1L Book Scholarship

FOR: GGU 1L students

PRIZE: $500 Amazon.com gift card 

FOR WHAT: For registering your Lexis and Lexis Advance IDs.

In early November, all 1Ls who have registered both IDs, watched a short video, and taken a quiz will be entered into a drawing for a $500 book scholarship.

HOW TO ENTER: The 1L Book Scholarship is based on the completion of both steps 1 and 2 of registration, as well as the Making Class Preparation Easier video and attached quiz.  After completing registration, watching the video, and taking the short quiz, students will be awarded 1,200 points and also will be automatically entered into the drawing, which will take place in early November.

THE BLUEBOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A MOBILE APP

After an extensive vetting process, the editors* of The Bluebook, A Uniform System of Citation, have selected the rulebook app as the exclusive mobile app to publish The Bluebook on mobile devices. The Bluebook is the authoritative style guide for legal citation in the United States used by lawyers, scholars, judges, law students, paralegals, and others involved in the legal profession. A joint venture of the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal, it is the most widely circulated law-related book in the world.

“The rulebook app helps us keep our promise of making The Bluebook as accessible and useful as possible,” said Conor Tochilin, president of the Harvard Law Review Association. “We are excited to see The Bluebook available in such an easy-to-use digital format.”

The rulebook app easily allows legal professionals to reference federal and state court rules, codes, and style manuals. The app incorporates all the functionality of paper rule books, such as highlighting, bookmarking, and note-taking, and adds functionality unique to digital devices, including searching, hyperlinking, and multitasking. It also keeps the mobile version of The Bluebook, as well as its other content, current with regular updates that are seamlessly integrated without overwriting the user’s personal highlights
and annotations.

“We are honored that the rulebook app has been chosen as the mobile app for The Bluebook,” said Gregory Hoole, president of Ready Reference Apps, the developer of the rulebook app. “There is an unmistakable paradigm shift occurring from paper to paperless publication. The Bluebook editors’ proactive move into this new space will provide a great benefit to law students and legal professionals alike.” Currently in its nineteenth edition, The Bluebook was first compiled in 1926 by Erwin Griswold, a Harvard Law Review editor and later, dean of Harvard Law School. 

Availability
The mobile version of The Bluebook is now available for individual sale via the rulebook app on all Apple iOS devices, including iPad, iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rulebook/id454619081?mt=8. Law firms, court systems and other large organizations can also purchase The Bluebook in bulk on behalf of their employees via an enterprise version of the rulebook app, which can be customized specifically for the organization’s needs.

New Law Students: Make Friends With A Librarian

Great blog post from the Law Librarian Blog:  New Law Students: Make Friends With A Librarian:

U.S. News & World Report has a short post out for new law students who will start their law school career in the next few weeks.  It offers four points for navigating law school:

1. Come prepared
2. Focus on finals
3. Make friends
4. Remove distractions

I’d like to focus for a moment on the third one.  The author suggests making connections within the law school and the wider university through activities and other diversions as a break from the law school routine.  That’s great advice as law school can be a highly competitive grind.  I’d like to make one other suggestion that may help the new student:  get to know a librarian.  Why?  Because we know stuff that students do not.

We know the cycle of the law school academic year.  It normally doesn’t shock us when 1Ls invade the library for the legal writing treasure hunt.  It’s not exactly the running of the bulls, but there are certain parallels.  For students it’s a new experience.  For us, it’s “been there done that.”  Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even for the simple stuff.  There’s usually a ready answer that can make a student’s life easier.

We also know the resources.  It may be nice to have all of those apps on tablets and phones.  And I’m sure there are plenty of new law students who have a lot of experience doing research in college.  Legal research, however, is a different animal.  Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law are not free in the wild.  The mechanics can be a challenge despite the trend to provide Google-style interfaces.  Librarians understand how this stuff works and can help.

I’ll offer related word of advice:  not everything is online.  More important, not everything is online and is free.   It’s more often than not a pay for play world.  Luckily the law library has licensed a lot of the good stuff.  We can tell students what information is easily accessible and what is not.  We can also explain how to get remote access to stuff, like articles, hard to find documents, exams, and other materials.

Librarians know the law school.  We’re not the concierge for the school, but we know how it works.  We can tell you generally which office likely handles what responsibility.  We can tell you where are public copiers, scanners, microform readers (yes, they are still necessary) and other useful resources may be.  We can also tell you generally what your expectations should be in using them.  The library is probably the friendliest location in the law school.  Students use the library facility regularly in spite of the integration of technology into the curriculum.  We try to make the place a comfortable and quiet space to study.  Take advantage of that.

So, make friends with a librarian.  We won’t break the rules for you.  But our institutional knowledge of the law program and legal information can make a student’s life easier.  We even know where the bathrooms are located.  Don’t be afraid to ask. 

Welcome New Law Students!

Orientation for 1Ls begins next week, and a great deal of information will be disseminated over a very short period of time.


One thing that you can do to help yourself - and that takes only a moment - is to "like" the law library on Facebook.  Find us here.