This past summer a group of students at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law participated in the Timor-Leste internship program. One of the interns, Alexandria Saquella, was working under the Parliamentary Watch Project. Her specific assignment involved anti-corruption legislation. Even though she was 8,395 miles away from the law school, feeling pressure from the gravity of the work, she turned to Reference Librarians Tara Mospan and Beth DiFelice for expert assistance. I was so afraid of making a mistake or giving the wrong information, Saquella said. But thankfully, we have amazing librarians here at the law school who know how to do international research. This is information that doesn’t just come up on Google. There are specific ways to find these laws and see how they’re applied. So I was communicating with our librarians a lot and they were incredibly helpful.

Via Zoom and email communications, the law librarians provided the help Saquella needed to make her internship impactful and successful. So whether you are on the other side of the globe, at home, or studying in the law school, the Law Library staff is available and happy to help you: Meet with a Librarian, Ask a Librarian, Reference Desk Hours.

You can read more about Timor-Leste internship program here:  International internship gives ASU Law students opportunity to impact democracy in developing country

CALI Lessons are online interactive tutorials that cover narrow topics of law. CALI publishes over 1,000 lessons covering 40 different legal subject areas. These lessons have been used over 10 million times by law students over the years. To access CALI, click here: Using CALI

#1- CALI Lessons are another way to learn the law.
CALI Lessons are another way to learn the law. They are interactive web-based tutorials that both teach and apply your understanding of what you just read. You learn the law from casebook readings, faculty instruction, and from supplements. Many commercial supplements are not written by law faculty and are simplified and watered down versions of the law. CALI Lessons are not. CALI Lessons present hypothetical situations and then quiz you on your understanding using follow-up questions and branching to make sure you got the right answer for the right reasons.

#2- CALI Lessons are a formative assessment for you.
Do you want to make sure you are understanding what you study? The only way to be sure is to assess and CALI lessons provide a form of self-assessment. You get feedback on every question – whether you get it right or wrong – and you get a final score that tells you how you are doing on a specific legal topic.

#3- CALI Lessons are interactive and engaging.
CALI Lessons are not videos that you passively watch. The material is modeled on Socratic Dialogue where a question is asked, you answer the question, and then various aspects of the topic are explored. CALI Lessons are written by tenured law faculty with many years of teaching experience (law librarians author the legal research lessons). The lessons purposefully steer you into thinking about the topic in a nuanced way.

#4- CALI Lessons are rigorous.
It is difficult to get a perfect score on most CALI Lessons the first time through. Law is complex and CALI lessons dive into that complexity. Each lesson covers a specific topic without getting too broad in scope. The questions are tough and require serious thought from the student. A typical lesson takes 20 to 40 minutes for a student to complete. You can take lessons multiple times to improve your understanding.

#5- CALI Lessons are a good learning appetizer or an excellent learning dessert.
CALI Lessons are an excellent learning experience as a first bite at the material. They prepare you for class or subsequent readings. The material is brief and rigorous exposing you to the concepts and nomenclature of a topic without being drilled and practiced to death. In addition, CALI Lessons are excellent for study after class (alone or in a study group), after the casebook readings, or for studying for the final exam. They provide immediate and substantive feedback that can direct you to the places where further study is required.

To access CALI, click here: Using CALI

Midterm season is just around the corner. Too soon, you say? As a law library fellow and self-described 4L, I remember the olden days of 2016 walking into my torts final with only an outline, some grim prophecies, and uncertainty, because newfangled midterms hadn’t spread to my section yet.

Midterms are your crystal ball showing your future exam-taking self, and a window to the essence of your learning style. They may be more important in informing and adjusting your study habits to achieve your academic apotheosis in December than their nudge to your final grade. Some students have taken them without much extra study just to see how well they can do on just regular, daily reading. But, of course, many of us are type-A achievers, so here are some tips from the Ross Blakley Law Library to help you excel.

1. Study aids for exam practice: The book Getting to Maybe has helped many budding lawyers learn to thrive in a field laden with slippery “it depends” answers instead of familiar, concrete facts. Crunch Time, on Wolters Kluwer provides flow charts, multiple choice, short answer, and essay exam questions. West Academic provides Exam Pro practice questions for multiple-choice and essay exam practice, and Mastering the Exam for tips that will help you throughout law school. CALI offers podcasts featuring panels of experts on outlining, time management, exam prep, and the grading process.

2. Meet with a Librarian about your open memo to buy yourself valuable study time for other classes: We can help you navigate Westlaw and Lexis to find all relevant good law efficiently and thoroughly.

3. Take past exams to prepare: Thinking like a lawyer involves more than just repeating memorized knowledge. Unexpected scenarios will test your ability to apply and analyze the law. The library’s Past Exams archive can help; even if it’s not from your professor, authentic issue-spotting exams offer invaluable practice in Civ Pro, Torts, Contracts, and upper-level classes. (Of course, when you come across questions that might be clearly outside the scope of your class, don’t sweat them and move on!)

