Did you know it’s illegal to play BINGO in North Carolina for longer than five hours?
Did you know that it’s illegal for dance halls to be within a quarter mile of a church or cemetery in South Carolina?
Check out this video from Mental Floss for more weird laws involving states.
Hungry for more?
~Jamie Sunnycalb~
We will all be moving to a new library soon, so I thought I would show you all some of the stranger libraries around the world.
Kansas City Public Library.
The Philological Library in Berlin.
If you haven’t guessed, the building is shaped like a human brain. Check out our earlier posting on this building for more information!
Geisel Library.
Want a really tall building but don’t want to fool with all those lower floors? Just put the building on stilts! It’s supposed to look like lantern…
Peckham Library is a see-through colored glass exterior on a extreme “L” shaped building
Oh, and this wooden monstrosity that looks like it is about to crush 6 people? That’s a meeting room.
I hope you enjoyed this tour through the strange.
~Aaron Greene~
So, libraries are a central part of many schools. It is a place for students to study, to meet with other classmates, and to find a wealth of resources. Along with the basic necessities, what makes a library unique?
Well, the Philological Library of the Free University in Berlin, Germany creates a unique environment for students with its creative and visionary architecture. This library is shaped like a human brain! Perfect for a library!
This library is comprised of a five story tower enclosed by two layers termed the “skin”, with the first layer being a glass-fiber fabric and the outside layer comprising of steel and glass. These two layers create a geometric pattern which is seen from the outside of the building.
Along with the aesthetically appealing exterior, the glass fibers of the “skin” are used to filter the daylight creating natural lighting throughout the library. With this natural lighting, the study areas are lively and welcoming, creating an atmosphere of concentration and an ideal space for reading.
The Philological library is also energy efficient! The exterior of the building is used to heat and cool the library with solar-driven currents. So, over half the year, the library is ventilated by merely opening the outside panels and filtering the fresh air.
The Philological library is unique and inspiring, from the outside to the inside! This library is the centerpiece of the Free University but is also an architectural landmark in Berlin.
~Brooke Rideout~
Filed under Hidden Treasures, Librarians Can Be Fun Too, Unique Libraries
You know that when the dedication in a book reads, “To Crime!” that it isn’t your ordinary law treatise. The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law gives you all the information you could hope to know about criminal law, but in a different way. The author uses humor and an illustrative comic style to inform his readers about every aspect of criminal law. Some of the chapters included in this book are entitled, “Rehabilitation: For the Love of God, Why?” and “Responsibility and Depravity: The Axes of Evil.”
The author, Nathaniel Burney, graduated from Georgetown University, where he was an editor of the American Criminal Law Review. During his time in law school he also found the time to work at the Supreme Court as a personal assistant to retired Chief Justice Warren Burger, and additionally played music in a band called The Ambulance Chasers. After law school Burney joined the Manhattan DA’s office as a prosecutor in NYC. He also spent some time in Special Narcotics and the Rackets Bureau. Burney eventually returned to the defense side of things, where he focused on cases involving wiretaps, securities fraud, antitrust, and loitering. Mr. Burney also teaches the “Hope for Hopeless Cases” series for West LegalEdCenter.
If you are looking for a book that discusses the complex issues of criminal law in a slightly different format, why not give The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law a try?
~Brian Trippodo ~
With the school’s impending move looming on the horizon, the library has undertaken some significant weeding projects, where old and non-updated versions of materials are being withdrawn from the collection and discarded. Much as when you’re moving to a new house, it’s always best to clear your clutter before you start anew.
Even though discarding books sometimes feels a little like death to librarians, weeding is a vital part of library collection management. Think about it – your library takes in new books almost every day. Can you imagine how quickly a collection could get out of hand if there weren’t policies and procedures in place to cull irrelevant and older materials? No library has unlimited space available for their resources, and sometimes hard decisions have to be made.
