07/17/2016 Summary and a Word about DuSable

By Julienne Grant

I was walking home from the Hyatt after the conference ended and an AALL member stopped me on Michigan Ave. to tell me how much she loved Chicago. That made my day.  I sent colleagues all over the city during the conference—to the Chicago History Museum, Wicker Park, Old Town, the CAF boat tour dock, the West Loop, and to Eataly (they owe me a huge cut). Throughout all of this, I was supposed to be writing up reports of various programs/meetings, and I got a little behind.  The following are short summaries of several events from Sunday, July 17:

Latino Caucus:  My DePaul law school classmate, Matt Katz, gave a compelling and provocative presentation that focused on the precarious and truly abominable state of immigration law in this country, providing specific case examples from his firm (Katz Law).  Mateo also berated the increasing trend of prison privatization in the U.S., mentioning a 2013 article in The Guardian, “America’s Private Prison System is a National Disgrace.” To drive his points home, Matt drew upon a wide range of authors, including French philosopher Michel Foucault.  Matt distributed copies of a piece he recently penned, “Como Indocumentado, Que Debo Saber y Hacer en la Era del Trump y la Negación de DAPA por La Corte Suprema?” (As an undocumented immigrant, what should I know and do in the era of Trump and the Supreme Court’s rejection of DAPA?).

After Mateo’s talk, the Latino Caucus began its business meeting, led by Chair Marisol Florén-Romero (Florida International U). The Caucus discussed a number of proposed projects, including one called “Latino Voices.” The goal of this initiative would be to compile information on selected members of the Hispanic legal community, including law librarians.  These personal profiles would be featured on the Caucus’ web page.

Matt Katz

Asian Legal Information in English: Availability, Accessibility, and Quality Control:   This was a very interesting and useful program; kudos to all the presenters who covered China (Alex Zhang, U of Michigan), Hong Kong/Macao (Anne Mostad-Jensen, U of North Dakota), South Korea (Juice Lee, Northeastern), and Japan (Mike McArthur, U of Michigan). The presenters did an excellent job of explaining the complexities involved in translating the law from these jurisdictions and the inherent pitfalls of English-language translations. Free websites and commercial databases were presented, and in some instances demoed live.  Juice Lee’s PowerPoint slides are posted on AALL’s website.

Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group:  The meeting drew about 30 attendees, and was led by Marci Hoffman (UC Berkeley).  Schaffer Grant recipient Rheny Pulungan of the University of Melbourne’s Law School Library offered a brief overview of her library’s print and electronic resources, which she described in more detail during her presentation on Monday, July 18 (summary forthcoming). Representatives from the Law Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard, NEFLLCG, and LLMC Digital provided updates. The LA Law Library was not represented, as Neel Agrawal has left his position there. Marci also brought the group up to date on recent developments related to the Foreign Law Guide (FLG) and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP). Regarding the former, there are newly-updated entries for Azerbaijan, China, France, Japan, and Mexico.  Updates for Germany, South Korea, and Switzerland have been completed and will be loaded soon; revisions for Argentina, Chile, Italy, and Spain are in the works. She also indicated that the IFLP will soon have a multilingual subject thesaurus and that the database will be adding 10 new Japanese journals.  Marci will post the full minutes of the meeting on the Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group web page.

 

Rheny Pulangan

 

Before closing, I want to say just a bit about the convention center’s DuSable room, which apparently piqued the interest of a few FCIL-SIS members. I’m quite sure the room is named for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable who is known as the founder of Chicago. DuSable was purportedly a Haitian of African and French descent who established the first permanent settlement here in the 1780s. Next time you’re in town, check out the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

 

 

 

AALL 2015 Recap: “International Attorneys and LL.M. Students: Filling Research Gaps”

By Alexis Fetzer

The late Sunday afternoon session entitled “International Attorneys and LL.M. Students: Filling Research Gaps” targeted librarians working with international students in an instructional setting. Each speaker presented on his or her experience working with foreign LL.M. students.

The first of the three speakers was Jinwei Zhang, Reference and Instructional Technologies Librarian at the University of Tennessee School of Law. Ms. Zhang had a unique experience in that she had been a foreign LL.M. student herself. She began by discussing some of the unique challenges instructors face in teaching these students, such as language barriers, cultural differences, and introducing a new legal system. One cultural difference that Zhang emphasized was a reluctance to ask questions in class. Many of these students are coming from learning environments in which they are not encouraged to interrupt a lecturer with comments or questions. It is important to be patient and encouraging of these students in order to get them to open up in class. One suggestion offered was instituting more one on one meetings with students in order to get them comfortable talking to instructors and to answer any questions that they are too uncomfortable to pose before an entire class.

Nina Scholtz, Head of Reference Services & Instruction Coordinator at Cornell University Law School, was the second of three speakers. Ms. Scholtz spoke on her experience as an academic law librarian instructing LL.M. students in legal research in their Principles of American Legal Writing course. In this course she instructs students in four class sessions and then works with students individually on their research for writing projects.

One challenge she highlighted was the difficulty in overcoming language barriers for legal citation abbreviations. It is important for instructors to keep in mind that what appears to make sense in the English speaker’s mind as an abbreviation for a court or publication may not always translate clearly to the foreign student. An instructor should look for ways to make this easier for students to understand and should be able to point to resources that can assist students in abbreviating or deciphering abbreviations of citations.

Scholtz shared one of the exercises she performed with her students, entitled “Thinking like a Common Law Lawyer.” This exercise focuses on the factual analysis that needs to take place before students can begin tackling legal research. Students are tasked with finding the basis of the case, generating search terms, and looking to other synonyms and antonyms of those terms. After the class performs this exercise together as a whole, students are broken up into smaller groups and given the same type of assignment with a different fact pattern.

The final speaker was Furman Scott DeMaris, Research Services Librarian at Reed Smith LLP, who spoke of his experience as a firm librarian when Reed Smith took on several Chinese LL.M. students as apart of work-study program with Temple University School of Law. One thing the firm did was to offer research refreshers and training for these students. Mr. Demaris found that it was important to let these students know that the librarians were there to assist them, because otherwise they might not have identified the librarians as a resource. Research guides were also offered to students on topics such as how to avoid research pitfalls and how to perform cost effective research. One challenge in hosting these LL.M. students was that, because they were guests rather than employees, they could not be given access to all of the firm’s resources. At the end of their time with Reed Smith, the students were asked to give a presentation on Chinese Law. This was a great way take advantage of the special knowledge of these foreign educated attorneys and to educate the firm’s attorneys on a foreign legal system.

After the final speaker, attendees were asked to discuss amongst members seated at their table the challenges in training foreign attorneys in an LL.M. instructional program or similar setting. The microphone was then opened for attendees to share and for the speakers to answer any questions.