After all the discussion and debate, a debt ceiling deal was finally reached earlier this week.  The bill passed into law is known as the Budget Control Act of 2011.  It's useful to note that the authenticated version of the bill and others …

Last week, Robert Ambrogi reported that the Office of Law Revision Council, who has responsiblity for preparing and publishing the U.S. Code, recently released a new official site for the U.S. Code.  The site is currently in Beta, but from what I've seen so far it …

Every summer many of the law librarians from BYU attend a conference put on by the American Association of Law Libraries.  This year the conference was in Philadelphia and it was my first time visiting that historic city.  Besides the fact that the heat index …

HeinOnline is one of our favorite resources here in the law library.  Most law students know it as the place to get pdf versions of law reviews and journals, but it's much more than that.  The Law Library subscribes to a number of …

Beatrice A. Tice has a nice essay in the U.C. Irvine Law Review titled The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School.  Tice, the Associate Dean for Library and Information Services at U.C. Irvine School of …

Earlier in the week I tweeted links to a few videos (here and here) showing some of the law school's construction projects going on this summer.  Here in the law library we have some of our own construction going on that I thought you …

There is so much information out there (legal and otherwise) that it's nice to get some tips on where to start.  That's where librarians come in.  Here at the BYU law library, we do our best to help you know where to …

The BYU Law Library is now on Twitter.  Follow us @BYUlawlibrary to keep up to date with our blog, Hunter's Query, as well as other goings on here in the law library.

One of the great things about being a law librarian is discovering new and useful information.  Recently, while researching some criminal law and procedure issues, I came across the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.  The UCR has all kinds of different annual statistics on …

If you weren't one already, law school has a way of turning students into Supreme Court watchers.  Now that the most recent term is over, SCOTUSblog (which all law students should become familiar with) has given us all the numbers you'll ever want …

Professor Shima Baradaran has recently posted one of her newest articles, Fair Trade and Child Labor, to SSRN.  This article was co-authored with Stephanie Barclay and will be published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

I can't say I love legal citation.  I understand why we have it and it's useful to me when I want to look up what's being cited, but some of the rules frustrate me.  One of the things I do find interesting …

Law students are now well into their summer jobs and externships and we hope it's going well.  Don't forget the law library is still around to help if you get stuck, so don't forget to null.  We've heard from a number of you …

The ABA Journal had an interesting article last month discussing the Supreme Court's practice of stealth overruling.  This is a practice in which the justices avoid expressly overruling precedent, but in effect do overrule it by "gnawing away at old cases without officially declaring them …

One of the nice additions to WestlawNext is the ability to save your research in folders.  WestlawNext has recently added the ability to share those research folders with other WestlawNext users.  Research is often a collaborative process and folder sharing will make collaboration much …

The law library is always a different place in the summer.  One reason is that there always seems to be some kind of construction going on nearby.  The University is currently working to finish up some of the new dorms that are replacing the old …

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Plata (the CA overcrowded prisons case), Professor Shima Baradaran penned an op-ed for the NY Times presenting her ideas about how CA and other states could go about reducing prison populations.  She suggests "reform[ing] the rules governing pretrial detention, …