Luckily, we’re part of a law school where new and updated materials are part of every day life, making it easy to determine what should be weeded and what’s out of date. When the not so easy decisions rear their ugly heads, it behooves libraries to take into account feedback from other librarians and staff, their patron base, their collection development policy and their circulation statistics.
You would be amazed at the things you can unearth in the library when undertaking a weeding project. And sometimes, you run across things so entertaining, you just have to share.
Awfullibrarybooks.net is a site run by Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, public librarians in Michigan. They state that their site is “a collection of library holdings that we find amusing and maybe questionable for libraries trying to maintain a current and relevant collection.” And amusing they are.
For instance, Diet, Crime and Delinquency is a book that was published in 1981. The back of the book states that this tome ““…demonstrates how ‘junk’ food diets, sugar starvation, vitamin deficiencies, lead pollution and food allergies can convert a normal brain into a criminal mind.”
But even books published recently can spark a need to weed. Check out My Beautiful Mommy, published in 2007, in which Mommy picks her child up from school to take her along on a trip to the plastic surgeon.
The little girl asks Mommy about the trip and her Mommy tell her she is getting a tummy tuck and a nose job and why.
The girl worries that her Mommy will look different, but is corrected that Mommy will just be more beautiful. You have to see it to believe it, right?
One more, and then I’ll let you check the site out for yourself. Macrame Accessories: Patterns and Ideas for Knotting was published in 1977, and features some of the grandest macrame phantasmagoria I’ve ever laid eyes on – with a little something for everyone.
Are you a shy hot pants wearer?
In need of a new vest for that moot court competition?
In the mood for a his and hers set? This book has you covered.
The moral of the story is, weeding in libraries is a necessary survival skill. Painful sometimes, as librarians, to physically let go of materials. But gratifying both by making additional room in the collection for even better materials and by running across treasures like these. I’m hoping we find something half as fun during our project…
~Ashley Moye~
Hello there diligent law student! Yes, you there with the stack of Federal Reporters straining your back and dropping that AmJur on your foot. The library loves you. And now that you are creeped out, I have your attention. Are you in the mood to read something out of the ordinary? If your textbook readings are leaving you in tears, why not peruse the unexplored sections in between the stacks? The library has a variety of fascinating books full of memorable anecdotes that enables the law to become more digestible.
Take for example the writings of author Allan C. Hutchinson. Hutchinson is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto. He is a legal theorist whose research interests include: public law, legal theory, and the legal profession. Hutchinson is a prolific writer, having authored/or edited some 16 works. And February 20th of this year marks the release of his 17th work entitled “Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law.”
You can check out his 2011 release, Is Eating People Wrong?: Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World, from the library’s Treatise section. In an interview with Rorotoko (5/22/11) Hutchinson states that he chose eight cases he felt had the most impact in shaping common law. He proposed that the legal cases discussed in his book “breathe life” into the law for the reader. Hutchinson presents monumental legal cases such as Brown v Board of Education and Miranda v Arizona.
The book’s title refers to R v Dudley and Stephens. Hutchinson displays his flair for the narrative style as he recounts the details of the infamous events abroad the Mignonette. The Mignonette was purchased by John Henry Want, an English businessman. He and his crew of three had planned to sail from New South Wales to Australia. A storm destroyed the yacht, and the men barely escaped with their lives. After weeks of drifting and slowly starving to death, the decision was made to eat the already emaciated cabin boy. Upon their eventual rescue at sea, the surviving men were at first hailed as heroes. Hutchinson really draws the reader in with his detailed re-telling of the events that led up to the men’s reversal of fortune, and subsequent arrests. This 1884 case set a precedent within common law that necessity is not a defense to a charge of murder. Sadly, this is the only case in Is Eating People Wrong? that analyzes the legal repercussions of cannibalism.
Another highly entertaining chapter concerns Donoghue v Stevenson, a.k.a the “snail in the bottle” case. The chapter entitled “A Snail in a Bottle: Nature, Neighbors, and Negligence” recounts how Glasgow native May Donoghue became ill after finding the partial remains of a snail within her ginger beer bottle. Her decision to pursue legal recourse against the bottling company led to the concept of negligence.
