On a sad note, this issue also includes a memorial for John Ramington who passed away suddenly on January 22 after 25 years of service to the University. John was a beloved member of the Tarlton Law Library and he will be greatly missed.
Roy M. Mersky
Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law &
Director of Research
The Library has purchased an online resource that provides page images of briefs and records of the United States Supreme Court from 1832 through 1978. This will complement the Library's existing sets of Court records and briefs in print and on microform. The new online version of United States Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978 contains 11 million pages and allows users to search the full text of documents. Briefs and records filed in cases denied certiorari by the Court are also included in the resource. Tarlton has prepared a user's guide for this database.
Learn more about this resource online at: http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/archives/scrb.html.To celebrate Black History Month, the Tarlton Law Library is installing three new exhibits. The first is an exhibit dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. Consisting of black and white photographs and reproductions of landmark documents, the exhibit surveys the civil rights movement from Dr. King's emergence as a regional leader in 1955 to his death in 1968. The exhibit is a production of the Texas Council for the Humanities.
The second exhibit, prepared by the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society, will trace the lives of the first African-American graduates of The University of Texas School of Law. The exhibit draws from the Law School History collection in the Tarlton Law Library's Rare Books & Special Collections department.
The third exhibit, "Black, White, and Burnt Orange," covers the integration movement at The University of Texas during the 1960s. The exhibit also discusses Law faculty involvement in the movement for integration. The exhibit is composed of materials from Tarlton Law Library's Rare Books & Special Collections department as well as from the Prints and Photographs Collection of the Center for American History.
All three exhibits will be open to the public in the Susman Godfrey Atrium from February 6- February 27, 2006.On February 15, the Tarlton Law Library presents its Second Annual Rare Book Lecture featuring Dr. Stanley Chodorow, a noted medieval scholar and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He will speak on "Law Libraries and the Formation of the Legal Profession in the Late Middle Ages." The lecture will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Sheffield Room, and all UT faculty and students are invited.
The newest volume in the Tarlton Law Library Oral History Series is now available: "Harry M. Reasoner: An Oral History Interview" (2005).
A 1962 School of Law graduate, Harry Reasoner has been listed since 2003 as one of Texas Monthly's Top 100 Super Lawyers for his distinguished career in commercial and business litigation. He has practiced with Vinson & Elkins since 1963, serving as managing partner for almost ten years. Here at the Law School, Reasoner served as president of the Law School Foundation, was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1998, and received the Leon Green Award from the Texas Law Review in 1990. He taught at the Law School in 1971 and 2002. In his oral history interview, Reasoner discusses his undergraduate and law education, as well as the many highpoints from his legal career.One of the great early law libraries of the American South is documented in the latest volume of the Tarlton Law Library Legal History Series, published by the Jamail Center for Legal Research at The University of Texas at Austin. "The 1877 Sale Catalogue of Gustavus Schmidt's Library" records the private library of an influential New Orleans lawyer and scholar. As Michael Hoeflich ( University of Kansas ) writes in his introduction, Gustavus Schmidt (1795-1877) was "a protégé of Chief Justice John Marshall, the founder of the first law journal in Louisiana, one of the most successful advocates in Louisiana legal history, and a founder of what has become the Tulane Law School." Hoeflich's co-author, Louis V. de la Vergne, is the great-great-grandson of Gustavus Schmidt and was the prime mover behind the project to publish his ancestor's library catalogue.
The publication includes a facsimile of the printed 1877 catalogue of the library from the St. Louis booksellers Soule, Thomas & Wentworth, which lists 1,015 titles and their prices. Hoeflich, who has studied many early American law libraries, calls Schmidt's library "one of the most remarkable libraries of his age." It included books in 13 different languages, and was rich not only in law books, but also in natural history, literature, and popular science.
The Tarlton Law Library has redesigned our online catalog, TALLONS. Besides a new look, the catalog has a number of useful new features.
Among the new features are:
- improved advanced keyword searching
- improved search results sorting
- easier navigation tools and icons
- links to book and DVD /video jacket images and book reviews.
The new catalog also uses technology that provides context-sensitive linking between your search terms and external online resources. As more resources are defined, additional linking options will appear in your search results.
The address for the catalog remains unchanged at:http://tallons.law.utexas.edu
The Law in Popular Culture collection continues to add DVDs for your viewing enjoyment, including the following recent acquisitions.
Arrested Development, Season 1Arrested Development, Season 2
The Big Bounce
The Boston Strangler
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
The Cosby Show, Season 1
The Greatest American Hero: Season One
Law & Order: The Fourth Year
Law & Order: The Fifth Year
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – The Second Year
Meet the Fockers
Murder One: The Complete First Season
Reversible Errors
The Star Chamber
Will and Grace, Season 4
If your research interests involve only a limited number of law reviews, a new service provided by Washington & Lee Law Library (based in large part on data supplied by Tarlton Law Library) allows you to set up a subscription profile that will send the tables of contents from selected law reviews on a weekly basis to your e-mail address.
