New Face at Reference Desk

With great pleasure, the Library Staff announces the arrival of our new Reference/Faculty Services Librarian, James Sherwood (“Jim”). As promised in the September 1999 Amicus Briefs, we offer an introductory profile here; however, we strongly encourage all members of the Law School community to drop by and meet Jim in person. You can find him in Office 270(c) or at the Reference Desk.

Jim earned his J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was a member of the Law Review and Order of the Coif. In addition, he has an LL.M. in Tax Law from NYU and a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Alabama. After working as a tax attorney in Mobile and New York City, Jim returned to the University of Alabama, where he taught Basic Composition and Legal Writing in the English Department and Legal Writing in the Law School; he also developed and operated a writing laboratory for law students.

Jim’s legal background served him well when he decided to follow his passion and open Sherwood’s Forests, a sole proprietorship engaged in the design and installation of residential landscapes, shade gardens and mixed and perennial borders. Frequently asked how a tax attorney could become a gardener, Jim notes that, “tax law is complex and arcane, but gardening is much more complex.”

A desire to return to the legal community led Jim to earn the graduate degree in library science; while in library school, he gained valuable experience working at the University of Alabama’s main library and Cumberland Law School’s Law Library. The quality of our Law School and Law Library, along with Athens’ proximity to the mountains, attracted him to the UGA Law Library. He looks forward to the mountain wildflowers in the Spring. Of course, he is also excited to be near such extensive  Botanical Gardens, and his obsession with gardening has not abated: he recently completed a series of articles about native plants, published in the newsletter of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. In addition, he has contributed text (“Will Grow under Beeches”) for an art book currently under progress at the University of Alabama’s Book Arts Program.

Ursula Ferrenberg Joins Library Staff

The Cataloging Department recently welcomed Ursula Ferrenberg, who has filled the part-time Cataloging Assistant position vacated by Arvell Poe. In addition to being a new Law Library employee, Ursula is also a new United States citizen! A Swiss native, Ursula met her future husband while he was an exchange student in Switzerland. Twelve years ago, she joined him in the United States, and last month she celebrated her new American citizenship.

Ursula has lived in Athens for most of the time that she’s been in the United States. She spent a couple of years in Pittsburgh while her husband, Alan, completed a Ph.D. in physics. Her own educational background is in engineering (“a branch similar to civil engineering, involving agriculture, hydrology, road-building, and more”). She has returned to the workforce now that her youngest child is in school. They have three children: Rebecca - 9, Hanna - 8, and Silvia - 5.

When asked why she sought a library job, Ursula responds that most of her jobs have had something to do with books and that she likes keeping things in order. She has volunteered in the Media Center at her children’s school, helping with shelving, locating materials, and other library tasks. Although her daughters keep her very busy, Ursula also loves to quilt and to garden. She is a member of the Cottonpatch Quilters, a quilting guild that meets at the Lyndon House. Her garden tends to the edible: blueberries, corn, tomatoes.... And, she also enjoys her family’s two cats: Grover (from the Humane Society) and Annahcat.

LegalTrac Sports New Features, New Look

The next time you log into LegalTrac, you may notice that it has a new and improved interface. With the new version, searchers can choose the following modes: subject guide, relevance, keyword, and advanced.

-to search for articles by topic, use subject guide search.
-to search for articles by matching words that occur in the articles themselves, with the results displayed in reverse chronological order, use keyword search.
-to search for articles by matching words and word variants that occur in the articles themselves, with the best matches displayed first, use relevance search.
-to search for articles by using one or more indexes (e.g., author, journal name, etc.), use advanced search.

Note that Boolean searching (terms and connectors) is allowed when in keyword or advanced mode.

Use the Help Screen for additional searching tips.

