HeinOnline Blog (www.heinonline.org): May 2009

IN THE NEWS & IN HEINONLINE: President Obama Nominates Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice

On Tuesday, May 26th, President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice. From the White House Blog:

"If confirmed for the Supreme Court, Judge Sotomayor would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the past 70 years."

"In 1998, Judge Sotomayor became the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, one of the most demanding circuits in the country. She has participated in over 3000 panel decisions and authored roughly 400 opinions, handling difficult issues of constitutional law, to complex procedural matters, to lawsuits involving complicated business organizations."

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination as Supreme Court Justice would replace the retiring Justice David Souter. Judge Sotomayor has had rulings across a variety of areas including copyright, first, second and fourth amendment rights, abortion, employment discrimination, antitrust, civil rights, property rights, constitutional law, environmental law, corporate law, and much more.

To read scholarly law review articles related to Judge Sonia Sotomayor's rulings, we ran a text search in HeinOnline for "Judge Sotomayor" OR "Sonia Sotomayor", and retrieved 175 law review articles related to Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Many of the articles discuss key areas of Sotomayor's previous rulings, including:

The 1994 baseball strike
Her nomination by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and appointment as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
The high profile copyright case New York Times Co., Inc. v. Tasini
Her rulings in international law cases, discussions about property rights including the Krimstock v. Kelly case
Anti-trust issues
The New York City Campaign Finance program, of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor served as a member of the New York City Campaign Finance Board
Fourth amendment rights as ruled in the N.G. Ex Rel. S.C. v. Connecticut case
Civil rights issues and much more!

Click here for a full list of results.

In addition to these 175 articles that discuss various rulings and law-related issues, there are also three law review articles/comments written by Judge Sotomayor in HeinOnline from 1996-2005.

For additional information and various links to articles about Judge Sonia Sotomayor view the Wikipedia entry. Or check out the SCOTUS blog where they have a series of blog posts discussing some of Sotomayor's civil cases, her leading criminal law opinions, other opinions and notes about her record, discussions leading up to her nomination, and more.

PRESS RELEASE - HeinOnline Awarded 2009 AALL Best New Product Award

BUFFALO, NY, May 6, 2009 - The American Association of Law Libraries has selected HeinOnline’s Subject Compilations of State Laws Database for the 2009 AALL Best New Product Award. HeinOnline converted the well-respected, leading research guide, Subject Compilations of State Laws publication compiled by Cheryl Nyberg and Carol Boast, into an online, searchable database. This revolutionized historical state subject searching by providing researchers with digital access to more than 18,000 bibliographic records, many with extensive annotations.

The bibliographic records in the online database are enhanced to include thousands of links to law review articles and U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are available in HeinOnline. Entries also include live links to the Internet where state surveys are located, as well as links directly to WorldCat in cases where OCLC numbers exist. Legal researchers can browse by subject, search across a specific subject, search by entry number, journal title, article title, court and more. New bibliographic entries are added to the database quarterly, bringing researchers updates faster than the annual print series. The exact replicas of the bound volumes are also included to provide researchers the same browsing capabilities as they would have with the print product.

The New Product Award honors a new and innovate commercial legal information product that enhances or improves existing law library services and/or procedures. New products may include, but are not limited to, printed material, computer hardware and/or software, or other products or devices that aid or improve access to legal information, the legal research process, or procedures for technical processing of library materials. Any product that has been re-introduced in a new format or with substantial changes is also available. A new product is one that has been in the library-related marketplace for two years or less.

About HeinOnline -- HeinOnline is a product of William S. Hein & Co., Inc. who has been serving the library community for nearly 90 years as a legal publisher, periodical subscription agent and the world’s largest distributor of legal periodicals. HeinOnline is Hein’s premier online product with more than 45 million pages of legal history available in an online, fully-searchable, image-based format. The content includes legal journals, government documents, foreign and international law materials, legal classics, world trials and much more. All content is in PDF format, fully searchable and from inception. Now, in more than 3,200 locations in over 150 countries, HeinOnline is the world’s largest image-based legal research collection and contains more than nine centuries of legal history.

HeinOnline's Tip of the Week: How to Find Regulatory Agendas in the Federal Register after the Fall of 2007

If you would rather watch this Tip of the Week in a video format, please click here.