Instructions for setting up the profile are available under the "Subscriptions" section at: http://law.wlu.edu/library/CLJC/explanation.asp
LLMC Digital is an online resource for historic legal documents. Now available on LLMC Digital are the full text of all 178 volumes of English Reports, Full Reprint ranging from the years1220 to 1865. LLMC has also added an extensive collection of military law titles.
Records for the component titles appear in the online catalog; additional information is available at http://www.llmc.com/digital_toc.htm.
Wex is a new effort from Cornell's Legal Information Institute to create an online collaborative legal dictionary and encyclopedia. The site currently has entries for terms such as “ad litem,” “insanity defense,” and “per curiam.” Wex was based upon the LII 's “Law about …” pages. Like other “wiki” based websites, Wex will permit outside authors to submit and edit entries, but an author must first be approved by the site's administrator.
Wex is available at www.law.cornell.edu/wex/
In September Thomson West acquired CourtExpress, a major online docket research and document retrieval service. Westlaw has now combined CourtExpress with its existing docket services to create Westlaw CourtExpress. This resource will permit users to search all federal and state docket records available in Westlaw's database. The site will also have a document retrieval feature for documents not available through the Westlaw databases. Such harder to locate documents can be acquired through a fee-based transaction.
CourtExpress will complement Tarlton's existing subscription to PACER, the archive federal court filings. Your Westlaw password will access CourtExpress at: courtexpress.westlaw.com.The “Pocket Part” is a new online resource from the Yale Law Review that creates a venue for shorter academic writing. This website has a “blog” feel to it, with the ability for readers to comment upon the articles. The articles will often be “op-ed” versions of longer pieces appearing in the Yale Law Journal. The creators consider this site to be an online complement to the print version of the Yale Law Journal, allowing a more interactive scholarly environment. The web address is: www.thepocketpart.org
First Amendment Law Review is a student-edited legal journal based at the University of North Carolina that seeks to promote and protect the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Submission information is available at: http://falr.unc.edu/submissions.html
International Law & Management Review is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes articles about current issues in the fields of international law and management. The journal is edited by law and graduate management students at Brigham Young University. Submission information is available at: http://www.ilmreview.org/submissions.htm
The NYU Journal of Law & Liberty provides a forum for the critical discussion of classical liberal legal scholarship, publishing essays and articles on the nature of rules and order, legal philosophy, theories of rights and liberty, constitutional law, jurisprudence, legal history, and historical & contemporary legislation. Submission information is available at: http://www.nyujll.org/submissions.php
Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to intellectual property law and practice. Published monthly, coverage includes the full range of substantive intellectual property topics. Submission information is available at: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jiplp/about.html
John Ramington, evening circulation supervisor at The University of Texas School of Law's Tarlton Law Library, died Sunday, January 22, 2006.
“John was a warm and welcoming presence in the Library for more than 20 years; a generation of law students (and faculty and staff) loved and respected John. He will be very much missed,” said Jeanne Price, associate director for patron services, instruction, and research at the Law Library.
Ramington often described himself as the “evening ambassador” of the library. “I operate under the compulsion to be of good cheer and to carry on with my duties as though I were the Prince of Wales,” he said.
“It is hard to imagine Tarlton without John. His knowledge of law library resources and his willingness to help made him an impressive ambassador for Tarlton,” said Professor Roy Mersky, director of the law library. “John was a sensitive man who handled his duties as circulation supervisor with tact, dignity, and elegance. He created a sense of community for law students and endeared himself to a generation of students, faculty, and staff,” Mersky said.
John Richard Ramington worked at Tarlton since June 1982. For five years, from 1972-1976, he worked as a curator of manuscripts at the Humanities Research Center. He also taught the writing of poetry in a program sponsored by the New Orleans Arts Council, and taught English and speech at Paul's Preparatory School in Covington, Louisiana. In 2003, he was recognized by The University of Texas at Austin for twenty-five years of loyal and devoted service. The University of Texas School of Law gave John two outstanding service awards, in 2000 and 2001. He was recognized as the Law School Employee of the Month in March 1995 and March 2003.
Ramington was a poet and writer of fiction whose writings were published in such magazines as The New Republic, The Paris Review, and the American Review. He won several prizes and distinctions, including two fellowships to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and a fellowship to the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York. He had completed a novel, which was submitted to an agent, and started work on another novel.
A memorial book has been placed at the circulation desk for students and other members of the UT Law community to share their remembrances of John.