Spotlight Blog

ZiefBrief, USF's Law Library Blog, has a preparation suggestion for those of you who have clerkships, internships, and other law-related summer jobs: CALI Lessons.

If you will be doing legal research this summer, it's a good idea to boost your research skills before you start your summer job so that you can hit the ground running. CALI's online, interactive tutorials are a great way to improve your legal research skills.

Read the entire blog post to see which seven lessons they suggest.

Last month we sent out a bunch of CALI Excellence for the Future Award® certificates to our member law schools who will then pass them along to their top performers in each class. So congratulations to the latest CALI Award recipients.

And it is around this time when we get feedback from uptight especially observant law students asking for reprinted award certificates because of the seemingly incoherent letters printed on the bottom right of their awards.

The good news is, this isn't a printing error. It's a unique URL that links to a virtual version of your award. With your name on it and everything. Every award printed generates its own virtual award because we want to give you a way to link to your award through online biographies or resumes. See, we at CALI foresaw this death of paper-based communication thing a long time ago.

So go ahead, type yours into your web browser and see for yourself.

And don't forget, if you're on LinkedIn join the CALI Award winners group to get a badge for your LinkedIn profile.

We've now opened registration for the 2010 Conference for Law School Computing at Rutgers School of Law | Camden with accomodations across the bridge in Philadelphia.

Don't forget, Friday, March 19 at 2PM Central Law Librarian Conversations goes live with Roberta Shaffer, the Law Librarian of Congress.

So this is your last chance to reserve your spot to listen in online live.

That's the only way you'll be able to join the lawlibcon chatroom and participate.

As always, the Law Librarian Conversations live broadcast and podcast is a free service to you.

See you online at 2PM Central.

Here is our new CALI Lesson poster in a printable 8.5 x 11 PDF version.

If you're a CALI Rep, you will be getting a tube package in the mail with 2 poster-sized versions. Want a poster-sized version and you're not your school's rep? Let us know. We will have extras to send.

Feel free to hand out the letter-sized version of the posters to your students or display the posters where students will see. And if you would like us to create a customized version of the PDF that includes your school's authorization code, also let us know.

CALI is a co-sponsor for the upcoming Law.Gov Workshop at Chicago-Kent on Friday, May 21st.

You can register for the workshop for free here.

There have been a series of Law.Gov Workshops throughout the country, and the aim is to have a dialogue that spurs the creation of a repository of all primary law in the US using open-source tools. They have our full support here at CALI, and we're very excited about the opportunity to help sponsor this one in our own backyard (half the CALI staff works out of the Kent campus).

Check out the Law.Gov website here. Stay tuned for more on this workshop.

When Richard Leiter, Director of University of Nebraska - Lincoln Law Library (bio), asked if CALI could provide a new outlet for his popular web series/podcast, The Law Librarian, it was perfect timing. Our webinar series coupled with a newly updated CALI Classcaster blogging system was an ideal solution.

So we'd like to announce the product of this partnership: the first live broadcast of the new "Law Librarian Conversations." This Friday, March 5 at 2 PM Central.

Register (free, of course) to join the conversation.

The new broadcast, iTunes feed, and blog feed will replace the old Blog Talk Radio ones, so make sure you update your subscriptions and bookmarks if you're already subscribed to "The Law Librarian." Follow the new Law Librarian Conversations blog for updates and content relating to the show.

We're very excited to have a hand in bringing this service to our law librarian friends and we hope you can join us in building a community.

After a lot of hard work from Elmer, we've unveiled Classcaster version 2.0 powered by Wordpress.

Especially after using it to help create our newest blogs, one as the home for CALI Lawdibles and one as the new home for Richard Leiter's Law Librarian Conversations podcast, we're excited about the possibility of law faculty using Classcaster to create some blogs of their own.

We encourage you to use it as a class blog space or and even to podcast lectures for your law school courses. If you're a law professor, why would you create a Classcaster blog for your course?...

Have a look at this article about A2J Author written by Ron Staudt; Associate Vice President, Law, Business and Technology and Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent.

