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Executive Orders Status Notes

On the state webpage http://www.state.nj.us/infobank/circular/eoindex.htm that lists the Governor’s Executive Orders, the useful practice of noting in the date-issued column when an order has been amended or rescinded by a later order seems to have fallen into abeyance recently. In particular, rescission needs to be noted for Corzine E.O.#1 (rescinded by Christie E.O.#24), Corzine E.O.#103 and Corzine E.O.#135 (both rescinded by Christie E.O.#19), and Christie E.O.#12 (rescinded by Christie E.O.#20). (This message has also been submitted to the Governor’s office.)

Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.

Court Law Libraries Feel the Budget Crunch

In Law.com, Henry Gottlieb writes –

There was a time when lawyers and laymen could go to most county courthouses and find the texts they needed for legal research and, in some large counties, a professional librarian to guide them.

Now, although most courthouses still have libraries, only six have professional law librarians, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts, which keeps tabs on library services in the counties but leaves the budgeting to assignment judges.

For the rest of the article, Click Here.

Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.

Westlaw Next – notes on New Jersey materials

A few points of difference between Westlaw Next and regular Westlaw, with respect to New Jersey materials (based on examination the week of May 17, 2010).

  • The unannotated version of the statutes found in Westlaw as NJ-ST is not found in Westlaw Next, where the specific content “New Jersey Statutes & Court Rules” includes annotations. But you can easily avoid searching the annotations by using the TE field in the main search box, or the “Statutory Text” field on the Advanced Search template.
  • Westlaw Next provides the content of the New Jersey Register, but only in the form furnished by NetScan, without any N.J.R. volume and page citations, so nothing is retrievable by N.J.R. citation. (Regular Westlaw has the N.J.R. as such, in the database NJ-ADR.)
  • In WestLaw Next’s New Jersey content options, besides the inclusive “New Jersey State Cases,” there are various subsets of specific content offered, evidently intended to allow you to limit a search to the highest court, or one of the lower levels of court, or the Tax Court. However , the scopes of these subsets are somewhat illogical and not clearly explained. For example, the subset “New Jersey Supreme Court Court” besides including, as it should, the modern Supreme Court and the older Court of Errors and Appeals, also includes, for 1790 through 1848 only, the former Supreme Court, which was not then the highest court. The 1849 to September 1948 cases of the former Supreme Court are included in the subset “New Jersey Superior Court.” The subset “New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division” happens to include Prerogative Court cases from 1830 to 1948. Moreover, the subsets collectively do not cover all the cases found in the inclusive set “New Jersey State Cases”: the Court of Chancery cases and County Court cases are found only in the inclusive set. (I submitted feedback to West about these subsets on May 19th.)
  • While many cases can be retrieved in Westlaw Next by entering their volume-and-page citations in the regular search box, this is not true for the New Jersey Law Reports. For those you need to use the citation field in the Advanced Search template, and put the citation in quotation marks. Omitting the quotation marks, or entering the citation in the regular search box on the home page, is likely to lead to a large result set in which the desired document will be hard to find. For example, try 100 N.J.L. 75.
Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.

Rutgers Law Library Honored By AALL

The Law Library at Rutgers School of Law–Newark has been selected to receive the American Association of Law Libraries’ 2010 Law Library Publications Award for Nonprint Material for its project titled “Same-Sex Marriage: A Selective Bibliography of the Legal Literature.” The bibliography was compiled by Paul Axel-Lute, Deputy Director and Collection Development Librarian.

For the full story, click here.

Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.

STR Responsible Sourcing Launches Labor Law Library

STR Responsible Sourcing (STR RS), a leading provider of ethical sourcing consulting services for Fortune 500 companies, announced that it has launched the most comprehensive and up-to-date online reference tool for labor laws and employment standards.

For more information, click here.

Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.

Thomson Reuters Launches WestlawNext — The Next Chapter in Legal Research

At a flashy, live music and multimedia event this week, at LegalTech in New York, Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) formally introduced what it is calling “the next generation in legal research.” The new platform, called WestlawNext, aims to simplify and streamline the front-end search experience and provide superior results using new back-end algorithms. The goal is to make legal professionals more efficient and give them the confidence that they’ve explored every relevant document.

For the full story, click here.

Visit NJLLA’s web site at http://www.njlla.org.