Timing

Today’s Read: Jennifer Crocker & Katherine M. Knight, Contingencies of Self-Worth, Current Directions in Psychological Science, v. 14, no. 4, pp. 171-228 (Aug. 2005), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00364.x.

Well, hello there.

I have not done a blog post in a while because I have been making some changes in my life.

Last October, I joined the Great Resignation and left my job after nearly 10 years.

Then in November I did the following: (1) interviewed for and did not get a full-time librarian job at a local academic library, (2) interviewed for and got a part-time fully-remote librarian job at an academic library a few hours away, and (3) went to California to spend Thanksgiving with family for the first time since before the pandemic.

Then, in December, I went to Germany for almost three weeks to teach a class and freeze in the coldest cold snap Germany has had in a while.

I arrived back home on December 20, and then I was sick with some non-COVID, non-flu hell disease for almost three weeks.

And now here I am, basically well and adjusting to my new life. I love not working full-time, to be honest. I love having the time for a balanced mixture of treadmill runs, afternoon naps, cross-stitching, working in my cozy home office, and doing interesting projects. I’d have to say this has worked out well for me so far, and I really don’t have any regrets.

I suppose however, in the end, that “luck” was bound to run out.

Should Trial Attorneys Use Complex Language? It Depends…

Today’s Read:

Alivia Zubrod, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Kathrene R. Conway, and David Ailanjian, Understanding the Role of Linguistic Complexity in Famous Trial Outcomes, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2021, Vol. 40(3) 354–377, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0261927X20958439.

I suppose starting off with a quote from one of the most famous trials in U.S. history is appropriate:

“If [the glove] doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Johnnie Cochran, Defense Attorney for OJ Simpson, June 15, 1995

Regardless of your opinion about the outcome of the OJ Simpson trial, you have to admire the beauty and simplicity of this contention by the defense. It does not employ any complex legal arguments, and it does not twist itself in circles trying to explain why the defendant is innocent. It just appeals to the common sense of the jury. Memorably, it even rhymes. And, clearly, it worked.

The article I’m reviewing today, published last year in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, provides a fascinating look at the use of complex language in “famous” trials.

As their corpus, the researchers used Famous Trials, an open-access database established and maintained by Douglas O. Linder of UMKC School of Law.

The idea behind the research was to figure out whether and how the use of complex language by prosecutors and defense attorneys in their opening and closing statements appears to have impacted the outcome of the case.

Do We “Translate” or “Interpret” Foreign Legal Texts?

Today’s Read:

Mateusz Zeifert and Zygmunt Tobor, Legal Translation Versus Legal Interpretation: A Legal-Theoretical Perspective, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique volume 35, pages 1671–1687 (2022), available open access at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11196-021-09837-7.

I’ve often thought about this question when it comes to foreign legal texts. Law librarians are asked to find translations of foreign statutes and cases all the time, and in my opinion this is one of the most problematic requests that we deal with, especially when the researcher wants a quick answer.

To make a translation of a normative legal document like a statute or a code (or, especially in common law jurisdictions, a judicial opinion) useful to someone who does not read the language it was originally written in, what needs to be done to it? Does it need to be merely translated, or does it need to be interpreted also?

If it’s the latter, then the problem of machine-generate translations like those rendered by Google Translate is immediately obvious. Computers, alas, are inferior interpreters to humans for a task like this, especially if those humans have legal training and knowledge. I firmly believe that computers will never be able to reason their way through ambiguities in legal texts as well as a person can. There are too many variables at play that just can’t be programmed.

Hartog on Hurst, and Why Zotero 6 is a Total Game-Changer

Today’s Read:
Hendrik Hartog, Four Fragments on Doing Legal History, or Thinking with and Against Willard Hurst, Law and History Review, v. 39, issue 4, pp. 835-865 (Nov. 2021) (Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248021000626)

In my last post, I talked about how I still get Harper’s magazine in print in the mail and like to mark it up with a pen. I even showed a picture of the ink-covered article that I was discussing. At the time, I really thought that nothing could match pen-and-ink annotating of printed-out articles.

