Financial Crisis Inquiry Report

Now Available:  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, investigating  the causes of the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2010.

On May 20, 2009, President Obama signed into law an Act that established the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." During the course of its investigation, the ten person bipartisan committee reviewed millions of pages of documents, interviewed more than 700 witnesses, and held 19 days of public hearings in New York, Washington, D.C., and communities across the country that were hit hard by the crisis.

The final report presents the Commission's findings and conclusions and also contains 126 pages of dissenting views. The Commission terminates sixty days following the release of its final report.

Cornell Law Library will have a print copy soon of the 662 page report. Right now, you can read it on the web at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf.  Let me know if you’d like to see the print version when it arrives.

 

Pat Court
Associate Law Librarian
pat.court@cornell.edu

E-Repository

It was just one year ago that the law librarians met with you over a faculty luncheon to discuss Scholarship@Cornell Law, the e-repository that contains articles written by our law faculty, students, and visitors.  In the past year, there have been 84,560 full text downloads from the repository, a number that may surprise you.  The number that surprises and delights me is this one: 

 

243,910 full text downloads since the repository started in 2003!

 

These downloads often are by researchers who do not rely on SSRN for articles.  Our repository is discoverable by search engines like Google and Bing, so lawyers, scholars, students, and others around the world looking for legal information will find your articles in this repository. 

 

If you ever find that we lack one of your recent articles in the repository, please let me know so we can be sure to add it.  You and I both will enjoy seeing those numbers rise and having Cornell Law School’s scholarship spread broadly.

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu  

 

Lexis for Microsoft Office

Lexis® for Microsoft® Office is now available, enabling you to research and write at the same time within your Microsoft® Word document with just one click.  Some of the key features of Lexis® for Microsoft® Office for Faculty include:

 

Enhanced Grading Experience:

Lexis for Microsoft Office helps you validate the citations in your students’ documents without ever leaving them by adding Shepard’s Signal™ indicators and links for each cite. With just one click, Lexis for Microsoft Office adds Shepard’s Signal indicators and direct links to the citations in the document. You can also create a list of all the citations in the document for even quicker review.

 

Streamline Your Scholarly Writing:

Lexis for Microsoft Office allows you to quickly find more cases, briefs, motions, and pleadings while you are performing scholarly research or reviewing documents. With one click, you can perform a search of Lexis materials (cases, statutes & analytical material) in addition to searching the open web (Google, Bing and Lexis Web) without having to leave the document.

 

To download Lexis® for Microsoft® Office you can follow this link. If you have questions about using Lexis® for Microsoft® Office or the download process, please contact your Library Liaison.

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu  

 

Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research

To recognize excellence in research by our law students, the Law Library is inaugurating the Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research.  Librarian judges will be looking for sophistication, originality, or unusual depth or breadth in the use of research materials; exceptional innovation in research strategy; and skillful synthesis of research results.  Papers must be at least 10 pages, written June 2010-May 2011, by current 2L, 3L, or LL.M. students.  Acceptable papers may include, but are not limited to, papers written for a class or a journal note, but not work product from employment.  First prize is $500; second prize is $250, awarded  May 13, 2011, and will have the opportunity to be published in Scholarship@Cornell Law, our digital repository of law faculty and student publications.

 

You are encouraged to invite your students to submit their papers to this research competition.  If you find a well-researched paper as you are grading this semester, please let the students know about this new prize and encourage them to apply.  Applications are to include a one page abstract (500 words or less) summarizing the research process involved, the lessons learned from that research process, the original purpose for which the paper was written, and the professor for whom the paper was written, if applicable.

 

Let me know if you have questions about this new Prize for Exemplary Student Research.  We look forward to having many papers from which to choose!              

                                                        

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu  

 

e-Book Guides to Technology

If you are using tech tools like BlackBerry or an iPad, or working with the Microsoft 2010 upgrade, you may be wishing for some handy guides.  Cornell has many e-books that you can find with a Guided Keyword Search in the online catalog.  Just search a phrase like “ipod touch” or “office 2010” and you’ll find lots of guides.  Most all of them will be e-books that you can link to directly from the catalog.  Here are some examples:

 

Click Here for link to Blackberry for Work

 

Click Here for link to Microsoft Word 2010 Step by Step

 

Click Here for link to iPad: The Missing Manual

 

Click Here for link to Easy Microsoft Windows 7

 

Your librarian liaison will be happy to assist with these in any way.  Just let us know!

