Posts: General
Question: I need to find the cite to a Presidential Executive Order from 1863. I had found it referenced in an article, but my professor said I need to have a cite to the real thing. Answer: Usually I love Presidential Executive Orders because they are published so many places and...
Question: I’m having trouble finding portions of the new Massachusetts Individual Health Coverage law on Westlaw even though he had a print out that mapped all the bill sections to their respective MGLA chapters and sections. Answer: We went to MGLA in the stacks to verify that 111M...
Question: Where can I get a list of law reviews that publish articles on a particular subject? I’m trying to figure out where to submit my article. Answer: Eugene M. Wypyski’s Legal periodicals in English contains a Subject Index in addition to its Author and Geographic...
Question: I have this New York state case and I can't find it. It is on Lexis and Westlaw, but it is from 1963 and there is no PDF. It is a low level court, maybe just a trial court decision. I need to look at it for a cite check. Do we have it? Answer: This case is...
Question: What does c.v.s.g. mean? This opinion says a party filed for a writ of certiorari, c.v.s.g. Answer: Library staff guessed that it meant something like "cert. vacated, something granted," but were wrong! After consulting Bieber's Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations and...
Question: A confused 1L asked about how to find and KeyCite an unpublished case from the SDNY. He knew the names of the parties but didn't know what it means to be unpublished, and was especially confused once he located the case since it has a U.S.P.Q. cite. Answer: With...
Question: Where can I find decisions of the Massachusetts Appellate Division? Are they binding on the Superior Court? Where can I get an authoritative statement that the Superior Court is not bound by Mass. App. Div. cases? Answer: As you all know, a party to a lawsuit who...
Question: Student had a cite to: Comptroller, Federal Protection and Preservation of Wild and Scenic Rivers Is Slow and Costly (1978) from the GAO. Answer: This GAO report is too old to be on the web, but we have some GAO reports in microfiche so we went to the Catalog of U.S....
Question: A student working on a source collection was unable to locate volume 85 of the Indiana Law Journal which was alleged to contain two documents referenced by the author of the article the journal was editing. Answer: Wypyski, Legal Periodicals in English , indicates that...
Message received via e-mail: I was hoping to get some help on a law review article that I'm helping a professor with. I am currently preparing some footnote citations according to Bluebook rules, and a few questions have come up. I hope that these questions make sense and can be...
Question: I am trying to use the print version of West’s Federal Practice Digest 4th to find cases under the topic Civil Rights key number 78, but the books go from the topic Children Out of Wedlock directly to Civil Rights Key Number 1001. Answer: There is no current Civil Rights key...
Question: I need to find Virginia cases from right after the adoption of the state constitution. Answer: The blue pages of the Bluebook provided information on the history of Virginia reports, including information that the court had been called the “Supreme Court of Appeals” and that...
Question: A student was looking for a book he had used before, but he didn't know the title. He thought it came from the Ready Reference Collection and remembered it was a paperback that listed law libraries in America. The d esk attendant found American Libraries Directory but that...
Question: My nephew is a second year law student and I was hoping to buy him a gift book for Christmas. What do you suggest? Answer: We were unsuccessful in getting additional information from the patron about the law student’s interests, but came up with a short list of...
Question: Patron needed to find House Reports 73-85 and 73-152 and Senate Reports 73-41 and 73-47 (1933). Answer: Generally our holdings of House and Senate Reports only go back to 1959. However, if these reports are part of the legislative history of some major legislation, it is...
Question: I need to collect a US Patent cited in a law review article I am editing. The author has cited it as: US Patent # 6.446.061, Taxonomy Generation for Document Collections (2002). The student who was responsible for collecting my sources informed me that her searches gave her a...
Question I am having a little bit of trouble with the “knowing when to stop” question. I keep clicking on new issues and cases which, given that I still feel I don’t know a lot of substantive law, I feel the need to read to see if and how they’re relevant. My concern is about using my...
Question: I am researching a federal regulation passed in 1974. I found the regulation but I need to find the comments received by the department influencing the specific regulations. The request for comments – with a deadline of Sept. 1974 – was included in the proposed rules (issued...
QUESTION I am unable to locate the following congressional hearings. Any help with locating the following would be greatly appreciated. (1) Foreign Corrupt Practices and Domestic and Foreign Invesment Disclosure, Hearing on S. 305 before the S. Comm. on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs,...
