Detainees transferred to Guantanamo

From the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, September 6, 2006:

Biographies of High Value Terrorist Detainees Transferred to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay .

Human rights: Israel / Lebanon

United Nations
UN Human Rights Council names experts to probe Israeli civilian killings in Lebanon
United Nations press release
September 1, 2006

No Justice, No Peace? re Hassan Nasrallah war crimes
Michael I. Krauss, Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law, and J. Peter Pham, Director, Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs, James Madison University
August 4, 2006

The UN-NGO Connection: spreading the message of hate and terrorism
Anne Bayefsky, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, and Visiting Professor Law, Touro Law Center Institute for Human Rights
June 12, 2006

Human Rights Watch
Fatal Strikes: Israel's indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Lebanon
Human Rights Watch
August 2006

Letters between Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch and Avi Bell, Professor of Law, Bar Ilan University and Visiting Professor of Law, Fordham University Law School, and others

Amnesty International
Israel/Lebanon: deliberate destruction or “collateral damage? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure
August 23, 2006

Amnesty International redefines war crimes
Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
August 23, 2006

Persuasive authority : acquisition and use

The other day a student at the reference desk asked if NESL's acquisition of titles implied pre-screening such that he could safely assume any source he'd find here would not be, to put it bluntly, bunk.

Certainly we screen potential acquisitions. For secondary authority, factors considered include the credentials, reputation, prior works of authors or publishers, the importance of the subject to curriculular or professorial research goals, plus currency, format, functionality, and price. Alas, none of this guarantees against the acquisition of bunk.

Below, arguably, in the context of human rights and the law of war, some recent bunk debunked, illustrating that, for this generation of law students, new media may become a factually and legally significant component of their legal research.

Reuters and Associated Press
Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?
Little Green Footballs blog
August 5, 2006

Other instances of 'fauxtography'
Little Green Footballs blog
September 2, 2006

The Corruption of the Media: Final Report re Qana
EU Referendum blog
Richard North and Helen Szamuely
August 15, 2006

The Red Cross Ambulance Incident
Zombie blog
August 23, 2006

Reuters Admits, then covers up taking Hezbo instructions
Kerry Rowe, The American Thinker blog
September 5, 2006

Money laundering: report

The Financial Action Task Force ( FATF ), an inter-governmental body created at the G-7 Summit in 1989, with currently 31 member countries (plus the European Commission and the Co-operation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf), was invited to assess the United States' compliance with FATF's recommendations. Here is the 17-page report, June 23, 2006: Summary of the Third Mutual Evaluation Report on Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism - United States of America .

FATF standards are comprised of the Forty Recommendations on Money Laundering and the Nine Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing .

The Counterterrorism Blog provides a summary of the above-mentioned report in this post .

FATF reports on other countries here .

U.S. Sentencing Commission: report

U.S. Sentencing Commission: Preliminary Quarterly Data Report , through June 30, 2006. Data on sentencing relative to the federal sentencing guideline ranges in light of U.S. v. Booker , 543 US 220 (2005), which rendered the guidelines advisory rather than mandatory.

ABA accreditation task force

Yesterday, the new chairman of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar formed a task force to "take a fresh look at accreditation from a policy perspective".

Blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy , Professor Bernstein comments generally here .

Controversy specifically concerning ABA accreditation diversity Standard 211 was noted in NESL blogpost of April 15, 2006 .

New NESL database: Wilson Retrospective

On August 24, 2006, NESL activated an IP-linked subscription to H.W. Wilson's Index to Legal Periodicals, 1908-1981 (onsite). This complements NESL's existing subscription to Index to Legal Periodicals and Books, 1982-. These two databases can be searched individually or together on the WilsonWeb interface (linked on NESL Database List both under the I's and the W's).

While the retrospective index is not a full-text databse, it should link directly into full-text if available on HeinOnline, a full-text retrospective journal database to which NESL also subscribes. A search on the phrase "Portia Law School" (NESL's original name) yielded a citation to a 1931 issue of Notre Dame Lawyer in which the case White v. Portia Law School, 174 NE 187 (Mass), was discussed. Look on the left side of the Wilsonweb interface and click on the icon of a piece of paper (mouse on the icon reads "Check for full text"). You will go into Portia catalog; then click on HeinOnline and find the volume and page. In this case, the name of the journal was changed from Notre Dame Lawyer to Notre Dame Law Review, but you can find the article by volume (6) and page (380). The article is entitled "Writ of mandamus. Reinstatement of expelled student. The Notre Dame Laywer, 6 March 1931, p. 380-1. .

The 1982- Wilson database also will link into HeinOnline; and, in addition, there are approximately 250 of the journals for which Wilson directly provides full-text. You can see which journals have full-text available by selecting "Legal Periodicals and Books" database, and then clicking either "Database Descriptions" (above the database name) or "Journal Directory (on the left-hand side). There you can create a dynamic list by selecting search by "Full-text".

Since Wilson and Hein are subscription databases, you must either view them online or log into the proxy server remotely with the barcode on the back of your NESL ID card.

Topic selection: cited legal blogs

As promised to law review associates in the context of suggesting that legal blogs may help generate ideas for their articles (posted here because it may be of more general interest):

Judicial opinions in which blogs are cited ;

Law review articles in which blogs are cited .

Welcome back!

Advice for second-year law students, from:

David Bernstein , Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law;

Jim Lindgren , Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law.

And, of course, welcome back also to third and fourth-year students, faculty and staff.

Welcome!

Welcome, class of '09 and '10.

Advice for entering law students, from:

Ilya Somin , Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law;

Orin Kerr , Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School and Brannon Denning , Associate Professor of Law, Cumberland School of Law;

Betsy McKenzie , Director of Moakley Library and Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School;

CALI's Advice for new law students: web roundup . (CALI is a publisher of computer-assisted legal instruction.);

The Wall Street Journal Online - link roundup (some overlap with above).

Lastly, our advice: the law librarian is your friend!