U.S. agencies are required to publish semiannual regulatory agendas describing regulatory actions they are developing or have recently completed, as outlined in Executive Order 12866 (58 fr 51735) and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 U.S.C. 602). These Agendas have been published in the Federal Register every year since 1983, typically once during the Spring and once during the Fall, and are found in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions section. Beginning with the fall 2007 edition of the Unified Agenda, the only Agenda entries published in the Federal Register are rules that are likely to have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities, and entries that have been selected for periodic review under the Regulatory Flexibility Act. In an effort to support the Administration’s goal to move the Agenda process to an Internet based format, the full Unified Agenda is available at http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaMain. This week’s tip is going to illustrate how you can use HeinOnline to find a Regulatory Agenda for a specific agency.

For this example, we are going to search for the Regulatory Agendas of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) from 2006-2008. At the beginning of each Unified Agenda you will find a Table of Contents that outlines what Agency Agendas are included in the Unified Agenda that term and on what page you can find it. You will also find a list of Agencies that did not publish any agenda entries in that print edition of the Federal Register. These agencies agendas are available from RegInfo.gov at http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaMain.

To search for Regulatory Agendas for the CPSC, open the Field Search option from within the Federal Register Library. In the first search box, enter the name of the agency, in this case Consumer Product Safety Commission, choose phrase and full text. NOTE: It is best when entering agency names to use the full name versus an abbreviation (i.e. use Internal Revenue Service vs. IRS). In the second search box we are going to enter the term Agency Agendas, select phrase and full text. This will allow us to quickly find the Table of Contents for each Unified Agenda section and determine if the agency published it’s Agenda entries or not. In the third box, enter Unified Agenda, select phrase and full text. This will help to further refine our search by focusing on the pages found within the Unified Agenda section of the Federal Register.

Now, highlight the Federal Register from the title listing, insert the range of years for which you want to focus, in this case 2006-2008, and choose a sort by method of Volume Date - Ascending. This will allow us to see entries from 2006 first. Click search.

We get six search results; two results for each year. You’ll notice the coverage information for each result indicates that there is one result from the spring and one from the fall in each year. This coincides with when the Unified Agendas are published.

From the first result, 71 Fed. Reg. No. 78, click on View Matching Text Pages Then click on the first link to page 22271.

On this page, you will find the Table of Contents for the Unified Agenda as it was published in the Federal Register in the Spring of 2007. Here you will find Consumer Product Safety Commission and page 23547 listed.

This allows us to quickly pull up that page to view the Agenda. To get to this page, choose 23547 from the page pull down above the page, and this will take you directly to the Regulatory Agenda for the CPSC.

Now, if we go back to our search results by clicking on Search History and then clicking on our search, we can view the remainder of our results.

From this results list, click on View Matching Text Pages from the last result, 73 Fed. Reg. No. 227 (2008). Now click on the first page link to page 71095.

This will bring up the Table of Contents for the Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda section from the Fall 2008 Federal Register. The list of Agency Agendas included begins on the lower half of the second column. If we click next page to go to 71096, we will see that the CPSC is not included in the Table of Contents for the Agency Agendas. Therefore, we continue reading to the second column where we find a list of agencies that do not have entries identified for inclusion in the printed agenda shown in this section. The CPSC is included in this list. This means, we have to visit the RegInfo.gov site to view the CPSC’s full agenda.

To make it quick and easy for you to access this site, we’ve included a link on our External Links page. Click on the resources tab, then under External Links click on Important Federal Register Links. The fourth link listed says To Access the Current Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions Click Here.

Click on the link to go directly to the RegInfo.gov site where you can select CPSC from the drop down menu and view the current regulatory agenda. Or, if you want to view the historic agendas, click on the Historical Unified Agenda and Regulatory Plan link at the top of the page, then select the year and then the agency.

Subject Compilations of State Laws Database Updated with 2007-2008 Records

The Subject Compilations of State Laws database has been updated to include 1,061 records from the 2007-2008 bound volume. These updates contain records related to three new subjects, including adult protective services, mortgage lenders, and restorative justice. You can also find new records related to data security breaches, foreclosure, health care providers, and wrongful conviction or imprisonment, all hot topics among state law surveys today! Do you want to view these new records in HeinOnline? Open the database in HeinOnline, click on "browse by subject" from the resources tab or from the collection landing page, find the subject from the listing and click on it, and you'll see the most recent entries listed first. It's that easy! Watch our brief 60-second demonstration below.