Question: I am trying to get a copy of a science fiction story written by Brian W. Aldiss called "Segregation" that appeared in NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION, issue #73, back in July of 1958, if my information is correct. Can you help me? Answer: Neither the Law Library nor the...
Question: I found myself wondering about the coincidence that Law Day and May Day are the same day and maybe this is not a coincidence. How can I find out which came first and if there is a connection between the two? Answer: A general reference source, in this case, the Columbia...
Question: I can’t find U.S. Reports volumes that have these two cases in them which I need to find pinpoint cites, and I have the U.S. Reports citations. Answer: There is something of a time delay in the publication of the official United States Reports , and frequently cases have...
Question: A student was trying to find No Child Left Behind Act § 9526, 20 USC §§. 6301 et seq. (2002). He said he had pulled up the document on Westlaw, but couldn't find § 9526. Answer: While this problem could have been researched on Westlaw, we used print resources, where it is often...
Question: I'm having trouble finding Presidential Proclamation No. 1043, which I need for my note. It's from May 30, 1910. Answer: Presidential Executive Orders and Proclamations are published in many, many places, so at first blush this question seemed strange. How could someone not...
Question: If one creates a document in MS Word and then modifies it using the *track changes* option is it possible to send the document to someone else WITHOUT: (1) having it automatically open with all the changes showing and (2) without the possibility of their backtracking through all of...
Question: A student was looking for "Assessment of the Increased Risk of Terrorist or Other Criminal Activity Associated with Posting Off-Site Consequence Analysis Information on the Internet", U.S. Department of Justice, 18 April 2000 . The report had been available on the free...
Today's reference question of the week comes from Raquel Ortiz at Boston University, who gave me permission to post this while I'm on vacation. Question: Where can I find the United States Supreme Court's Statement of Recusal Policy (1993), which is cited in Scalia's memorandum decision...
Question: Has the following ever become a final draft, or has the Third edition of this Restatement ever been approved? Restatement (Third) of Agency section 1.01 ( Tentative Draft No. 1 , 2000). Answer: According to the American Law Institute, the Restatement Third of Agency is still...
Question: Any idea how I can find this? All I need is the title page and page 63. Committee on Environmental Issues in Pacific Northwest Forest Management, Board on Biology, National Research Council, Environmental Issues in Pacific Northwest Forest Management (ISBN: 0-309-05328-5, 280...
How is it determined which cases will be put on Westlaw/Lexis? Why are some unpublished and is there criteria? I assume ALL court decisions are not on there (i.e. most divorce cases...) but is that true? Answer: To answer this question we need to start with the difference...
How to cite a state attorney general's opinion does not appear to be on your website. How is it done? Answer: Our website [www.bc.edu/lawlibrary] does not include a comprehensive list of how to cite, but just a little guide on how to read some of the most common legal citations...
How many volumes were in the U.S. Code in 1960? How many volumes (including annual supplements) are there in the 2000 Code? (Is that the current version?) Also, how many linear feet did C.F.R. occupy in 1960? How many today? Answer: The 1958 edition of the U.S. Code has ten volumes. The...
Can you help me find the Model Business Corporations Act and also find out how the various states that have adopted portions of it have deviated from the model Act? Answer: Uniform laws and model laws are suggested state legislation on subjects where uniformity of law between the states is...
There must be something wrong with this cite: J. Thomas Greene, "A Kindler, Gentler Justice System?" 181 F.R.D 559 (1998). It looks like a cite to an article, but isn't F.R.D. a reporter? Answer: The Federal Rules Decision is part of West's National Reporter...
Why do they ask you to cite to the official code when no one seems to ever really use it for research? Most people seem to research on Lexis or Westlaw. And even if they don't have access to that, they would probably use an annotated code, rather than the official U.S.C. Answer:...
Information desk staff members received the following reference question after the reference librarian had gone home for the night: What age must a person be to be governor of Massachusetts? And the correct answer is: We can't answer a question of this type over the phone, but if you come...
At the Boston College Law Library we use the triage reference model where library support staff at our single service point do all they can for a patron, including referring those questions they can't answer to professional reference librarians or technology specialists. To keep up the skills...