Survey on Status of Women in Law Firms

Law students interested in the status of women attorneys, particularly in law firm practice, should not overlook the 2007 Survey of the Status of Women in Law Firms. Results of the survey are compiled and published by the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL), an independent organization affiliated with the American Bar Association. The NAWL survey is the only national study that annually tracks the professional progress of women in law firms by providing a comparative view of the careers of men and women lawyers at all levels of private practice. Check it out.


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10 Essential Legal Web sites

For some new places to find legal information on the web, look at 10 Essential Legal Web sites for Litigators . Some you should recognize, but others, such as ZoomInfo, for information on companies and people, is a new one for me.


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Cosmic Collisions!

Nothing puts the smaller-scale activities that take place in the "human aquarium", be they Bar examinations or presidential politics, into perspective quite like images of the greater cosmos, courtesy of the Hubble telescope.

In particular, these photographs of cosmic collisions are intriguing on many levels, not least of which is the contrast between the immense power of the collisions and the glacial (by human standards) time scale at which they occur.



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Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

The 2008 Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be screening at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center from June 12-26. This festival features works that "help to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and dignity, and celebrate the power of the human spirit and intellect to prevail." Films are selected on the basis of artistic merit and human rights content. This year's program features films from several countries addressing a broad range of issues such as access to health care, civil war and human trafficking



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Looks like it will be Obama

News sources are reporting that Barack Obama is likely to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for President this evening. The contest between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama for the nomination has made for an interesting primary.

Please remember that Hofstra University is hosting a Presidential debate October 15, 2008. Educate '08: Dialogue, Democracy and the ’08 Debates, is an unprecedented educational effort that will engage not only students and faculty but also the public in a year-long series of conferences, events and lectures about the 2008 election, politics and presidential history.

Part of the Law Library's efforts for Educate '08 are the series of Displays that focus on the election and various issues.



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Searchmash

If you would like to know whether your search results are available in other formats, try Searchmash a website operated by Google, Inc. Searchmash displays your Web results by URL and clusters other results by format type, such as blogs, videos and images.

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Hein's Compiled Legislative Histories

People often try to compile federal legislative histories from scratch, but legislative histories of many important laws have already been professionally compiled and published. One good source for these is HeinOnline. Last week, Hein's blog offered a how-to for using its compiled legislative histories.



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Audiobooks Online

I love listening to classic literature in audiobook format, especially in the summer! So I was excited when I found LibriVox -- a web site that provides audiobooks free for download. Libravox describes its mission as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain".

Volunteer readers record themselves reading public domain books and then release the audio files onto the Libravox web site. As a result of their efforts, Libravox offers a large collection of audio files for free.

I, for one, will be downloading Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat!




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2007 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics

2007 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provides data on foreign nationals who, during a fiscal year, were granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., admitted as immigrants or became legal permanent residents), were admitted into the United States on a temporary basis (e.g., tourists, students, or workers), applied for asylum or refugee status, or were naturalized. The Yearbook also presents data on immigration law enforcement actions, including alien apprehensions, removals, and prosecutions.

In addition to the Yearbook, the Office of Immigration Statistics Annual Flow Reports and Annual Reports provide text, tables, and charts on legal permanent residents, refugees and asylees, nonimmigrant admissions, naturalizations, and enforcement actions. The Annual Flow Reports and Annual Reports have replaced the text chapters in the earlier editions of the Yearbook."

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Complaints About Lawyers' Writing

This National Law Journal article surveys typical problems with lawyers' writing, noting that these problems are not all new, but that technology may be both helping and hurting. It also charts the pedigree of distraction from legal writing as being crossword puzzle > computer solitaire > basically anything on the internet.



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