Moritz Legal Information Blog

Did you know that Ohio State is among a select group of “Big 10” and other major research universities participating with Google in a major book scanning project that first launched nearly a decade ago?    The Google Books Library Project is the largest project of its kind ever undertaken to digitize printed materials in academic research libraries.   OSU began pulling and sending books from campus libraries two years ago and now it’s the Law Library’s turn to participate.   Out-of-copyright books in the public domain (published pre-1923) have been identified for the project.     Books will be unavailable to patrons for a period of about eight weeks, while they are in transit and being scanned at a facility out-of-state.   If you have a question or need an item right away, please contact the Circulation staff who can assist with locating a copy through interlibrary loan. Digital copies of the scanned books eventually will be made available to users through a digital archive known

The idea of fugitives seems old fashioned to me: I can't fathom committing a crime and somehow hiding out to avoid prosecution. It just seems like a lot of work. And also, U.S. Marshals on the hunt for a guy on the lam? That sounds like a TV show to me rather than a modern-day reality. So how intriguing is it that Columbus is home to its very own fugitive from justice, Tommy Thompson the Shipwreck King of Ohio? Well, he is a fugitive no more . Mr. Thompson raised $55 million in equity and debt financing in an effort to salvage gold from a sunken ship. Investors did not see the return they thought they would and have filed suit. When he disappeared after skipping out on a warrant, he became a fugitive. For some time, he's been living in a Hilton in Florida. Mr. Thompson's latest case (a criminal complaint for failure to appear) was filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida. Check out Bloomberg Law's docket (case 9-mj-080499-DLB) for more info

We've written here fairly extensively about Twitter, and it's no wonder. Twitter presents a fascinating opportunity for librarians to learn new systems for organizing data. Hashtags are really just like the subject headings in a library catalog and can give a person insight into collective consciousness. Now you have at your fingertips a resource for learning about the collective consciousness of faculty. The Faculty Lounge has an informal, mostly accurate census of law faculty around the country who are on Twitter . Not on the list yet is our newest professor tweeting: Ric Simmons! Follow him @4thAmdBlog to read the latest on search and seizure law.

In continuing recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, here are several exhibitions which might be of interest: At the Library of Congress website, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom .  The physical exhibit is in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, but the online exhibit features a great deal of multimedia , including interviews with author Toni Morrison, Tuskegee Airman Lee Archer, and NAACP lawyer Benjamin Hooks. Also at the Library of Congress website is Voices of Civil Rights , a solely online exhibition focusing on oral histories of individuals of the Civil Rights Movement. Closer to home, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum recently concluded an exhibit on Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics .  You can also learn about their newest exhibits here .

Professor Ric Simmons recently posted on his new blog about Fourth Amendment issues related to the Silk Road. The Silk Road is part of the dark web/deep web/dark Internet ---that part of the Internet that isn’t searched by Google. Though many used the Silk Road purely to avoid prying eyes, others use it to conduct illegal transactions without prying eyes. The person who ran the site, Ross Ulbricht, is currently on trial, and one of the pre-trial issues, which Professor Simmons addresses, is whether an illegal hack is an illegal search. For more information, check out Professor Simmons's blog Search and Seizure , "exploring the reach and the limits of the Fourth Amendment in the modern world."

The career and legislative accomplishments of Congressman William M. McCulloch (R-Piqua), who represented Ohio’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives (1947-1973), are currently featured in a new library exhibit curated by Jeffrey Thomas, Archivist of the University Libraries’ Ohio Congressional Archives . The exhibit includes facsimile reproductions of papers, correspondence, photos and other items included in the Archives’ collection of McCulloch’s papers. An alumnus of the OSU College of Law (Class of 1925), McCulloch had a distinguished career as a lawyer, politician and member of Congress during a turbulent era. He is receiving renewed attention today for playing a pivotal role in ensuring passage of key civil rights legislation during the 1960’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later legislation to end housing discrimination. The exhibit highlights McCulloch’s legislative accomplishments, service on crime commissions and w

Revelry after Monday night's national football championship got a bit out of hand . Police used tear gas and/or pepper spray to control the crowd of rowdy students. I skimmed the photos, and I am pleased to report I did not spot a single law student in the bunch. I did wonder, however, how many of those on the streets and causing property damage aspire to be law students. With this in mind, I posed a question to our bar exam expert, Katherine Kelly : If the person who tweeted about the torn down Ohio Stadium goal post (or actually helped take it down) was a law student and they were caught, could that affect their bar admission? (Because as you all know as future lawyers, there are differences between committing a crime, getting caught committing a crime, and gleefully taking credit for a crime by posting evidence of the crime on social media that will last forever .) Here's Professor Kelly's response: "Absolutely. That person would have to report it on the C

When I was in law school, we had an attorney come speak who'd accomplished what was touted as a wildly rare feat: he'd argued TWO cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. To emphasize how rare this is, we were told the Court receives around 10,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari per year and only a fraction of those are granted and heard (less than 100). I was duly impressed, but it turns out I was not doing my due diligence. I didn't ask the right questions when given statistics designed to wow. Turns out for some attorneys, their petitions are reliably granted by the Court. So, it is quite possible the attorney I heard didn't have a mere 75/10,000 chance of being heard. Instead, his odds were likely  much better. Reuters news service did a little research and produced The Echo Chamber, which concluded that in the last nine years, "66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Th

Slate has prepared an extraordinary mash-up of performances by the Duck's marching band and TBDBITL in the interest of assessing who would win the national title if band performance was key. For more on copyright issues and marching bands, check out our previous post . Go Bucks!

We've written here before about how to get a cheap flight, and if you were lucky enough to score tickets to the national college football championship, you may be scratching your head on how to afford a flight to Dallas. Plane tickets from CMH are running around $600. Skiplagged to the rescue? The service basically works like this: Let's say a flight to Chicago from Columbus is $279, but a flight to Madison, Wisconsin, with a layover in Chicago is $259. Skiplagged tells you so you can purchase the ticket to Madison and simply "miss" your connection to Madison and save $20. Genius entrepreneurship or something illegal? Well, you've been in law school for at least four months now or up to two years and four months. If you wanted to sue, what would you sue for? (Because you know someone wants to sue the creator .) I puzzled over it for a while; then I did what any good lawyer should do: Look it up. I went to Bloomberg Law (you should have received a usernam

The Moritz Law Library may be lovely and its librarians oh-so-helpful, but you have additional resources for those times you are downtown doing legal research. One library in particular is in an extraordinary new space, has plenty of room, and can provide meeting space for attorneys and county employees on official business: the Franklin County Law Library . Check out a great video of what the FCLL has to offer.