Because April is National Poetry Month, as established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, I would like to highlight some little known materials that are available at the Law Library of Congress–with the aim of promoting a bit of poetry. If you are familiar with Mexican history or if you have read my …
Birthdays are a great thing to blog about. We’ve written birthday posts on Shakespeare, THOMAS, a queen, the new year, and, yes, this blog. It was one year ago today that I blogged about the launching of the @THOMASdotgov Twitter account. Over the year, we have shared over 1,500 tweets about legislation in THOMAS and various …
This is a guest post by Debbie Keysor, Senior Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress. In February, Andrew Weber pointed out in “The Supreme Court and the Library — Pic of the Week” that the Law Library Reading Room is a U.S. Supreme Court Depository Library. There are currently 10 Supreme Court Depository Libraries scattered throughout …
When Andrew asked me if I would write a post for Shakespeare’s birthday, I enthusiastically agreed. I had just been rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s film, Henry V and as a dedicated Anglophile thought, this will be easy! I subsequently realized that as a writer for the Law Library’s blog I would need to write about Shakespeare and the law – …
Last week, in the course of researching a Global Legal Monitor article about the possibility of New Zealand introducing a law requiring plain packaging of cigarettes, I discovered that the New Zealand Legislation website has recently been updated! Such things are quite exciting to some of us here at the Law Library, as you may …
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) recently formed a new technical committee, the OASIS LegalDocumentML (LegalDocML) Technical Committee, to begin moving forward specifications for a common legal document standard for parliamentary, legislative and judicial documents. The specification will be based upon the Akoma Ntoso-UN project’s XML schema, which Andrew Weber mentioned …
Earlier this week, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress paid a visit to Capitol Hill. The Committee is composed of legal professionals from across the United States and “serves as the voice of the legal profession concerning the Law Library of Congress (LLC)“. The Standing Committee is the second-oldest …
In a post last year, I looked at some of the United Kingdom’s weird laws. I started to research a “part two” to that post, but ended up finding so much interesting (and yes, shockingly legal) information relating to the Loch Ness monster (commonly and affectionately referred to as “Nessie”) that I decided to dedicate an entire post to her …
This week’s interview is with Tariq Ahmad, a Legal Analyst in the Global Legal Research Center of the Law Library of Congress. Describe your background My family is originally from Pakistan. My father and mother moved to the U.S. before I was born so my father could complete his Ph.D. Soon after I was born, …