Summer US Legal Research Roundup

This July I was able to attend the American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting in Chicago. I had a wonderful time reconnecting with old friends and colleagues. Many of the sessions focused on how to handle AI in law libraries. I was glad to go to a presentation on project management where I learned that my colleagues at the Law Library of Congress are planning to work on a project to make the records and briefs of the Supreme Court of the US available online. This is a very exciting project that will take many years to complete and will be extremely useful for judges, lawyers and historians. I also attended an excellent program about the Supreme Court decisions this term.

As usual the librarians at the Law library of Congress were very busy this summer blogging in their In Custodia Legis blog. “This spring, the Law Library of Congress added two new foreign legal gazette collections to our website, namely Panama and Czechia, and also released a new Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial featuring guidance to researchers on how to use the Foreign Legal Gazettes Guide. This recap continues our quarterly series from spring 2023, summer 2023, fall 2023, and winter 2024.

The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Panama includes 4,814 issues in Spanish spanning the years 1977-2005. This new release of reformatted microfilm issues represents a sizable contribution to the collection, and Panama is now the largest jurisdiction by issue count on our public website. All PDFs in the collection have been indexed for full text searchability. For example, users can search across the gazette collection for the Spanish search terms quinientos balboas, which is one of the official currencies of the Republic of Panama, called the Panamanian balboa (PAB), that circulates alongside the U.S. dollar.

The new collection of the Collection of Laws of the Czech Republic (now Czechia) includes 633 issues spanning the years 2019-2022. This gazette title includes main issues and annual indexes. All PDFs have been indexed for full text searchability in the native language, so users can search across the gazette collection for Czech search terms such as registrovaných léčivých to discover issues relevant to prescription medication laws for example. Users can view the image gallery of issues to consult the Czech text found on each page. The Law Library is pleased to expand its public offerings into Eastern Europe and to support diacritic searching capabilities in the native Czech language of the title.”

“Earlier this month, Robert shared about the new Appropriations Resources video that was added to Congress.gov.

With this second release for July, we have now added the “Download Results” feature to the Command Line search. You are able to download up to 2,500 results as a CSV.

The Command Line search box on Congress.gov

Enhancements

The enhancements to Congress.gov in this release include:

Enhancement – Command Line Search – Download Results

• From a command line search you can download up to 2,500 search results as a spreadsheet.
• Use filters to narrow your results to a single collection, such as legislation, in order to select which data columns to include in your download.

Enhancement – Legislation – Text Size

• The legislation text tab displays the size (byte count) for each format of text.

Congress.gov Tip

Are you new to Congress.gov? Want to learn more about how to search? We have a great Introduction to Search page. If you would like to watch a video, you can watch Using Search Terms and Filters on Congress.gov.”

“On August 15^th they posted “Upcoming US Law Webinars – September 2024 Posted by: Taylor Gulatsi

With school starting back up and the weather cooling down, the Law Library of Congress is happy to offer additional educational webinars for the first month of fall. The Law Library’s next offering in its Orientation to Legal Research Webinar Series will focus on an overview of U.S. federal statutes.

In September, our Orientation to Law Library Collections webinar will feature a special appearance by the staff of the Washington State Law Library as part of our 50 State Law Libraries Outreach Project. The purpose of the 50 State Law Libraries Outreach Project is to strengthen the ties between the Law Library of Congress and state law libraries by sharing information about our collections, products, and services with one another and with the public. Presenting from the Washington State Law Library will be Rob Mead, state law librarian.

An Orientation to Legal Research Webinar: U.S. Federal Statutes

Date: Thursday, September 5, 2024, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EDT

Content: This webinar will provide an overview of U.S. statutory and legislative research, including information about how to find and use the U.S. Code, the U.S. Statutes at Large, and U.S. federal bills and resolutions.

Instructor: Louis Myers. Louis is one of the Law Library’s legal reference librarians. He holds a B.A. in history from Kent State University, a J.D. from the University of Idaho College of Law, and a Master of Library and Information Science (M.L.I.S.) from Kent State University.

Register here.

An Orientation to Law Library Collections Webinar 

Date: Thursday, September 19, 2024, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EDT

Content: The Orientation to Law Library Collections Webinar is designed for patrons who are familiar with legal research, and would instead prefer an introduction to the collections and services specific to the Law Library of Congress. It will cover digital resources available through the Law Library’s website as well as those available onsite. As a part of the 50 State Outreach Initiative, State Law Librarian Rob Mead will be presenting on behalf of the Washington State Law Library.

Instructor: Anna Price. Anna is a legal reference librarian at the Law Library. Anna holds a B.S. in communications from Ithaca College, a J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law, and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Washington iSchool.

Register here.

To learn about other upcoming classes on domestic and foreign law topics, visit the Legal Research Institute.”