Spring Roundup of Legal Information News From Washington DC

On May 7 I received some very good news about the Library of the Supreme Court. “David S. Mao has been named the new Librarian of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Mao will be the 12th Librarian of the Court. He succeeds Linda Maslow, who retired in August 2022 after serving 10 years as Librarian and 33 years at the Supreme Court. William Sleeman, the Court’s Assistant Librarian for Technical Services and Special Collections, has served as Acting Librarian since July 2023. Mr. Mao is expected to assume his new duties on July 1, 2024. As Librarian, Mr. Mao will manage the Supreme Court Library, its 29 employees, and a collection of nearly 650,000 volumes.” The press release continues to detail the stellar career of my friend and colleague. The Library will be in very good hands.

The Law Library of Congress continued to post useful research information in their In Custodia Legis blog. I highly recommend subscribing to the In Custodia Legis blog to keep up with their informative and interesting posts.

On May 13^th Sarah Friedman posted a Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial: Law Library of Congress Online Research Guides. “The Law Library of Congress has created over 300 research guides to help users narrow their searches for resources on a wide variety of legal topics. The Law Library’s research guides are a useful source for beginning legal research, as they organize print and digital resources on specific research subjects in one place. The collection includes guides for conducting basic legal research, such as Legal Research: A Guide to Case Law and Federal Statutes: A Beginner’s Guide, and guides to researching legal subjects that patrons often have questions about, such as Family Law: A Beginner’s Guide and Landlord-Tenant Law: A Beginner’s Guide. There is also a collection of research guides dedicated to U.S. state and international research, the Guide to Law Online. The Guide to Law Online: The United States has guides for every U.S. state and territory, with links to resources for each branch of the state or territory’s government and to other legal guides for the jurisdiction. The Guide to Law Online: Nations of the World compiles legal resources for over 200 international jurisdictions. “ If you click the main link above you can watch a short video tutorial.

On April 25^th Andrew Weber posted a guest post on the blog by Cassidy Charles on Modernizing Congressional Data – Nominations on Congress.gov .

“About Nominations by the U.S. President

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the President of the United States the power to nominate, and with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoint individuals to certain positions laid out in the Constitution and in subsequent laws.

Scope of Coverage: Nomination records are available on Congress.gov from the 97th Congress (1981-1982) to the present. Current congress information is updated once a day, usually by 8 am.

Nomination Numbering: The Executive Clerk assigns each nomination a number starting with the prefix PN (Presidential Nomination) and followed by a sequence number (e.g., PN1). Numbering begins anew each Congress, so searching on a PN number without specifying a Congress will return nominations with that number from all Congresses.

Each nomination may contain one or more individual nominees. Military nominations, for instance, often contain multiple names. For example, PN1340 (113th Congress) is a single military nomination with 185 nominees.

Nominations with multiple nominees may go through the confirmation process as a single nomination, but they could be partitioned if the nominees follow a different confirmation path. The partitions are identified with a suffix; for example, PN230-1 (114th Congress) and PN230-2 (114th Congress). In Congress.gov, searching on a PN number, such as PN230, without a partition designation will retrieve all partitions of a partitioned nomination.

Privileged Nominations: Most nominations are referred immediately to committees according to the Senate’s rules and precedents. The Senate Committee filter allows you to limit a search to nominations referred to a specific committee.

Pursuant to S. Res. 116 of the 112th Congress, certain nominations to specified positions will not be referred to a committee unless a Senator requests the nomination be referred to committee from the Senate floor. These nominations will be listed in the “Privileged Nominations” section of the Executive Calendar and follow a different path to confirmation detailed in S. Res. 116 of the 112th Congress

Searching Nominations: You can search nominations from the search bar by selecting Nominations as the source and entering your search terms in the search box. Nominations also are included when you search All Sources.

You also can search nominations using the search form or advanced search, which includes a query builder form and a command line search for using SOLR query syntax. See Search Tools for details on using operators and fields in your search query. Nominations fields can be used in the search bar or the advanced search command line.

Nominations from 1981 (97th Congress) to 1986 (99th Congress) are labeled historical on the search form, as they may be incomplete. Projects are underway to improve the accuracy and completeness of historical nominations data on Congress.gov.

You can narrow your search results by selecting additional criteria from the filters, also known as facets, on the left side of the results page. Filters available for nominations include Congress, Nomination Type, Committee, Status of Nomination, and Nominees with US State or Territory Indicated. See Refining with Filters for more information.”