4. Refine your outline: Making an outline is probably the best way to study legal doctrine and make the connections between the rule of law and the court’s reasoning. ASU’s past outlines are most useful to check your own work as you process your notes and readings. Your classes’ teaching assistants can help you resolve discrepancies.

5. Breathe: Remember that no one exam will make or break your professional dreams, not even the ones you’ll take in December. Good luck!

Andrea Gass, research fellow, doesn’t have to take midterms or finals anymore, but she still gets all the fun of life at ASU law. How great is that?

Greetings from your resident ELECTRONIC Resources Librarian for a Spotlight on New Law Library Resources.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. – Muhammad Ali

Want to be a sports law champion?  Then you need to train your research skills to be able to competently represent your clients. Luckily for you we’ve added an all-star player to our database roster and I think you’re going to like the way they perform in the upcoming seasons: BLASE.

What is it?
A massive database of information all centered around sports and Entertainment law.  It has books, scholarly articles, congressional documents, important cases, legislative histories, etc.  It intended to be a one-stop-shop for all of your sports law needs.

How to I get to it?
Please see the video below.  Soon many of these titles will be integrated into the ASU catalog.  Until then, you must access them through HeinOnline:

How do I use it?
That’s a great question and it depends on your purpose.  If you’re looking for case law, they’ve got a meticulously sorted list of sports topics that you can choose from:  everything from Agents, to Horseracing, to Olympics and Golf.  They’ve collected these cases into neat categories so you don’t have to scour Lexis and Westlaw to find them.

Looking to drill-down on the Athlete Agents Act NCCUSL?   They’ve got a mini-collection of committee meeting reports, agendas, state by state violations, and (of course) drafts of the final act.

If you’re looking to stay up-to-date on current events, they have a robust collection of sports law periodicals and magazines.

(Pro-Tip: if you click the image box, it will convert the PDF original to a text format so you can cut-and-paste.  This works for nearly all HeinOnline PDFs.)

And take a look at the Law Library’s Sports Law LibGuide.

Sean Harrington, Electronic Resources Librarian

In addition to teaching her first-year Torts classes and upper-level courses on Cults & Alternative Religions and seminars, Professor Linda Demaine has developed a body of published work on liability issues and the interplay between the human mind, the law, and the court system.

In The Psychology of Intellectual Property Law, A book written with ASU Law Professor Aaron Fellmeth and due to be published this year, Professor Demaine explores how the law of intellectual property—names, artworks, trademarks, and inventions of the human mind—tracks (and departs from) the science of psychology. Earlier this year, Professor Demaine provided the preface to the book The Psychology of Family Law. There, she discussed the unfortunate limitations on the legal profession’s ability to embrace scientific research in other fields despite the remarkable improvements to judicial understanding of eyewitnesses, confessions, and its potential to improve legal doctrine governing marriage, divorce, and parenthood. Previously, Professor Demaine contributed to The Civil-Military Gap in the United States, a book that explores the potential impact of divergent views between military leaders and civilian elites on U.S. military effectiveness.

Professor Demaine has produced numerous law journal articles. Most recently, in Seeing Is Deceiving: The Tacit Deregulation of Deceptive Advertising, Professor Demaine discussed the potentially misleading impact of federal regulations that concentrate mostly on the truthfulness of words in advertising despite advertisers’ increasing reliance on less-regulated visual images. In Navigating Policy by the Stars: The Influence of Celebrity Entertainers on Federal Lawmaking, she analyzes the problems associated with entertainers testifying in Congress to influence policy. In Search of the Anti-Elephant: Confronting the Human Inability to Forget Inadmissible Evidence examines the threats to justice associated with judicial reliance on instructions to juries to disregard evidence they should not have known of, a practice whose merits are hotly debated but potentially dubious.

Earlier, in “Playing Doctor” with the Patient’s Spouse: Alternative Conceptions of Health Professional Liability she analyzed the effects of refusing to extend to all medical professionals a ban on sexual relations that stands between psychiatrists and psychologists with regard to their patients. Reinventing the Double Helix: A Novel and Nonobvious Reconceptualization of the Biotechnology Patent, a Stanford Law Review piece she co-authored with Professor Fellmeth explored the scope and purpose of patent law, and whether including biochemicals such as naturally occurring DNA sequences that are “isolated and purified” by human ingenuity should be considered intellectual property.

You can read Professor Demaine’s scholarship in the Law Library’s Faculty Scholarship Repository. If you have interest in tort, legal-scientific, or intellectual property research, the reference librarians can help you get started on an article of your own. Stop by the third floor reference desk or make an appointment to Meet with a Librarian.

Andrea Gass, Law Library Fellow