Category: What’s New

W&L Law Library is pleased to announce access to Westlaw Edge UK, a full-featured Thomson Reuters platform for legal materials and information in the United Kingdom.

Content includes UK case law, dockets, and law reports; statutes and legislation, newspapers, secondary materials, and many treatises through Westlaw UK Books. Tools and enhancements include Case Analytics, Legislation Compare, UK-EU Divergence Tracker, and Legislation Alerts.

To access Westlaw Edge UK, select it from the main product drop-down menu, once logged in at lawschool.tr.com. As with regular Westlaw Edge and the full suite of Thomson Reuters products, access is limited to W&L Law School students, faculty and staff; a valid academic Westlaw account and password are required.

For additional information, see the official Westlaw Edge UK information page and introductory YouTube video from Thomson Reuters. For further guidance, feel free to reach out to a librarian at LawRef@wlu.edu.

Just in time for your fall exam prep! The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce school-wide access to LexisNexis Digital Library Study Aids.

This new ebook collection offers easy online access to over 100 study guides published by LexisNexis. Our subscription includes popular and trusted study-aid titles, including the Understanding series, Questions & Answers series, and Skills & Values series. The OverDrive ebook platform allows you to create custom tags and annotations to help organize your studies. You may also print ebook content or download for offline use.

Study aids for many fall semester subjects are available, including:

• Administrative Law
• Civil Procedure
• Contracts
• Evidence
• Federal Income Tax
• Intellectual Property
• Torts

To access the Digital Library homepage, go to https://lexisdl.com/library/wlu (log in with your WLU credentials when prompted). For guidance on using the Digital Library, view this short YouTube video from LexisNexis.

If you have questions about using or finding any of the Library’s resources, please contact us at lawref@wlu.edu and a librarian will respond to you promptly.

The 2020 Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings are now available at go.wlu.edu/lawjournals.

Maintained by the W&L Law Library, the Rankings are a world-recognized resource for identifying and comparing law journals by subject, country of publication, or rank across several categories relevant to scholars and publishers.

Data for 2020 includes the top 400 U.S.-published law journals and the top 100 law journals published outside the United States, based on citation counts and publication statistics for a 2016-2020 survey period.

New Rankings are released annually based on data up through the preceding calendar year. Historical data from the 1996-2003 to 2015-2019 survey periods remains accessible on the site for reference and comparison.

For more information about W&L Law Journal Rankings, please visit the the How to Use and Methodology pages of the site. Questions and comments are welcome at LawJournalRankings@wlu.edu.

Dig into the fascinating, inspirational, and oftentimes dramatic lives of legal leaders through the biographies we’ve selected for a new display at the W&L Law Library.

Speaking of, don’t forget our W&L Law Community Read discussion of Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life on Wednesday, March 24: Visit bit.ly/LawReadZoom to register, and bit.ly/LawReadEbook to access the free eBook online (valid W&L login required).

All titles are linked below to WorldCat.org, where you can find them at a library near you. The list is alphabetical by author’s last name.

• The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts (2019), by Joan Biskupic

• A Lawyer’s Life (2002), by Johnnie Cochran & David Fisher

• The Life and Legal Writings of Hugo Grotius (1969), by Edward Dumbauld

• Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (2002), by Justin Martin

• Of Courtiers and Princes: Stories of Lower Court Clerks and Their Judges (2021), by Todd C. Peppers (ed.)

• The Jim Report: My Life in Law School (2011), by James Reavis

• Barbara Jordan: American Hero (1998), by Mary Beth Rogers

• Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (2020), by Troy R. Saxby

• John Jay: Founding Father (2005), by Walter Stahr

• Thurgood Marshall: A Biography (2012), by Glenn L. Starks & F. Erik Brooks

• First: Sandra Day O’Connor (2019), by Evan Thomas

• Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (2016), by Marlene Trestman

• From the Texas Cotton Fields to the United States Tax Court: The Life Journey of Juan F. Vasquez (2021), by Mary Theresa Vasquez & Anthony Head

Happy New Year!

Each year, January 1 is recognized as Public Domain Day and Copyright Law Day to raise awareness of the intellectual property rights of both authors and the public that enjoys their works. It also marks the day when thousands of U.S. copyrights expire.

The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (Pub. L. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827) amended the Copyright Act of 1976 to set the duration of copyright protection for any work at 95 years, after which the work will enter the public domain and may be used freely by anyone to entertain, enlighten, or earn revenue.

