We have added 150 new titles to our collection in October. Have a look at the list of latest additions at: http://www.library.law.northwestern.edu/collections/new-books
New Resources in October
Posted in Library Resources
Resource Spotlight: Westlaw China
Need to do some research involving Chinese law, or wish to keep up with developments in Chinese law? Please check out Westlaw China! This resource from Thomson Reuters aims to be a comprehensive database of and about Chinese law, with content in both English and Chinese.
Westlaw China contains a number of discrete types of content, including:
- Laws and Regulations – including more than 1,000,000 promulgated by Chinese government agencies at central, provisional, municipality, and autonomous region levels since 1949, with over 20,000 of the most important laws, regulations, and international treaties translated into English
- Legal Topics – interpolate key elements of laws and cases, categorized by attorney editors under the Key Number System to facilitate research; they currently provide 14 legal topics in English, covering more than 7,600 legal issues
- Case Headnotes – are provided in both Chinese and English; Westlaw China currently provides over 4,600 headnotes in English; full text of case judgments available in Chinese (almost 2,000,000, sourced from Supreme People’s Court and local courts in 31 provinces, municipalities under the Central Government and autonomous regions, as well as special courts such as maritime courts)
- Articles – over 2,500 articles by lawyers, judges, and other professionals discuss, analyze, and study topics and difficult problems in various practice areas
- Current Awareness – updated several times per day to provide the latest legal and business information on adopted and proposed legislation, courts and cases, government policies, news, and statistics
- Legal Glossary – provides over 6,600 bilingual terms and expressions, with precise English translations of Chinese legal terms
To get started from the library’s homepage, simply choose the “Research” menu, then the “Databases” page, as shown below. Westlaw China will be located on this page (under “W”).
Posted in Library Resources, Resource Spotlight
New Exhibit Featuring Dean Hansell Collection
To celebrate the Honorable Dean Hansell’s 40-year reunion at the Law School, the Pritzker Legal Research Center is pleased to present a new exhibit featuring five historical legal instruments from the collection bearing his name.
Judge Hansell, who received his Juris Doctor from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has led a distinguished career first as an attorney, and currently as a judge on the California Superior Court in Los Angeles. Prior to his judicial appointment in 2016, he had a diverse practice in both private firms and public agencies. He has also been a consistently active member of the legal community: in 1985, he co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), and from 1997 to 2001 he was a Police Commissioner of Los Angeles.
An avid collector of historic legal documents, Judge Hansell has generously donated a number of items from his collection to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. The collection includes legal instruments and related materials from France, England, Germany and the United States. This particular display features five English documents from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. However, in recognition of the significance of the contents as a whole, the Pritzker Legal Research Center is working to digitize the entire collection. A sample of this progress is available at plrc.omeka.net/.
The Dean Hansell Collection exhibit will be on display of the third floor of the Pritzker Legal Research Center through the rest of the fall semester.
Posted in Exhibits
PLRC Celebrates NU One Book
NU One Book is an annual inter-campus campaign where we all read the same book and then come together to engage more deeply with the themes, importance, and application of its message to our lives and society. This year’s selection is Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, who offers a provocative modern analysis of the Declaration of Independence. Read more about Our Declaration and the author.
Events take place on both the Evanston and Chicago campuses, ranging from lectures and art exhibits to an essay contest and group outing to the musical Hamilton. Here at the Law School, we’re proud to be hosting a keynote address by Danielle Allen on Thursday, October 19, at 12 pm in RB 140. Anyone from the Law School may attend by RSVP’ing here; note there is a limited number of seats available. Juliet Sorensen, Director and Associate Dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, and Dr. John Franklin, Professor of Psychiatry, Surgery and Medical Education-Medical Humanities and Bioethics; Associate Dean, Diversity, Inclusion and Student Support at the Feinberg School of Medicine, will lead a moderated conversation with Ms. Allen. Questions for the author may be submitted to lisa.winkler@law.northwestern.edu by Oct. 11 for consideration by the moderators.
Be sure to visit the PLRC to explore our NU One Book display! There are complimentary copies of Our Declaration, pocket-sized Declarations of Independence, and One Book event calendars. Also featured are replicas of the original Declaration of Independence and more information about the author and her insightful work. The display is located beneath the library’s grand staircase; the library is located on the 2nd floor of Rubloff.
Our Declaration Display for NU One Book
Our Declaration Display for NU One Book
Posted in Events, Uncategorized
September 2017 New Library Resources
We have added over 200 new titles to our collection in September. Have a look at the list of latest additions at: http://www.library.law.northwestern.edu/collections/new-books
Posted in Library Resources, Uncategorized
Resource Spotlight: CQ Supreme Court Collection
Do you want to do some empirical research on the U.S. Supreme Court, but don’t know where to start? Do you want to know the seminal cases is particular fields of Supreme Court jurisprudence? For these answers and others, try taking a look at the CQ Supreme Court Collection, published by CQ Press (publishers of Congressional Quarterly and a number of other books and databases in the Pritzker Library’s collection).
To find the CQ Supreme Court Collection (and other Pritzker Library databases), simply go to the library’s home page and click on “Find a Database.” From there, you can scroll through an alphabetical list of our databases (or click on a letter to jump to databases beginning with that letter; hint: here we will click on “C”).