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu  

 

 

Roubini Global Economics

Cornell has joined the Roubini Global Economics' University Program to provide faculty and students with access to what The Economist magazine dubbed "the world's most important economic website." This provides you with RGE's rich and timely research and analysis and unique understanding of the modern global economy.  RGE provides insight into macroeconomic developments along with citations and readings which act as pathways for scholars, policymakers and future business leaders who need to pursue their ideas to the next level.  Features include:

 

• Critical Issues: Identifies key questions essential to the research process, seeking out viewpoints beyond the consensus
• Economic Research/RGE Analysis: Deep-dive analysis into factors driving global finance developed internally by a team of 40+ economists
• EconoMonitors: Blog posts by Nouriel Roubini, RGE Analysts and an outside network of top independent contributors in global economics
• Daily Digest: Timely coverage of developments that are shaping global markets right now
• RGE Partner Content: Reports and white papers sourced from leading economic think tanks and world-recognized economic organizations.

At the Roubini website you will be invited to register for a personal account.  From off campus, access Roubini using the library catalog link - http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/7060771.  Hat tip to Donald Schnedeker, Librarian at Cornell School of Hotel Administration, for this information.

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu

 

 

David Lyons

For those of you who remember David Lyons, Professor Emeritus of Cornell Law School, you may like to know that he was honored with a conference on March 12-13 this year at Boston University, where he still teaches law and philosophy.  The presentations can be read in “Rights, Equality, and Justice: A Conference Inspired by the Moral and Legal Theory of David Lyons,”  90 Boston University Law Review 1667 (2010). 

 

“David B. Lyons is one of the most preeminent moral and legal philosophers of our time. He is a Law Alumni Scholar and Professor of Law and Philosophy at Boston University, where he has taught since 1995. Previously, he was a distinguished faculty member of Cornell University from 1964 to 1995. Not only has Professor Lyons published a number of significant books and journal articles in moral, political, and legal theory, he also puts his theories of justice and morality into practice. He has been involved with civil rights and anti-war activities since the 1940s and is currently involved with human rights organizations including the BU Faculty for a Humane Foreign Policy and the BU Inter-Faculty Human Rights Consortium.”       ~~ from the Editor’s Foreword

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pat.court@cornell.edu

 

 

 

PassKey for easy access off campus to licensed e-resources

The library has a new way for you to connect to licensed electronic resources when you are off campus.  It’s called CUL PassKey, and here’s how it works –          

You’re working at home and come across a link to a recent article in, for example, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.  You could open the library catalog, search for Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and then follow the link to the journal.  But there is a simpler way:  the CUL PassKey bookmarklet.  With PassKey installed on the bookmarks toolbar in your browser, all you have to do when looking at a licensed resource from off campus is click on the PassKey icon on your bookmark.  You will be prompted for your netid and password, and then will be reconnected to the full text of the desired content.

You will find PassKey and instructions for installing and using it here.  Hat tip to Peter Hirtle at CUL for this info.

 

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pgc1@cornell.edu

 

 

FDsys, the new federal digital system

U.S. Code, Federal Register, Congressional hearings, House and Senate committee reports – the federal government is improving electronic access to these and many other materials.  The new system is FDsys, which provides much easier searching than the first generation of GPOAccess.   This news from the Government Printing Office:

“The sunset of GPO Access is planned for the end of 2010. At this time, FDsys will assume the role as GPO's electronic system of record. Migration of all content from GPO Access to FDsys will be complete by October 2010, and the two systems will run in parallel through the end of the year.

 

“FDsys is a system that allows Federal content creators to easily create and submit content that can be preserved, authenticated, managed, and delivered upon request. As opposed to just being a content repository, it is a system that will continually be updated with new Federal content collections, and these collections will need to be refreshed and migrated over time.”

 

You will notice that many of the documents have a blue banner at the top, showing that the document is official.  Try the “Advanced Search” link from the middle of the FDsys homepage for the most specific searching.  If you had bookmarked GPOAccess, it’s time now to revise that and link to FDsys.  Please contact me or your librarian liaison if you’d like to learn more about FDsys.

Pat Court

Associate Law Librarian

pgc1@cornell.edu

 

Cornell Library Goes Mobile

In a move designed to make online information more accessible to library patrons, Cornell University Library (CUL) recently launched CULite, a new mobile interface for the library’s website. The Law Library is grateful to the mobile team that designed this feature for the benefit of all libraries on the Cornell campus, including ours.

Two alternatives are available to users: a device independent mobile site (http://library.cornell.edu/m) or an iPhone/iPod Touch app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cu-library/id354721654?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D6) available free from iTunes. Both options allow users to search the Classic Catalog, check individual Library hours, locate contact information for each Library, submit a question to an individual reference desk, and more. Check out the promotional video on YouTube. Your research just became a little easier.

Amy Emerson
Research Attorney and Lecturer in Law
aae25@cornell.edu