ATOs Move 1,355 Volumes to Aid Libraries
by Maureen Cahill

If you wandered into the basement over the last couple of years, you may have noticed that the entire aisle beside the section of locked shelving was crammed to the gills with boxes.  The cramming was not just in this aisle but in every spare corner and along every empty wall throughout the lower level of the library.  The boxes – all ninety of them – held 1355 volumes of legislative materials from New York, a wonderful collection covering the years 1900 to 1967, and good only for historical purposes.

The hard decision to withdraw these volumes from the Law Library collection was made over three years ago.  They consumed nearly 140 shelves of space, and served the needs of none of our usual patrons.  Tedious and time consuming negotiation won state approval for shipping the books to the New York State Library.  The lingering problem was how to get them there.

Shipping over a ton of material nearly 1000 miles is expensive unless you are very creative.  A collection of inventive minds from our library, the New York State Library and the Georgia Historic Preservation Division finally came up with a plan.

On September 28, six brothers from Alpha Tau Omega arrived at the back door of the library in a U-Haul.  They loaded up the boxes and drove them to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta.  From there, the New York Air National Guard will fly them to a base near Albany, where another truck will haul them the final leg to the State Library.

The Athens to Dobbins portion of this journey was organized by Parker Hudson, a student assistant at the Law Library. He’s available to give pointers to anyone who needs to drive a twenty foot truck between the Law School and Caldwell Hall during the lunch hour.

Book Review
by Sally Curtis AsKew
 

Benched: The Memoirs of Judge Rufe McCombs, Rufe McCombs with Karen Spears Zacharias. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997  KF373 .M395 A3 1997 (Balcony)

Judge Rufe McCombs graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1942. She had begun Law School while in her senior year as an undergraduate economics major. In 1940 after one year of Law School she took and passed the Georgia Bar Exam. At the urging of Dean Hosch and other law school professors, she decided to stay in school and complete her degree, known at that time as an LL.B. Toward the end of her third year in Law School she went to Washington to work for the Department of Agriculture, but she did manage to complete her classes and graduate with the Class of 1942. After a varied career as a lawyer in various situations in 1982 she became the first woman in Georgia to win a race for Superior Court Judge without having been appointed to the position first.

Judge McCombs recounts in a lively manner her experiences growing up in Decatur, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida. Her experiences will bring a chuckle to readers as she was ever an unconventional free spirit. From her first visit to a courtroom when she was only five years old to her retirement from the bench in 1993 she recounts her experiences as an early woman lawyer. Some are sad–like her offer from a lawyer cousin to become a clerk in his office when she finished Law School–and others are hilarious–like her experiences with some of the litigants in her courtroom when she was a judge.

Judge McCombs overcame many things in her adult years–tuberculosis in her early adult years with two years spent in a sanatorium; cancer in her middle years; her gender at a time when seeing women as lawyers in the courtroom was rare; her passionate belief in the rights of minorities; the attitudes of the community where she lived toward her work as an attorney for persons who couldn’t pay for her services, among others. Unlike many other biographies of persons from the legal profession, this book is fun and easy to read. Unfortunately, there are mistakes in spelling of proper names and other similar errors, but they do not make this book less important for present day Law School students to read.

In the final pages of her book she sums up her life and philosophy in the following quotations:

Our legal system has changed much since I first arrived on the scene in 1942. Some of those changes have been good–more minorities have the freedom to practice law; there is better representation in the courtroom for defendants, in and our of the jury box; and technology makes it possible for me to carry my laptop to work every day....

But not all changes have been beneficial....

We need to stretch ourselves individually, and collectively, to our most upright position in order to land on our feet. We do this, not by government mandate, but as individuals who decide to discipline ourselves. Not just for our own benefit, but for society as a whole. It is our obligation.

