Captain Copyright - A Canadian Creation. So I'm thinking about whether it is legal and/or advisable to sell my old 1L outlines to the hoard of current 1Ls that would undoubtedly pay dollars for a customized outline.  There was a service called TakeNote @ Cornell that produced custom class notes on red paper, designed to foil would-be photocopiers.  (They hired TAs to take notes during that class that you undoubtedly skipped because of your subscription to Takenote Example of Intro to Wines TakeNote). So I ask - Would be infringing upon a professor's copyright? The concept of copyrighting a lecture (technically, a live performance) was briefly addressed in my copyright class.  Additionally, an excellent law review titled "Note: 'Profiting At My Expense': An Analysis of the Commercialization of Professors' Lecture Notes" by Ashley T. Barnett - 9 J. Intell. Prop. L. 137 (Fall 2001) discusses the issue of commercial note-taking services, advocating that additional protections should be adopted. Does federal copyright law prevent a commercial note service from copying a lecture delivered by a professor? The answer is: it depends. The legality of buying and selling lecture notes or of posting lecture notes on the Internet seems to be a gray area of the ...

The Supreme Court began hearing oral argument for the fall term this morning.  SCOTUS Blog always has great coverage of what cases are being argued today and a preview of the cases this week.  Two interesting criminal procedure cases are being argued Tuesday: Herring v. United States (07-513), on whether courts must suppress evidence seized during an arrest made as a result of faulty information provided by another law enforcement agency Arizona v. Gant (07-542), on whether police must show a threat to their safety or the preservation of evidence to conduct a warrantless search of a car whose occupant was recently arrested. So I was wondering if argument actually influences the decisions of the Justices.  Interesting article from the Yale Pocket Part - an online publication of the Yale Law Journal. Frederick Liu's Citing the Transcript of Oral Argument: Which Justices Do It and Why analyzes empirical data from 1994-2007, examining the number of citations to the oral argument transcript that are included in opinions. Liu also details how Justices use oral argument. The three main reasons Justices cite the transcript are: (1) to describe an advocate's affirmative position; (2) to record an advocate's concession; and (3) to note an advocate's representation ...

Students Rejoice in ... The new building will indeed be awesome.

I would be interested to know how many times a certain R.E.M. song has been referenced within the last week. As a rational consumer of goods (law firms) who is in the process of making an important choice (2L summer employment), I've been reading a lot about how the recent bailouts of Fannie/Freddie and AIG, and failures of Bear Sterns and Lehman Bros. (hereinafter "1929" or "the crisis") will change the legal landscape.  Recognizing that my future as a litigation associate will be significantly impacted by this crisis, even if I don't specialize in financial services, is an important first step. I believe that law students should be aware of the business world to be better able to serve their clients, and see two major consequences of the current financial crisis: (1) Firms will change their employment practices, and (2) Clients will demand more of their firms. The Shrinking Legal Employment Market My advice for 1Ls - study harder, for 2Ls - job search smarter (diversify), for 3Ls - pray.  There's no doubt that the top large law firms will be directly affected by these business failures. Above the Law conducted a survey of associates in major markets to gauge their reactions.  It's a ...

Document reviewers celebrated on Monday when the House passed S. 2450, a bill designed to add Federal Rule of Evidence 502 - "Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product; Limitations on Waiver."  The main point, as described in this point of law article, is that since the production of privileged documents during discovery acts as a waiver to that privilege, firms are spending a significant amount of time on privilege review to ensure that documents don't slip through and destroy their case.  FRE 502 would remove this barrier, serving both judicial economy and junior associates' sanity. (b) Inadvertent Disclosure- When made in a Federal proceeding or to a Federal office or agency, the disclosure does not operate as a waiver in a Federal or State proceeding if: (1) the disclosure is inadvertent; (2) the holder of the privilege or protection took reasonable steps to prevent disclosure; and (3) the holder promptly took reasonable steps to rectify the error, including (if applicable) following Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5)(B). And Josh - Happy Large Hadron Collider Day - I know you've been waiting for this for a long time.

Legal Geekery contributor Kim told me about the entertaining website of Marque Lawyers, who seek to revolutionize the legal industry. MARQUE exists!  We are Australia’s newest law firm, and we have the single ambition of completely changing the way that law is practised. We do not charge by the hour. We do not charge you when we pick up the phone or send you an email. We do not charge you for photocopying or travel time or any of that kind of stuff. We invest in long term relationships with our clients, and we measure the value of our services in the same way that you do. We have a lot to offer, and we provide it in a way that doesn’t hurt. There’s a lot more, but that’ll do for starters. So I laughed for a bit, but then recognized that the firm has a pretty sweet address for a non-traditional fee structure.  Granted they're up-and-coming, but that section of Sydney is somewhere I'd like to practice. And because of the the ongoing job search, I've been visiting a ton of firm sites recently, and have stumbled across some pretty great designs. Gibson Dunn - traditional styling, motivational text & artistic lawyer photos Cravath - ...

As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I'll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year. I always read these articles and notice that they've been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn't give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I'm looking at you. Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it. OS X / Linux people, you're stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask. Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you've ever downloaded. It's real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and ...

I had no idea what to expect from law school classes. I knew that they would be taught using the socratic method, but I didn't know how I was going to extract information while other students were on call. As a result, I essentially transcribed the entire professor/student dialogue during my first torts class. While this was insanely stupid for a lot of reasons, reading it may give you a good idea of what kind of questions you can expect to be asked. Click here for my notes from the first day of class. Now I'm going to tell you why these notes are bad. 1.) If I did want to take anything substantive out of these notes, I'd have to go back through the conversation and pick out the important parts. It would have been just as easy to do it the first time, while it was being said. 2.) As you can see, I prepped that brief with a lot of useless information. If you insist on writing real briefs (rather than book briefing as I've discussed in previous posts) try to keep facts to a minimum. My fear was that I would be called to state the facts and forget some ...