As of January 1, 2021, copyrights for all works published in 1925 and before have ended. Other works that have shifted into the public domain are those published before 1964 whose registration was not renewed in their 28th year of protection.

Some Background on U.S. Copyright Law

For copyright protections to apply in the first place, a work must be original and in a fixed, tangible form – for example, a written story, a play, a painting, a sculpture, or a recording or composition of music. (See 17 U.S.C. § 102, and Title 17 – Copyrights of the U.S. Code more generally.) Individual states also have copyright laws, but they are only applicable in narrow areas not preempted by federal copyright law, often relating to criminal infringement and piracy. (See the U.S. Copyright Office compilation of state copyright laws.)

Some works are “born” in the public domain, without copyright protections from their creation onwards. Important examples are all laws published by the U.S. federal government, including statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions. State laws vary as to whether and to what degree works by their governments are copyrightable or in the public domain; Harvard University Library provides a good resource for these state guidelines.

Copyrights Expiring in January 2021

A helpful guide to works whose registered U.S. copyrights have expired (1870 to 1925) has been compiled by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, using digitized Catalog of Copyright Entries from the Library of Congress. Some of the notable works joining the public domain in 2021 are also highlighted in a new display at the W&L Law Library (pictured above), including:

Visual Arts

• The House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper
• Three Elements by Wassily Kadinsky
• The Three Dancers by Pablo Picasso
• Texas Cowboy Monument by Constance Whitney Warren

Books

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
• Der Prozess (The Trial) by Franz Kafka
• The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Music

• Always by Irving Berlin
• Sweet Georgia Brown by Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard, and Kenneth Casey

Film

• Go West by Buster Keaton
• The Merry Widow by Erich von Stroheim

The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce University-wide access to over 120 full-text ebooks from leading academic publisher Edward Elgar, through the ElgarOnline platform.

The new collection includes electronic versions of 94 titles that the Law Library also owns in print, plus 30 additional open-access titles that are available to all internet users. Books and chapters are viewable online and downloadable in PDF.

The selection includes works on legal, public policy, political, business, and international affairs topics, with several highlights from the W&L Law faculty:

• Mark Drumbl, Research Handbook on Child Soldiers (ed. with Jastine C. Barrett, 2019)
• Lyman Johnson, Corporate Law and the History of Corporate Social Responsibility, in Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law (Harwell Wells ed., 2018)
• Christopher Seaman, Presumption of Validity, in Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law (Ben Depoorter et al. eds, 2019)

Access to ElgarOnline off campus requires log-in with valid WLU credentials. For an extensive list of ebook collections and other legal research platforms available from the W&L Law Library, see our Databases and Online Resources page.

The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce a new online research guide on World Correctional Institutions in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In April 2020, W&L Law professor Nora Demleitner asked the Law Library to begin tracking how COVID-19 is affecting correctional institutions around the world. With the UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project already compiling information on U.S. jails and prisons, Prof. Demleitner, a scholar of international and comparative law, sought to expand data collection to foreign countries.

Franklin Runge, Head of User Services at W&L Law Library, and his team of McThenia Research Assistants were up to the task. They developed a site on the LibGuide platform that is freely available to researchers worldwide.

“Our approach is to start small and slowly add countries in which RAs are fluent in the language and can find and comprehend the data,” says Runge. “The goal is to provide an ‘apples to apples’ comparison between countries. That said, some correctional regimes are radically different and data distribution is not uniform.”

As of October 2020, the guide has resource pages for eight countries: Belarus, Colombia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Ukraine. The pages are updated as new data becomes available, and more countries may be added in the future.

The guide is the most recent in the Library’s collection of LibGuides on researching legal subjects, finding and using materials, and conducting legal research. If you have feedback or questions, or a suggestion for a new LibGuide that the Law Library might offer, please email us at LawRef@wlu.edu.

The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce a new online research guide on Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism Resources.

The guide is a collaboration between the Law Library and W&L University Library, and brings together resources on racism and violence against Black people in the United States to support curricular and extracurricular efforts to oppose racism. It includes information about and links to a diverse range of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, biographies, poetry, films, and online resources, all specially selected for their value in the ongoing study and discussion of race and racism in America.

The guide on Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism Resources was created with the W&L community in mind. If you have any questions, suggestions, or other feedback on the guide, please email the Law Library at LawRef@wlu.edu or the University Library at library@wlu.edu.