Is Eating People Wrong is a thoroughly enjoyable read that takes a look at some of the notable cases that have come to shape common law. And proves once again that fact is indeed stranger than fiction.
~Erica Tyler~
Now that final exams are over and you have time to relax over the holiday break, it’s the perfect time to pick up some pleasure reading from the Treatises section of the library! Here are some of the most interesting and amusing titles in the collection.
8. Taking Sports Seriously | by Jeffrey Standen
Because we all were making fun of them before…This book examines the biggest issues in sports today.
7. Obscurity and Clarity in the Law | by Anne Wagner and Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy
Just the title sounds mystifying. Read this book to learn about legal language, drafting, and interpretation.
6. Bong Hits 4 Jesus | by James C. Foster
For those interested in the first amendment and public schools, this book covers an Alaskan case involving high school students’ right to free speech.
5. Law of Solid Waste, Pollution, Prevention, and Recycling | by Jeffrey M. Gaba and Donald W. Stever
Who knew there was so much to say about solid waste? This treatise is perfect for environmental law gurus.
4. The Likelihood of Confusion in Trademark Law | by Richard L. Kirkpatrick
How likely are you to get confused about trademark law? Now there’s an entire volume that can end that confusion.
3. Substantial Similarity in Copyright Law | Robert C. Osterberg and Eric C. Osterberg
It sounds like this volume belongs in the same series as the last book. It includes key cases and court decisions on the subject.
2. The Law & Harry Potter | edited by Jeffrey E. Thomas and Franklin G. Snyder
What exactly are the social consequences of considering house elves to be people? This is the authoritative source on all things law in the world of Harry Potter.
1. Is Eating People Wrong? | by Allan C. Hutchinson
Do we really have to ask that question? Actually this book is a lively study on jurisprudence, exploring eight cases that shaped our legal system.
~Kirsten Hallman~
If you were walking down the streets of New York in Manhattan Valley or Morningside Heights, you might be lucky enough to happen upon one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time…
Architect John Locke has repurposed phone booths into communal libraries based off of the “take a book, leave a book” principle. He’s taken guerilla librarianship to the next level, quietly installing these structures and outfitting them with donated books from local residents, ready for other residents and passerbys to take, borrow and exchange whatever they wish from the fluid collection.
These phone booths are part of a larger plan, his ‘Department of Urban Betterment‘ interventionist project. Check out the link to learn more…
So what are the details on these structures, you may ask? They’re nothing but machine-cut and assembled plywood shelves, designed to hang securely inside the phone booth without any additional fasteners, leaving the signage on the phone booth visible and the phone itself completely operable.
Here’s what Locke has to say:
Even as they are rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of smartphones, I’m interested in pay phones because they are both anachronistic and quotidian. Relics, they’re dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, a skeuomorph hearkening back to a lost shared public space we might no longer have any use for. Something to be nostalgic for, in the way I can’t think about a phone booth without conjuring up images of an old, impatient woman banging on the door to one while I was inside using a calling card to ask for money. And of course they are nuisance, basically pedestrian level billboards that only blight certain neighborhoods (good luck finding a payphone in Tribeca, while there are eight separate phone kiosks on one block between 108th and 109th streets and Columbus Ave). But they can also be a place of opportunity, something to reprogram and somewhere to come together and share a good book with your neighbors.
Alright – raise your hand if your first impulse is to start your legal research or any kind of research by first going to look for it on Google? Most everyone. Oh, a few of you use Google Scholar, or perhaps started with Westlaw and/or Lexis, good for you. That still means the majority of you still started with the computer and internet, if I do not miss my guess. While the internet has clearly made starting research much easier, every once in a great while there are still some old school methods that cannot be beat for finding information. Such a thing happened recently here at the Charlotte School of Law Library. One of our reference librarians, Betty Thomas, received a call from a gentleman in Georgia who had been referred to us by The Library of Congress. That is correct “THE” Library of Congress, the foremost repository of national information and archives in the country if not the world. It would seem that the Charlotte Law Library was one of only two libraries in the southeast that had the archival information that our particular patron was in need of.
