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November 2010 Archives
Written by Megan Good, Archives Intern.  Bernard Segal was an accomplished Philadelphia lawyer devoted to civil rights advocacy. After graduating from Penn with both his undergraduate degree from Wharton in 1928 and his law degree in 1931, he became the youngest Deputy Attorney General in Pennsylvania history under William A. Schnader. When Schnader left office in 1935, he formed a law firm with Francis A. Lewis, with Segal as their first associate. Segal quickly became partner in the firm which employs over 150 lawyers today. Segal advocated for civil rights, judicial merit selection, pro bono services by lawyers, fair compensation for judges, and improvement of the administration of justice. He was involved in 50 cases before the United States Supreme Court and worked with four Presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Among countless other professional activities, Segal served as President of the American College of Trial Lawyers and Chairman of the Board of the American Judicature Society. In 1975 Segal received the award as the "World’s Greatest Lawyer" at the seventh World Law Conference in Washington, D.C. Segal was a life trustee of Hebrew University, where the law library is named after him and received honorary degrees from many universities including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Villanova University, Franklin and Marshall College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Vermont Law School, and Georgetown University. Segal died in June 1997. The Biddle Law Library Archives is currently revising the Segal finding aid, but the collection is open to the research community. The Bernard G. Segal Papers comprises correspondence, meeting materials, scrapbooks, and other documents that reflect Segal’s activities outside of his law firm. The collection was donated by his wife, Geraldine R. Segal, in 1999. The scrapbooks, which include letters sent to Segal by prominent legal and political figures—including Justice Warren Burger, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and more than one Kennedy—were created by Ms. Segal to preserve mementos from her husband’s life and career. More information about the Segal Papers is located here. If you are interested in learning more about the Segal Papers, contact Jordon Steele or stop by the Archives.
  Find an interesting New York Times article but need to study for your Civil Procedure exam? Save articles to read later with Instapaper or Read it Later, two web tools with mobile applications that allow you to save articles to read later from your computer, smartphone, iPad, or even e-reading device. Using Instapaper or Read it Later is similar to bookmarking (i.e. saving) a link but both provide more functionality. Use either service to save online articles to read from anywhere by visiting just one website or by using a compatible mobile application. Using either Instapaper or Read it Later is relatively straightforward: - Begin by creating an account with either service
- After creating your account, you can install a button in your web browser that will allow you to save an item quickly. Installation is simple and takes less than a minute.
- Next time you see an article you would like to read later, just push the button on your browser to save it to your account. Both applications save the text of the article on your screen, so if your article has multiple pages you should first click on the print view to retrieve the full text, then click on Instapaper's or Read it Later's save button so that the application saves the entire article.
To read your saved articles, just log in to your account to access all articles. However, there are other ways to access your account information, including the option to read your saved articles without web access. For example, you can install mobile applications for Instapaper or Read It Later on your iPhone or iPad, Android smartphones, or your Blackberry. By using these applications, your articles will sync to your mobile device so that you can read your saved articles even when your phone or iPad does not have internet access. As a result, both applications can help you stay up-to-date from anywhere and are perhaps perfect for the commute to and from the law school! Both Instapaper or Read it Later will work on your favorite nonlaw news sites or blogs, but you can also try using these applications to stay up-to-date on legal news and the legal profession by saving articles from sites such as Law.com, SCOTUSblog or one of the blogs listed at Law Professor Blogs. Happy reading!
Many of you reading this may be in law school now, but it is important to think about the kinds of things you will encounter when you are in practice. Though this post is mostly practical, and some of it will be out of date by the time you practice law, the principles should remain useful for years to come. When it comes to today's litigation, paper documents are likely to represent only a tiny fraction of the materials that get generated prior to litigation and get requested in discovery. More often the documents found in discovery as a result of requests to produce documents, are almost entirely electronic. This process is called e-discovery. The e-discovery business is huge; in 2009 it was a 2.8 billion dollar business. Electronic documents can often tell a tale that no paper document ever could. These types of documents have "metadata" embedded within them. This type of data can change simply by browsing the document, during the discovery process. How do we define metadata? It is data that describes other data. Metadata can apply to a wide range of items, from documents to both internal and external hard drives. A common example you might have experience with would be Word documents, where there is hidden information about the who, what, where, and when of your file. This metadata often looks something like this: 
Continue reading "Don't Forget the Metadata!" »
Have a research project involving foreign or international law for your coursework or journal, clinic or public service-related activities? Biddle Law Library offers access to a wide variety of specialized electronic resources on foreign and international law. Biddle subscribes to country-specific databases, such as iSinolaw and LawinfoChina for research on Chinese law, and InterAm for research on the law in Latin America. In addition, Penn Law students have access to subject-specific databases such as Kluwer Arbitration and World Trade Law for research on international dispute resolution, and tools like the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals for finding articles in legal journals published outside the U.S. Many of the key databases, websites and helpful tools for foreign and international legal research can be found quickly and easily on Biddle’s E-Resources list, which is organized by subject. Under the Foreign and International heading, you’ll find links to the sources above and many more subject- or area-specific databases. The E-Resources list also provides quick links to important governmental and intergovernmental sites, such as the U.S. State Department’s Treaty Affairs site, and to guidance on how to conduct your research, such as the GLOBALEX repository of guides written by specialists in a particular jurisdiction.
Continue reading "Getting Started with Foreign and International Law Databases" »
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