The CQ Supreme Court Collection provides summaries and analyses of more than 4,000 major decisions, including all cases in which a written opinion was issued from the Burger Court (October Term 1969 to the present) and links to the full text of the cases; statistics and other data on essential topics, such as the quantitative analysis of voting records and opinion alignments, political alignments, and institutional data, and more.
Biographical and voting data is provided for every justice who has sat on the Court. Tools allow users to perform analyses such as showing every time two (or more) justices voted with (or against) another justice (or justices) on a variety of topics. Searches can be retrieved for later use with a permalink, and many documents can be downloaded in PDF format. So, if you want to see the role played by Justice Black in 280 due process cases from 1941 to 1971, simply take a look here.
Posted in Library Resources, Resource Spotlight
August 2017 New Library Resources
We have added over 275 new titles in the past month. Have a look at the list of latest additions at: http://library.law.northwestern.edu/collections/new-books
Posted in Library Resources
Student Job: Pritzker Legal Research Center Seeks Fall Semester Research Fellows
The Pritzker Legal Research Center is looking for 4 Pritzker Library Fellows for Fall Semester 2017. Pritzker Library Fellows serve a 3-month appointment, with a $750/month stipend, working 10-15 hours per week on short-term faculty research projects. Preferred Qualifications: Rising 3L status, journal experience, RA experience, and/or Advanced Legal Research. If interested, please email copy of résumé and law school transcript to Tom Gaylord, Faculty Services & Scholarly Communications Librarian at tom.gaylord@law.northwestern.edu. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the positions are filled.
Posted in Employment
Student Library Assistant Positions Available
The Pritzker Legal Research Center is looking for reliable law students to work at the library circulation desk on evenings and weekends during the 2017-18 academic year. Duties include the following:
- Check out and check in books, journals, reserve books and other library materials
- Answer basic informational, directional and library policy questions, help patrons locate materials in the stacks, provide basic printer and copy machine assistance
- Help troubleshoot public computers according to directions
- Record and tally usage statistics
- Search the stacks for books reported missing
- Assist with opening and closing procedures
For an application, please email Jamie Sommer, Associate Director for Public Services at jamie.sommer@law.northwestern.edu.
Posted in Position Available
Seeking a Foreign & International Law Librarian
The Pritzker Legal Research Center of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law invites applications for the full-time, permanent position of Foreign and International Law Librarian. The successful candidate will join a team of experienced reference librarians who provide research and instructional support services to the Northwestern Law community, as well as to a broad range of library users throughout Northwestern University and beyond. The Foreign and International Law Librarian has particular responsibility for reference and instructional services and collection development for Foreign, Comparative, and International Legal Research. We seek someone who is creative, flexible, capable of working in a dynamic environment, and committed to excellence.
Primary Responsibilities: As part of the reference team, the librarian will participate in our very active faculty liaison program and provide research support to a faculty and student body with a wide range of interdisciplinary research interests.
Working in close consultation with the Associate Director for Public Services, the ideal candidate will assist in the continued advancement of the Center’s extensive educational programs, including our first-year research program and advanced legal research courses. The librarian will be responsible for supporting the research needs of the law school’s expanding foreign and international programs, including the LLM for International Students, the LLM in International Human Rights, the International Executive LLM, international joint degree programs, and International Team Projects. Other instruction responsibilities include subject-focused research sessions in substantive law courses and research training sessions for law journals, international competition teams, and student organizations.
The librarian is responsible for maintaining and developing content for the library website, in particular research guides and other training materials related to foreign, comparative and international research. The librarian will serve as a collaborative member of library’s selection team and participate in collection development activities for foreign, comparative, and international law.
The librarian will assist with other public services activities and work on team-based projects with other members of the Pritzker Legal Research Center. Participation in professional development activities is encouraged and supported.
Required Qualifications
- Master’s degree from an ALA-accredited library school, J.D. from an A.B.A.-accredited institution, and professional experience in a law library. Equivalent degrees from accredited foreign institutions will be considered.
- Knowledge of resources and methods for researching foreign, comparative, and international law, as well as law of the United States; knowledge of research resources in the social sciences and humanities and international relations
- Successful experience teaching legal research in the classroom
- Strong service orientation and excellent interpersonal skills
- Demonstrated ability to work both independently and in collaboration with others in a collegial atmosphere; ability to manage and work efficiently on multiple projects
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with foreign, comparative, and international legal research in an academic environment
- Reading knowledge of French, German, Italian, or Spanish
- Experience teaching foreign, comparative, and international legal research
Salary: Competitive and commensurate with qualifications and experience.
Environment: Located in the heart of the Gold Coast on Northwestern’s Chicago campus, the Pritzker Legal Research Center supports the research and instructional needs of more than 900 J.D. and LL.M. students and 90 residential faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law. The library has a collection of more than 700,000 volumes and equivalents and subscribes to a wide array of electronic information resources. Further information about the Pritzker Legal Research Center is available at the Library’s website http://www.law.northwestern.edu/library.
To Apply: Candidates must submit a letter of application, current resume, salary requirements and the names of three references with addresses and telephone numbers via the Northwestern University link below. Candidates must additionally submit all application materials (electronic applications are encouraged) to:
Daurina Gregory
daurina.gregory@law.northwestern.edu
Program Assistant to the Search Committee
Foreign and International Law Librarian
Pritzker Legal Research Center
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Applications accepted here: https://facultyrecruiting.northwestern.edu/apply/NQ==
Candidates are strongly encouraged to apply by August 15, 2017.
Posted in Position Available
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