Now, while I am very proud of our Law Library, it is not what one would think of in terms of being a repository of archival material. We have a large treatise collection, maintain statutory materials for all fifty states and additional United States territories, keep our physical legal reference materials up to date, etc.; however, the growth in the collection, as with most modern libraries, is with our digital databases. Yet, here was a researcher that had been directed toward us by The Library of Congress to aid him in his quest for information. If you have missed the key fact at this point let me make it clear that the information the patron was in need of was not on Google, much less the internet. I know some of you reading this are saying to yourselves, “But everything is on Google!” Oh – not so dear reader, not so. Nor was this information to be found in some dusty tome perched among our stacks, nor in our periodicals (some of which are weeded every six months), nor was it information held on a closed database or any kind of audio or video medium. No, this information was on a single tiny sheet of microfiche. OK, follow the hyperlink if you do not know what microfiche is, then come back this article. Got it? Good! See, the internet is a wonderful source of information.
Now some of you at this point are scratching your head and going huh? Some of you might even be saying, “But isn’t microfiche obsolete? Does anyone still use it? And if they do, why would you keep such an outdated method of storing information?” Ah -why indeed? Well, as it turns out, and as you may now have gathered everything is not on Google. In fact, mind bending amounts of information have still not been digitally transferred and archived. There are numerous initiatives in play working to rectify this issue; however, time, funding, and interest are just a few of the problems facing what is a monumental task that not one entity can surmount alone. And while virtual mountains of information are being digitally transferred everyday some things are still in a long queue to be converted. Plus microfiche is in many ways still a viable way to store information not only because it is affordable, but the film the documents are saved on have a very long shelf life. Digital media degrades or the technology that allows you to read it is rendered obsolete by rapid software/hardware advances in technology. Microfiche on the other hand, if properly stored, can last decades if not centuries. And while you cannot store microfiche on something as small as a flash drive, the amount of space microfiche cabinet storage takes up in a library is minimal. However, I digress, and as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now for the rest of the story.”
Our Georgia researcher is an amateur historian. His particular area of interest is the American Civil War. The information he was seeking had to do with United States War Department records in regards to grave stone marker numbers and the names of Confederate Soldiers interred at a cemetery that was once a United States Army POW camp in Ohio. Now, out of respect for our historian I am not going to go into the specifics of his research. However, he was kind enough to provide us with a link to an Ohio article that may shed light on what he is investigating. I have posted that link below. What is important to this article is that yes, we had the documents he was looking for on microfiche. And while I am a bit embarrassed to admit it, due to budget constraints we had only purchased one microfiche storage cabinet for the Law Library. Of course, the particular single sheet of microfiche that our researcher needed had never been filed away in that cabinet because that cabinet was full. Here is a note to any library directors reading this post, legacy memory is important. In this particular case I was the legacy memory because having been with the Law Library for five of its six years of existence I knew where the remainder of the microfiche collection was stored and mostly forgotten. Moments later after Betty and I dug through numerous boxes, we found the single tiny sheet of film that contained the documents our researcher needed. Score!
Our task did not end there. Betty and I had to reacquaint ourselves with the antiquated microfiche reader in the Law Library. That was the work of minutes and soon we had the documents on view to see. Indeed it was 54 pages of lists of names of Confederate Soldiers along with the name of their regiment, their rank, the marker number where they were buried, and the date of death. It was both a thrilling and sobering moment. Here were all these names of young men buried far from home, part of what was the most devastating conflict in American history. Betty spent the better part of the afternoon making copies of all 54 pages. Betty mailed the copies of the documents to our researcher and we wish him well in his endeavors.