[A] real success story has emerged based in part on my persistent optimism that technology can improve the delivery of legal services. A2J Author, a modest software tool that allows lawyers to build guided Internet interviews for prospective clients, has been adopted across the United States and in several foreign countries as an interface for public access to legal processes. This Article describes the origin of A2J Author as a collaboration by courts, legal aid agencies, and funding sources. The Article explores the combination of factors that produced this technology, which successfully attacks barriers to access to justice. Finally, the Article speculates on whether A2J Author can begin to transform the delivery of legal aid and government services to low income people.

The article will be published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. 

Read Prof. Staudt's full A2J article here.

Our CALI Author software makes it pretty easy for you to write your own interactive tutorials or even edit current CALI Lessons for your own (non-commercial) use. We just released a new version of CALI Author: 

Download CALI Author 4.0 here.

Besides the fancy new logo, most notably, we've upgraded the AutoPublish feature.

Upgraded AutoPublish Feature

So once you write an interactive tutorial of your own or customize an existing CALI Lesson, you can, as the AutoPublish name suggests, automatically publish it to the CALI website.

Once you publish the lesson to our website using the AutoPublish feature in CALI Author, you'll get a unique URL. You can pass this URL on to your students so they can run your AutoPublished lesson. You can even track who has used your creation and what they scored within your CALI AutoPublish account (login, righthand menu > CALI AutoPublish).

You can read more about CALI Author here.

Have a look at Prof. Patrick Wiseman's open, online collection of edited Constitutional Law cases. Just a few of the cool features in this collection:

• Ellipses are expandable one by one (), or by selecting an 'expand ellipses' icon (, in the upper left corner), which expands all ellipses in the case.
• All footnotes may be shown by selecting a 'Show footnotes' icon (, also upper left corner).
• The above two features combine to allow restoring the entire case.
• Every paragraph in each case is made a "target", enabling direct linking from the class syllabus or web page to any paragraph.
• In a few cases, editorial footnotes (indicated by lower-case letters, and with text within square brackets) provide commentary or additional information about the case. More such editorial material will be added over time.
• In many cases, links are provided from the top of the first page to concurring and dissenting opinions.
• Supreme Court precedent cited in each case is linked from within the case if available.

Play around with a case and take advantage of some of these features, especially the expandability. You can find Prof. Wiseman's complete project description here.

Prof. Wiseman's hard work is available to anyone who wants to use it under a Creative Commons license. CALI would like to thank Professor Wiseman for sharing his hard work and allowing us to give it a home. And we all should thank him for his willingness to share it with the world.

His sharing is a fantastic example of the spirit of our eLangdell Project. We hope that a few more law professors out there are willing to write casebook materials and make it freely available - and right now we're offering some pretty nice cash incentives for those who write casebook material and give it to us to share.

We at CALI along with the folks at Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT) are very excited about the newest release of A2J Author, version 3.0.

A2J Author helps legal aid attorneys create computer-based, self-guided A2J interviews for use by unrepresented litigants and others in need. The A2J interviews walk users through a step-by-step question and answer process, which, in the end, creates an (often otherwise confusing) legal form.

CALI users who currently use a Comcast email address, as well as a few who use certain law school email addresses, may be experiencing problems receiving emails from CALI. Your spam blocker service has blacklisted CALI, inexplicably, along with a few others who use certain Amazon cloud services (technical details here). We're working hard to fix this mistake.

How to fix it:

This is bad news for those of you with afflicted emails because you cannot receive CALI account verifications and password resets. To avoid the problem, make sure you white list cali.org and the IP 174.129.29.17. If you need help doing this, please talk to your school's IT department.

Test to see if your email is affected:

To test if your email address is one we're having trouble sending to, visit www.cali.org, hit the "Request new password link" and have the system send you a message. It should show up quickly. You don't need to actually reset your password, the link in the message will expire in 24 hours. If it doesn't show up, first check your spam filters, and then let us know.

A very astute reader at Paul Caron's TaxProf blog asked about how we will update the casebook chapters we publish in the eLangdell Ecasebook Stimulus Project.  I have reproduced my reply here for everyone's benefit as I believe this will be a common question.