz student code . Use your OSU email address when registering. Please contact a Moritz reference librarian if you need assistance, or if you have questions about additional study aids in print or online.

Do you need a jump start on your seminar paper this semester? The Moritz Law Library has created a list of resources relevant to this process, including books on academic legal writing, scholarly research tools, and more. Here are a few research tips for academic legal writing: Sign up for a research consultation with a reference librarian at any stage, from topic selection to developing background research.   Explore the world beyond Google. The Moritz Law Library and the OSU Libraries offer a wide range of databases, books, and journals.   Keep track of your research process so that you don’t repeat steps and so that you can cite sources properly.   Synthesize sources. Academic legal writing draws on many supporting sources rather than only a few.   As you read law review articles, take note of the range and frequency of citations as a model for your own work.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum , just a five-minute walk from the law school, is currently exhibiting over 70 works of art by famous American political cartoonists and death row inmates. Political cartoonist Patrick Chappatte and journalist Anne-Frederique Widmann curated the exhibit, Windows on Death Row: Art from Inside and Outside the Prison Walls , which they intend to stimulate conversations around “politics, race, morality, and the question of equality under the law.” What can you expect to see at the exhibit? According to The Political Cartoon , political (also known as editorial) cartoons should demonstrate artistic quality; genuine sentiment; fresh, uncomplicated imagery; and lasting importance. In other words, don’t expect to laugh, but do expect some dry, complex wit and exceptional artistic talent. The inmates’ works are more diverse in form and medium, yet each convey something about daily prison life, the criminal justice system, or the experience of lifel