Moritz Legal Information Blog

Exam season yields a law library full of anxious students.   How do you cope with exam stress?   The growing mindfulness movement provides one option:   mindfulness meditation.   In fact, an increasing number of lawyers find benefit from meditation, including Justice Breyer .     One advocate describes the benefits of mindful meditation , noting that through this technique lawyers often "enhance their capacity to be more genuine and present for what arises in their interactions with their clients, their colleagues, with witnesses, and their adversaries,"  adding "[t]hey are also able to focus with greater clarity on assignments and work." Interested in trying this practice or in learning more?   Today, the Ohio Union is offering several meditation sessions .   The Mindful Law Student offers many related resources, and the law library’s collection includes Scott Rogers’s Mindfulness for Law Students .

A recent article in The Daily Reporter  explains how one condo association addressed the unfortunate situation of condo owners failing to pick up after their pooches. The solution? Doggy DNA testing. It was simply a matter of revising the condo rules. Now, condo owners who have dogs must pay $60 to have their dogs' cheeks swabbed to record DNA information. When a dog is not picked up after, the sample is tested (a $50 charge), and the offending dog's owner is responsible for the testing charge plus a $100 fine. Problem solved. Curious to know whether Ohio condo laws permit these kinds of restrictions on owners? Check out Ohio Condominium Law in the Reserve Room.

Clearly you love law blogs (or---ugh---blawgs). You're reading this one. If you're looking for new blogs to peruse, check out the American Bar Association 7th Annual Blawg 100. You can vote for your favorites. Here are a few of our recommendations: The Girl's Guide to Law School JD Careers Out There Technologist Dewey B Strategic

As perhaps the most famous dissenter, Justice Scalia knows how to craft a barb .   And he’s not alone.   The Columbus Dispatch describes the “pointed language” of dissents written by justices of the Ohio Supreme Court.   The Dispatch reports, for example:   “ In June, [Justice] Pfeifer took issue with a majority opinion that relied on a statute containing a 307-word sentence by writing a one-sentence dissent: 300-plus words to lampoon the ‘24 lines of unrelenting abstruseness.’” Vociferous dissents may be fun to read, but how useful are they?   Here are a few resources for exploring this type of judicial opinion: Justice Ginsberg offers her views on The Role of Dissenting Opinions in a lecture published by the Minnesota Law Review . PBS offers discussion of several “famous dissents,” including dissenting opinions in Korematsu and Dred Scott . Check out some of our titles, like Scalia Dissents and Foreshadows of the Law:   Supreme Court Dissents and Constitutional Developm

Enjoy your holiday break, and we hope you have safe travels. Law students are able to come in to the library using their BuckIDs over the Thanksgiving break. Here are our holiday hours: Wednesday, Nov. 27 7:15am - 5:00pm Thursday, Nov. 28 CLOSED Friday, Nov. 29 10:00am - 5:00pm Saturday, Nov. 30 10:00am - 5:00pm Sunday, Dec. 1 10:00am - midnight No reference service Thursday, Nov. 28 and Friday, Nov. 29.

If you love discount shopping, an overabundance of food, and the opportunity to wear sweat pants for four days straight as you watch football over Thanksgiving weekend, take a minute to give thanks for Sarah Josepha Hale . (The legal connection? She was married to a lawyer; yet another reason to praise Ms. Hale's brilliance!) Ms. Hale was a fervent supporter of Thanksgiving, which wasn't actually a nationally recognized celebration until 1863. She wrote numerous letters to presidents ( including Lincoln ) petitioning them to make Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. Lincoln acquiesced . (According to abrahamlincolnonline.org, "Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states.") Where might you find an actual copy (like a pdf scan) of Lincoln's proclamation? Presidential proclamations are currently found in the Federal Register , but that government publication didn't exis

Cocaine has been in the news quite a bit lately. This left a Slate.com blogger puzzling , "Why is cocaine metric?" Which in turn left me puzzling, how do we quantify drugs for purposes of defining crimes here in Ohio? We all know .08 is the customary blood alcohol limit. Here's what I've found for cocaine: For BUIs (boating under the influence), cocaine in the bloodstream or urine is measured in nanograms per milliliter. For possession generally, Ohio measures severity of the crime in grams. Knowing this, consider the blogger's reasoned thinking: As a fan of powers of two, it seems to me that it would be nice to traffic pounds of cocaine with each pound divided into 128 eight balls. In metric units, a single kilogram of cocaine contains 285.71 eight balls, which is totally ridiculous.