Reader, I may have been mis-informed.

One of our SJD students is also one of my Twitter mutuals. He tweeted out a link to this article by Hendrik Hartog this morning and said that he “couldn’t get it out of his head.” If that is not a compelling invitation to read and blog about an article, I don’t know what is.

I’ll get to some substance about the article in a minute, but first let me talk about why this experience has shown me that Zotero 6 is, truly, a game-changer.

I have been, at best, a half-hearted Zotero user in the past. I recently had to get a new laptop at work, which meant downloading and installing the newest version of the app, Zotero 6. I have offered Zotero training to our researchers for a few years now, since it is the only CMS that Harvard offers university-wide for free, and some of our LLM and SJD students have reported that it really helped them stay organized and efficient. This is why I forced myself to use it before – so that I knew exactly what it could do and answer questions from students about it.

With the release of Zotero 6 in April 2022, the platform now comes with a built-in PDF Reader and Note Editor.

Y’all, the stuff just got real with this new feature.

On “Work” Done By “COVID Maximalists”

Today’s Read:
Justin E.H. Smith, Permanent Pandemic, Harper’s (May/June 2022).

I subscribe to the print version of Harper’s magazine. I like to mark up the articles while I read them, and that’s hard to do on a phone or a computer.

The main essay in the most recent issue certainly has a lot of mark-worthy content:

I am actually considering writing a few blog posts on this article because there was so much there.

But I have to start with the author’s description of who a typical “COVID maximalist” is:

“The maximalists typically belong to a distinct social class (my own, incidentally) in which it is financially possible to stay home and ‘work’ (i.e. manipulate the windows on our laptops in various prescribed ways) at a distance from our employers.”

Well.

I feel the need to explore why that sentence landed as such an insult to me, and made me feel angry and defensive. To get into that, I have to talk about the public service ethos surrounding librarianship and how that didn’t really go away for any of us despite being stuck at home for months and months.

Privacy and Dignity

Note: After a two-year break, I am back! Basically, thanks to the pandemic, my blogging went from occasional to never. This is a place where I write a few words about something that I am reading that I find striking, interesting, informative, or infuriating. I used to spend half a day or longer on these posts before, which is not sustainable. So my goal moving forward is to really keep it to a few words.

Today’s Read:
Lawrence M. Friedman, A Tale of Two Cultures: Privacy and Dignity, in Gesellschaft und Gerechtigkeit: Festschrift für Hubert Rottleuthner 273 (2011).

So I guess privacy and dignity have been on my mind recently, especially given the leaked SCOTUS opinion in the abortion case. What does it mean to have and enjoy the right to privacy and the right to dignity?

Friedman’s essay, written in 2011, is more concerned with the ideas of “privacy” and “dignity” as they relate to people who are in the public eye and impacted by celebrity culture. Although that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I was drawn to this essay by its title, it still offers some universally thoughtworthy ideas.

This essay asks, as a fundamental inquiry, how much responsibility the law, as interpreted and exercised by judges, has an obligation to protect people and culture from corrupt and damaging thoughts and ideas. It argues that European courts, in contrast to those in the United States, sometimes operate under the conviction that “not everything that interests the public is in the public interest.”

Legal Scholarship and the Expectations of Old, Western White Guys

Today’s Read:
Alonso Gurmendi and Paula Baldini Miranda da Cruz, Writing in International Law and Cultural Barriers (Part I), August 7, 2020, http://opiniojuris.org/2020/08/07/writing-in-international-law-and-cultural-barriers-part-i/

It’s getting to be that time of year. I’m staying afloat, and feeling OK and reasonably productive, but waves of emails and requests and things that need to be done ASAP are threatening to pull me under if I’m not careful. Alas, COVID hasn’t really changed the volume or urgency of the work in my world, I’m afraid. At least I don’t spend 90 minutes a day commuting right now. But whether I am always using that found 90 minutes productively is a different story.

