Law Library Reference's Weblog

House Katrina report available
The U.S. House of Representatives' report on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, A Failure of Initiative: The Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina is available here: http://katrina.house.gov and here: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/katrinareport/mainreport.pdf [PDF].

Economic Report of the President
From your Government Printing Office:
The Economic Report of the President is issued by the Executive Office of the President and the Council of Economic Advisers. It includes:

• Current and foreseeable trends and annual numerical goals concerning topics such as employment, production, real income, and Federal budget outlays;
• Employment objectives for significant groups of the labor force;
• Annual numeric goals;
• And a program for carrying out program objectives.

Also included is the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers. Each year, the Council of Economic Advisers submits this report on its activities during the previous calendar year in accordance with the requirements of Congress as set forth in section 10(d) of the Employment Act of 1946 as amended by the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.

The Economic Report of the President, 2006 is available on GPO Access at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/.

FY2007 Budget of the U.S.
The President's Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2007 is available on GPO Access at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/index.html.

Documents are available in ASCII text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), with many of the tables also available for separate viewing and downloading as spreadsheets in xls and comma delimited formats.

Statutes at Large on Hein
HeinOnline has released the full text of the United States Statues at Large. Now you can browse, view and print the Statutes at Large just like the 900+ law reviews also on HeinOnline.

HeinOnline is available from anywhere on Yale's campus or via the proxy server or VPN connection.

DOJ and CRS on NSA wiretapping
The Department of Justice has published a whitepaper outlining the administration's reading of the legal issues behind the controversial NSA warrantless wiretapping program. It is available from the Government Printing Office.
Additionally, the Library of Congress' non-partisan Congressional Research Service has published two reports related to the program. The reports are available from the Federation of American Scientists web site, through OpenCRS, a catalog of publicly available CRS reports.
1. Statutory Procedures Under Which Congress Is To Be Informed of U.S. Intelligence Activities, Including Covert Actions and
2. Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information.

International Practice Resource
Recently, the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State digitized selected documents from the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, from 1989 - 2003, in an effort "to provide the public with a ready source of current information on the views and practice of the Government of the United States in the arena of public and private international law."

Oxford Books Online
A new database, Oxford Scholarship Online, is available. This resource provides over 400 electronic books about politicial science, economics and finance from Oxford University Press, many of which are also available in print for more portable reading.

You can search these for these books in Morris by creating a keyword search for "Oxford Scholarship Online" and <your keyword>. You can also search the abstracts of each book's chapters directly at the Oxford site, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.

Opinion in Padilla v Hanft
The Fourth Circuit's December 21, 2005 opinion in Padilla v. Hanft is available here.

Intelligent Design Case
Here's the district court's order in the Pennsylvania Intelligent Design Case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. http://library.law.uiuc.edu/kitzmiller.pdf The full docket is available from the court's web site.

Orbis upgrade
Please note that this does not affect the library's catalog, MORRIS.

This year the Yale University Library will upgrade the Orbis library catalog software during the recess, and this will cause some additional service changes. The following services will be available December 23, 2005 to January 3, 2006:

	Borrowing books
	Returning books
	Searching Orbis
	Requesting material through Interlibrary loan

The following services will be limited or unavailable December 23, 2005 to January 3, 2006:

	Limited Privileges activities (no desk passes) this affects SML and some other libraries, not the law library.
	No Place Requests, retrieval or searching services through Orbis, this does not affect MORRIS.
	No recalls from books checked out from libraries other than the law library.
	No Eli Express, including items from the Library Shelving Facility (LSF).
	No access to “Your Library Account” including Place Requests in Orbis.
	No fine payments.
	No e-mail notices (e.g., courtesy reminders, recall notices, overdue notices, hold available notices, etc.) in Orbis.
	No Borrow Direct requests.
	Law school interlibrary loan requests received between December 23, 2005 and January 2, 2005 will be processed on January 3, 2006.
	No Borrow Direct or Interlibrary loan pick-up (unless the item arrived prior to December 22, 2005).

If you have any questions, please contact the law library's circulation desk at (203) 432-1608.

Rumsfeld v. FAIR MP3
A recording of the arguments in Rumsfeld v. FAIR is available to law students in Blackboard. Just log in and go to the "Library Databases" community. You'll find a link to the file there for a limited time.

"All work and no play . . .

. . .makes Jack a dull boy." -- James Howell, Paroimiographia (1659), p 12, middle of the right-hand column.

To help you avoid Jack's fate, the law library has a collection of new books (located across the Reading Room from the library entrance) and a collection of DVDs and videos in the Periodical Reading Room (at the right-hand end of the Reading Room). Enjoy!

Database Passwords . . .

. . . and off-campus access to databases.

You can use most of the databases that the university or law school buy from anywhere. Access to most of the databases is controlled by IP address (the database looks to see where you are coming from and if it thinks that you are coming from Yale, they let you in). If you want to get into one of these databases from off-campus, you will need to make the database think that you are coming from Yale. There are two tools that that will let you do this: the proxy server and VPN. Information about both is available here

Not all databases regulate access by IP address. Some require a password. Lexis and Westlaw are two obvious examples of this group. Each law student has their own Lexis and Westlaw passwords. With some other databases, the law school community shares a password. You can find these passwords in the Library Databases community on Blackboard. To find the community, log into Blackboard, select the "Community" tab, click on "browse the catalog" and then enter "library" in the search box. If you click on the link to "enroll" (on the right-hand side of the screen), the database listing will remain in your community tab.

Finally, a very few databases require that you use specific computers at the law library (those are the databases that have the code "YLS workstations" in the "access restrictions" column on the law library databases page.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact a reference librarian at 203.432.1606 or lawref(at)pantheon.yale.edu

Thank you.

Terrorism Database Subscription
The Law Library is engaged in trial subscription with EBSCO Host to their new International Security and Counter Terrorism Reference Center database. The trial subscription lasts through December 31, 2005. Be sure to comment to this blog or email us with your thoughts on the database after you use it. Your opinions will help us decide whether to purchase a permanent subscription.

Historic Newspapers

At Yale, we have access to several several national newspapers with coverage going back to the 19th century. These databases provide searchable full-text access as well as page images. The papers can be search individually or in combination (to search in combination, connect to this page and make your selections from the list at the bottom of the page).

The current stable of papers

• Boston Globe (March 4, 1872 - Dec. 31, 1922)
• Chicago Tribune (April 23, 1849 - Dec. 31, 1985)
• Christian Science Monitor (Nov 25, 1908-Dec 31, 1992)
• Los Angeles Times (Dec. 4, 1881 - Dec. 31, 1985)
• The New York Times (Sept 18,1851-Dec 31, 2002)
• The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 1889-Dec 31, 1988)
• The Washington Post (Dec 12, 1877-Dec 31, 1989)

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact a reference librarian at 203.432.1606 or lawref (at) pantheon.yale.edu