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'm working a bit late to get some additional material for my research adviser (read: boss) and while researching Terms of Service Agreements, I came across the case Van$ Money Pie Inc., 47 U.S.P.Q.2d 1020 (N.D. Cal. 1998). For some reason, I'm just not used to seeing symbols in case names. At first I thought it was a Lexis formatting error, but then I realized that it was just a character in the company name. That got me thinking. If I ever start my own company, I should name it something to really screw with Lexis/Westlaw searches. Maybe something like: L! L! L! Love or of atleast57(His!) /3 Pancakes What do you think? Flows off the tongue, right? Amusingly, the proper search for that name would be "love and pancakes." Could life be any more right than that?

I enjoyed physics research a lot: it involved a minimal amount of endlessly crawling through books. Legal research on the other hand, is a lot of "see, that guy said what I want to say, so by our combined power, my argument is strong." I find that this procedure makes it somewhat difficult to "think outside the box."  Sure, this approach makes complete sense for most legal applications. It's essentially a technique of verifying stare decisis. Does it really make sense for research, though? I find that it's particularly annoying as a Research Assistant because my adviser is always saying, "Find me something that says X." For the most part, we're not looking for statistics; we're just looking for a similar statement so we can mark it down and make a footnote.  Sometimes we look for statistics, but it's definitely the minority of the time. I get the impression that most legal scholars don't collect their own data. I suppose that's the difference. Scientists, in my experience, generate their own data at least as much as they rely on other peoples' data. The application was always more fun, at least for me, than combing the tomography books looking for algorithms.  I think what ...