Columbia Law School
Arthur W. Diamond Law Library
Library Tour and Exercise
Spring 2010
The following tour and exercise that will provide an overview of the extraordinary collections at the Law Library. It will cover a variety of primary (law) and secondary (texts about the law) sources located on the fourth floor of the Law Library. Write responses to the questions on these pages.
Third Floor.
Reference Office
The entire holdings of the Law Library have been electronically catalogued and can be searched in a catalogue called Pegasus. There are Pegasus terminals on all floors of the library. Most significantly, it is universally available via the library web page at
< http://www.law.columbia.edu/library/>.
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Secondary Sources:
Question 1 - Using Pegasus (http://pegasus.law.columbia.edu/ ), locate the catalog record for a 2001 monograph on “students’ rights”. (Hint: Use a title search)
What is the name of one of the books you found?______
What is its call number and location?______
Is it currently checked out?______
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Question 2 –Connect to the Index to Legal Periodicals (the AWilson Index@). The Index to Legal Periodicals can be accessed from Pegasus (http://pegasus.law.columbia.edu/ ).
Find an article about college students and credit card debt. (Hint: Use a keyword search).
What is the title of the article?______
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Circulation Desk
Most library transactions take place at the Circulation Desk. Here you will check books out and return them.
Fourth Floor
Primary Sources: Federal and State Case Law
Southeast Corner of the Fourth Floor.
Case reports and Digests
Federal and State Cases are published in print and online. Let’s take a look at the books first:
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Question 3 - Federal reporters
What is the title of the set of books in which federal district court opinions are now published?
______
Below is how we identify a case: by its party names, the volume number, abbreviation, and page number of the reporter where it was published.
U.S. v. Wade, 577 F.Supp. 1326 (E.D. Penn. 1983)______
Can you find it online?______
Where?______
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Question 4 - Supreme Court reporters
What is the title of one of the Supreme Court reporter?______
The following is a U.S. S.Ct case. Note its three citations (parallel citation)
Babbit v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Or. 515 U.S. 687, 132 L. Ed. 2d 597, 115 S. Ct. 2407 (1995).
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Regional reporters contain state court appeals cases, grouped together by region. A citation to 267 P.2d 131, for example, means that you can find the cited case in volume 267 of the Pacific Reporter, 2nd Series, at page 131. Citations to locations in regional reporters are often listed as second, or parallel, citations along with a citation to an official state reporter.
Question 5 - Regional reporters
How would you cite a case published in volume 267 of the Pacific Reporter, 2nd Series, whose opinion starts at page 131? _____ Can you find it on the shelf?
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Digests serve as both a subject index and a case name index to the reporters they cover.
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Question 6 - Digests
Let’s use one of the sets published by West.(e.g., Supreme Court Digest, the Federal Practice Digest, any current regional digest -Atlantic Digest, North Western Digest, etc., or any state digest -Ohio Digest, Pennsylvania Digest, etc.)
Examine the Descriptive Word index. Find the TOPIC and key number for Paupers. ______What do this numbers identify? ______
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Primary Sources: Federal Statutes
Federal Statutes are published in more than one form. Laws printed in chronological order as passed by the legislature are called session laws. Federal session laws are called (for the most part) Public Laws. When Congress passes a new law, it is assigned a Public Law number. For instance, the fourth law passed by the 105th Congress is P.L. 105-4. The number before the hyphen refers to the number of the Congress that passed the law. The numbers after the hyphen are a chronological serial numbering of the laws passed by that Congress.
(The Library of Congress’s legislation web site called Thomas, at <http://thomas.loc.gov>, is an excellent source for public laws too recently passed to have been published in print sources.)
Federal Statutes are also published in codes. There are three federal statutory codifications: USC, USCA, and USCS. The advantages of the USCA and the USCS over the official United States Code are that they are much more timely (the official set is always at least two years behind) and that the commercially produced sets are heavily annotated, with historical notes, cross-references to related code sections, references to law review articles and CFR sections, citations to leading cases interpreting code sections, and a variety of useful tables, indexes and other research aids.
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Question 7 - The federal code
How is the federal code organized? Is it organized e.g. by the statute’s name, date or subject matter? ______
Try to find the title that covers welfare by going to http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html.
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Question 9 - The CFR
Statutes are often detailed in rules and regulations issues by federal agencies (also available online). Can you guess from where?______
Those rules are also codified in a source abbreviated CFR. What does CFR stand for?______
The End
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