Anyway, I wanted to get in a read before the crush of the fall semester is here. I did myself a favor and chose a short blog post this time, and I am so glad I did! This wonderful piece by Alonso Gurmendi and Paula Baldini Miranda da Cruz really got me thinking about language and legal commentary. It allowed me to further contemplate some of the thinking I was doing in my last blog post, in which I explored the legal canon, who decides what’s in it, and how librarians may be complicit in that system: a system that definitely fails to amplify minority voices.

Well. We who care about legal literature must ask ourselves what place foreign-trained legal scholars, especially those who are not native English speakers, have in that literature, mustn’t we?

Who Decides What’s In “The Canon”?

Today’s Read: Alexandra Kemmerer, Juristische Kanonfragen: Andere Auffassungen nähren die Neugier (Legal Canon Questions: Other Views Feed Curiosity), July 27, 2020, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/juristische-kanonfragen-gegenprobe-auf-den-juristischen-kanon-16682327.html.

Today’s read is a short newspaper article written by my friend Alexandra Kemmerer, who is a Berlin-based senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (located in Heidelberg).  She also writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, which is where this article was published.

This article is in German, and it stretched me in terms of both language and substance, so I hope I get everything right AND can do it justice.  I also want to use it as a springboard for some thoughts I have about how the concept of the canon affects academic librarianship.

Who were the Members of the Nazi Party?: An Empirical Study

Today’s Read:  Christian Stass, NSDAP: Neun Millionen Deutsche…, Die Zeit, June 24, 2020, https://www.zeit.de/2020/27/juergen-w-falter-nationalsozialismus-nsdap-politologie/komplettansicht.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months, as have many other thoughtful people I know, wondering about Trump supporters.  Who are these people, and what motivates them to not only have supported Trump in 2016, but also to continue to support him in spite (or maybe because) of his performance over the last few years?

A few archetypal traits keep coming to my mind when I think about who Trump supporters are, shaped by several factors, such as people I know who support him (including many members of my own family) and the media.

For better or worse, here is the list:

Copyright Law Impacts How Libraries Provide Access to E-Books: During a Pandemic, Should It?

Today’s Read:
Congressional Research Service (CRS), COVID-19 and Libraries: E-Books and Intellectual Property Issues (Apr. 28, 2020), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10453

This topic has been on my mind a lot since we all went on lockdown and couldn’t access physical books anymore.  The pandemic has not stopped research, of course.  There are still deadlines to be met.

My focus, as always, is on supporting our LLM students.  They cannot graduate without submitting a research paper, and some of them were still doing research as late as April (the original deadline for LLM papers this year was April 25, although many students got extensions).  To have their access to our print collection blocked by circumstances of fate was very unfair, and I felt so badly for them.

Not to make light of what is a very serious global health pandemic, but there are, of course, a few not-negative ways to spin this.  It wasn’t as if only some of the students could not access print books — the restriction affected everyone equally.  Furthermore, LLM theses are not graded on a curve, at least not as far as I know.  The students do not compete against each other.  When you are writing an LLM thesis, the goal is to do the best and most thoroughly-researched paper you can possibly do under the circumstances you find yourself.

When I was writing my own LLM thesis, I had about 6 weeks to do the bulk of the work because, in Germany, you are not permitted to begin work on your thesis until you finish your LLM coursework.  My leave of absence was nearly over by then, and I really needed to get back to my job in the library (where I had a quick look at some relevant resources in Harvard’s library collection, in addition to wrapping up the writing and editing).  I made it work the best I could.  Could my thesis have been better?  Absolutely, if I hadn’t felt so rushed to gather and process sources, and then pound it out.  But it got done, and it got a decent grade, and I was able to finish my LLM.

I tell that story to show that I really feel for the students, in whatever circumstances they find themselves.  And where they were finding themselves during the final few months of this academic year was locked out of the library, with no access to print books unless they’d checked them out beforehand.

Duplicating print and electronic resources in a sustainably cost-effective way is a conversation that we have been having in our library for a very long time, and restrictions on lending e-books is always a primary element of the discussion.  So I was glad to find the CRS report that I am discussing today, which frames this conversation against the backdrop of the current situation.