The real silver lining in this adventure in obscure library media was that two of our law students who happened to be working for us this summer became very curious in the process. It provided Betty and me a teaching moment where we demonstrated why knowing about this type of technology could be valuable to them in their futures as practicing attorneys. For one thing, Betty and I explained that newspapers are still saved on microfiche as are numerous other documents. What if as an attorney you had a case that required finding out the name of a witness from a cold case, or you were doing research on real property that was in contention and the only historical evidence was on microfiche. We probably could have gone on with numerous examples where knowing about microfiche could be relevant.
So there you have it. Not everything is on Google, or the internet for that matter. And while microfiche might seem outmoded it is far from obsolete.
Special thanks to Betty Thomas who is a wonderful and dynamic librarian. Here is the link to the article:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/05/28/blue-among-gray.html
~Kim Allman~
Filed under Careers, Hidden Treasures, Of Interest to Law Students
Many summers ago, after my sophomore year in college, I abandoned the Midwest in order to spend the summer working as a waitress in a coastal inn near Portland, Maine. The inn, which was nearly 100 years old, was quietly and confidentially, “on the block.” Presumably the owners either lacked the resources to maintain all of the long-time customs associated with the inn or didn’t have sufficient vision with which to guide the inn into the future.
I, along with the majority of the staff, lived in dormitories and cottages on site. (Try blending the movies “A Summer Place” and “Dirty Dancing.”) Despite having been raised inland, I loved being near the ocean. However, after having had attended a Big Ten university and having lived in co-ed dorms, I was startled and uncomfortable by the rigorous adherence to segregation among the staffs. This existed not only along race lines, but within the races, by type of employment. It carried over to living quarters, dining privileges and uniformed attire.
I recall that I was permitted in the inn only twice – once when I arrived and presented myself at the front desk and a second time when, along with the entire dining room staff, I trooped down to the basement and hauled furniture into the dining room. Before the inn opened, the dining room staff swept the floor, washed the windows and hung the curtains. We brought the tables up to the dining room and scrubbed them off. Each waitress was responsible for changing her own table linen, busing her tables and washing her own crystal and flatware. A handful of college kids worked alongside hotel professionals – those who worked the winter season in Florida and the summers in Maine and New Hampshire. We worked seven days a week, with only every other lunch hour off. Many of us had no car and depended upon those who did. My assigned roommate’s family lived nearby and I frequently accompanied her home. Otherwise, my precious spare time was often spent hiking along the cliff walk or riding my roommate’s bicycle.
My mind is jam-packed with memories of that summer. The professional waitresses took me under their collective wings. The guests, most of who were “mature” and “moneyed” took a genuine interest in the little girl from the Heartland and what had brought her east. And to my surprise, I learned that my parents had been correct and that hard work wouldn’t kill me. In fact, I took pride in my accomplishments and felt as if I were contributing to quality of the inn – as if I were making a difference. It was an eye-opening summer and one which has remained very special to me.
I recently returned to this inn as a guest. The years had brought about some major changes, the biggest one being that the staff did not live on the premises. The dormitories, cottages and even the auxiliary guest villas had been torn down and some of the land sold in order to fund renovations to the inn. There were no uniformed elevator operators, bellmen, laundresses or chauffeurs. In addition, there has been a relaxation in standards of dress and an overall eroding of caste distinctions. The focus of the inn has become events and cuisine. Yet, one may still be assured of beautifully appointed rooms, afternoon tea service and daily wine-tastings. Because it has been willing to adapt to changing times and needs, the inn has moved graciously into the present century while retaining its hallmark qualities.
I couldn’t help but compare that historic inn to Charlotte School of Law. The inn has stood for well over 100 years and Charlotte School of Law is only in the early stages of its life cycle. Yet both entities have been fueled by the vision of their respective founders, the hard work and dedication of their staffs and a desire to create something of long term value.
~Susan Catterall~
Filed under Hidden Treasures, Local Happenings
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