Covered topics include:

Effective Internet Search Strategies
Internet Research Methodology
Federal and State Cases, Legislation and Regulations
Georgia Resources
GPO Access - Federal Government Information
Legal Research Meta-indexes and Web Directories
Foreign and International Resources
Business Information
Commercial or Fee-based Sites
Upgrading Your Internet Connection
Internet Tools - E-mail, Listservs, FTP, Usenet and IRC

The Institute for Continuing Legal Education (ICLE)  will videotape this presentation. Contact ICLE at 369-5664 for information on availability of the videotaped presentation.

GAVEL: Access to the Law Library

Don’t know how to use the Law Library’s online catalog, GAVEL? Ask for assistance - not only are we happy to help you locate the item you seek, but we especially enjoy showing patrons how easy our online catalog is to use. In addition to allowing for searching by author, title, subject, keyword, and call number, GAVEL allows for Boolean searching (terms and connectors) in the keyword search mode (see image below).

Efficiency Tip: before approaching the Circulation counter to ask for Reserve materials, use GAVEL to obtain the call number(s). The Circulation staff do not know the location of each of the hundreds of items on Reserve, and a call number is the most effective description of an item’s location.

If you are interested in a short GAVEL training session, either the basics or more advanced searching techniques, please let Anne Burnett (aburnett@arches.uga.edu) know - the Reference Librarians will be happy to set up some 30-minute sessions in the Computer Labs if there is enough interest.
 
 

Supreme Court's Greatest Hits on CD-ROM

The Supreme Court’s Greatest Hits [computer file], by Jerry Goldman. Evanston, IL (Northwestern University Press, 1999). KF8742 .A52 1999 (Balcony)

Until 1993, researchers accessing the United State’s Supreme Court’s audiotapes in the National Archives abided by an agreement not to copy or redistribute the recordings. That agreement was violated in 1993 when political scientist Peter Irons issued a 6-cassette collection of oral arguments (highly edited and including voice-overs) from 23 Supreme Court Cases (May It Please The Court -  KF4748 .M39 1993 Balcony).

After threatening to sue Irons, the Court opted instead to adopt a policy allowing unrestricted access to the tapes. In 1996, Northwestern University Political Science professor Jerry Goldman created the Oyez site at http://oyez.nwu.edu. Oyez is a multimedia Web site providing more than 900 hours of oral argument before the court, summaries of 1,000+ Court opinions, biographical materials on all 108 justices, and a Virtual Tour of the Supreme Court building. The highly acclaimed site has earned support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This year, Goldman released a related CD-ROM product (The Supreme Court’s Greatest Hits) covering 50 constitutional cases argued before the Court since 1955. Although much of the content is the same as that included on the Oyez site, the CD-ROM provides access without a Web connection, thereby avoiding loading problems associated with Internet congestion. The CD-ROM provides unedited arguments through digitally encoded sound files, allowing the listener to hear the emotion and inflection not discernible from a printed transcript. The CD-ROM also includes biographical information about the justices involved in each decision, as well as summaries and highlights for each case.

Like the Oyez site, the CD-ROM is well-designed with great attention to detail. Even the sound clips provided to allow the user to recognize each justice’s voice were selected with care: in Justice Hugo Black’s sound clip, he addresses charges of racism stemming from his past membership in the Ku Klux Klan. The audio quality varies greatly from case-to-case and even within the same case (in some instances, a particular justice may have turned off his or her microphone, rendering that speech inaudible).

This CD-ROM brings some of our most familiar Constitutional law cases to life. Patrons with slow Internet connections will find the CD-ROM more usable than the multimedia Oyez site. Please note that the user license limits use of the Supreme Court’s Greatest Hits to individual or educational purposes.

Library Hours thru December 12

Regular Hours:
Monday - Friday 7:30 a.m. - Midnight
Saturday - Sunday 8:00 a.m. - Midnight
 

October 25 - November 14:
Regular Hours

November 15 - 22:
Regular Opening Hours
Closing at 1:00 a.m.

November 23 - 24:
8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

November 25 (Thanksgiving Day):
CLOSED

November 26 - December 12
Regular Opening Hours
Closing at 1:00 a.m