We also have an abundance of other training materials available on our Wiki for this collection. On the wiki page specific to HeinOnline's Subject Compilations of State Laws Database, you can find FAQs, search examples, how-to's, a quick reference guide, and a link to the Getting Started video.

If you are not subscribed to the Subject Compilations of State Laws Database view our detailed brochure or contact marketing@wshein.com for more information.

Join us for our next Webinar - Using & Searching the Law Journal Library

Our next webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, May 13, 2009 from 2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m EDT. This webinar will focus on using and searching HeinOnline's Law Journal library. We will discuss the following:

How to quickly pull up a journal article when you have a citation
How to search for a journal article by article name
How to search for articles written by a specific author
Browsing or searching by subject, state, or country
Overview of indexes and finding aids available
How to use the full power of Hein's ScholarCheck tool to connect citations and view citation analysis
How to find coverage information for a journal title
And much more!

Use the following link to register for the webinar, https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/760984123.

Last month we hosted our first webinar and concentrated on "Getting Started" in HeinOnline. We had more than 100 attendees and received a lot of great feedback. If you missed the webinar and wish to view it, we have posted a link to the recording at http://heinonline.org/wiki/index.php/HeinOnline:WebinarGettingStarted, or you can view it by clicking here.

For more information or if you have any questions, please visit our Webinars page on the wiki at http://heinonline.org/wiki/index.php/HeinOnline:Webinars, or email us at marketing@wshein.com.

225-Year Archive of Taxation and Economic Reform in America is Coming Soon to HeinOnline!

We are proud to announce that a 225-year archive of taxation and economic reform in America is coming soon to HeinOnline! This new a-la-carte library, Taxation & Economic Reform in America, a Historical Archive, 1781-2009, will contain more than 900 volumes and nearly one-million pages of legislative history materials and other documents in its first release, expected to launch by the end of August 2009.

This new a-la-carte library is our greatest value ever offered in HeinOnline and will be available at an affordable price. Essentially, you can have access to this nearly one-million page archive for the same price you might pay for just one legislative history set; that's a huge savings!

How did America end up in the current global financial crisis?
What did President Bush propose and how is President Obama planning to restore the U.S. economy?

Find answers to these questions and more with this new taxation and economic reform archive from HeinOnline! This library will include the complete Carlton Fox collection, which contains nearly 48 years of historical legislation related to the internal revenue laws. It will also include more than 25 other legislative histories related to U.S. economic reform and stimulus plans.

Bring the power of HeinOnline law review articles to the study of American taxation and U.S. economic reform!

With it's rich archive of law review articles, HeinOnline will connect the legislation to key law review articles allowing you to not only read and follow the laws, but also to fully understand how it impacted the economy from the time of its inception to the present day.

We know your budgets are tight and you want to save money and space! Now, with this new comprehensive archive, HeinOnline is giving you the opportunity to do both. Pre-purchase the library by August 1, 2009 and you can save $400! For more information regarding the content and subscription options, please view our detailed brochure. Contact us today at (800) 828-7571, marketing@wshein.com, or contact your sales representative for more information.

Most Cited Journals and Journal Articles in HeinOnline- UPDATED!

With the addition of Hein's ScholarCheck tools in the Law Journal Library, we have been able to gather data that gives us insight into the most cited journal titles and the most cited journal articles in HeinOnline. In June of 2008 we published our findings. We have since added an abundance of new content. Therefore, we have updated our analysis to reflect new content that has been added to HeinOnline over the course of the last 12 months. Below are our updated findings broken down by the top 30 Most Cited Journal Titles in HeinOnline, followed by the Most Cited Journal Articles in HeinOnline. We note here that the data was based on results using OCR technology, therefore some citations may not have been recognized or counted.

Top 30 Most Cited Journals in HeinOnline:

*Each title below displays the number of times the journal title is cited in HeinOnline.

Harvard Law Journal 196,315

Yale Law Journal 128,358

Columbia Law Review 98,082

Michigan Law Review 77,363

University of Pennsylvania Law Review 75,955

Stanford Law Review 69,838

Virginia Law Review 65,103

University of Chicago Law Review 55,863

UCLA Law Review 40,702

Minnesota Law Review 40,232