Leash Laws

Do you need to find the leash laws for your state? Take a look at the Animal Legal and Historical Center's overview of state leash laws. It provides a handy table where you can look up your state's leash laws. Do proceed with caution--while the site does give information on statewide leash laws, many municipalities also have ordinances concerning dogs. For more information about the municipal leash laws, look here.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Blogging Jurors

A recent article in the Fulton County Daily Report points out the new problems, and opportunities, attorneys are faced with as jurors sign onto blogs and social networking profiles to complain about the cases they are deciding. It might be possible not only to find out if a juror is commenting during trial, but also to use information culled from social networking sites to tailor a presentation to specific jurors.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Licensed to Practice?

Finding out if an attorney is licensed to practice law in a particular state is the topic of a recently updated research guide and directory, "A Compilation of State Lawyer Licensing Databases," provided by the legal research and technology site, LLRX. This guide is a real time-saver with direct links to each state's online database of attorneys and the relevant telephone number that is sometimes needed to be certain that an attorney's registration is current. If you encounter a dead link in this guide, tryLegalDockets.com, which provides links to attorney registration, disciplinary, and lawyer referral sites for states and for some individual counties. Both are worth bookmarking for future reference.
Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Guide to the Stimulus

Plan on buying a car this year? Wondering what your tax bill will look like for 2009? Get a guide to the new Stimulus package enacted into law at the NY Times. This guide lets you get information on the stimulus by categories such as Tax Cuts for Individuals, Energy, Housing and many others. Here you will see the basics of the tax incentives for buying a car and many other measures.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

New Credit Crisis Victim: Bar Loans

Law.com is reporting that the newest victims of the credit crisis are some law students who seek bar exam study loans.  Criteria for obtaining a bar study loan has apparently tightened, causing more applicants to be denied than in the past.  The WSJ Law Blog has also commented on the article. 



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American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Pres. Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today. To assist citizens to understand this act a website was created to explain the act and to permit tracking of the money spent. Recovery.gov is a one stop site for this important piece of legislation.



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Free Federal Court Docs

There was an article in the New York Times last weekend about public.resource.org, which has taken a large number of federal court documents and made them free and available on the general internet, rather than downloadable for 8 cents per page on Pacer.  Watch out if your social security number was ever included in a court filing, though.


Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Presidents' Day

In honor of Presidents' Day and President Lincoln - this year being President Lincoln's 200th - I will be prowling the Library from 10am-6pm (which coincidentally, is when the Library will be open). For those interested in the Lincoln bicentennial, check out the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Military Personnel Statistics

Those who are interested in finding the latest numbers for American military personnel on active duty, whether by rank or by region, will find the Department of Defense page for Military Personnel Statistics to be helpful. Just click "personnel" after following the previous link. Historical reports from 1994 through 2001 are available, as well.

Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Stay Up-to-Date with TicTOCs

If you are having difficulty staying up-to-date with content from your favorite scholarly journals, try ticTOCs. TicTOCs, a table-of-contents aggregator, is a free service which provides the most recent table of contents for more than 11,000 scholarly journals. You can view the table of contents, link to the full text of articles, or save your selections for future access.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat