April 2009

L.O.I.S. Primary Law Library!

If you are working for an attorney or firm this summer, consider signing up for free access to the L.O.I.S. Primary Law Library offered by Loislaw.  Loislaw is part of Wolters Kluwer Law and Business, the second largest provider of content to the legal market with divisions including Aspen Publishers (publishers of the Examples and Explanations series) and CCH.  Unlike LexisNexis and Westlaw, the L.O.I.S. Primary Law Library is free to law school students who work for attorneys and firms while still in law school.
The L.O.I.S. Primary Law Library offers full-text access to federal and state cases, statutes, administrative regulations, and court rules.  Cases and statutes may be retrieved by citation and cases by party names.  There is keyword and field searching of documents.  Free 24/7 technical support is provided.

Contact a Reference Librarian to obtain the School of Law’s access code when signing up for the L.O.I.S. Primary Law Library.

[Posted April 27, 2009]

Spotlight on CCH Internet Research Network!

CCH (Commerce Clearing House) has been a leading publisher since 1913.  THE CCH Internet Research Network provides numerous virtual “mini”research libraries on a range of legal subject areas as detailed below.  Under each topic, the researcher has access to the full text or summaries of pertinent statutes, case law and agency rules and regulations as well as scholarly and expert analysis and relevant practice tools (such as forms).  Unlike free web resources, the information is updated and enhanced 24/7 with the latest primary source materials and analysis of developments in the law.

The CCH Internet Research Network offers access to thousands of primary sources, journal articles, and treatises. Topic libraries are: Antitrust & Trade Regulation; Banking; Commodities & Derivatives; Corporate Governance; Exchanges & SROs; Federal Energy Guidelines, Government Contracts, Insurance Coverage Litigation; Intellectual Property, Computer & Internet Law; International Business; Investment Mangement; Mergers & Acquisitions; Products Liability & Safety; Securities; and Transportation Law.

To access the contents of the CCH Internet Research Network, you must enter your institutional email address to ensure that your preferences will be saved from session to session along with any customization.

Searching is easy.  Try keyword searching, with the option to restrict your search by document type and/or date.  For those who like to browse, there are topical indexes and tables of cases.  As in the BNA topical reports databases, you can request email delivery of the latest news stories.  For ongoing research, CCH Internet Research Network offers a tracker service for receiving added documents that satisfy your search query (similar to the LexisNexis and Westlaw alert services).

[Posted April 20, 2009]

BNA Tax and Accounting Center

One of the leading online tools for tax research is the BNA Tax and Accounting Center, available through the Law Library.  The researcher can access the text of the tax code and court cases, text of IRS proposed and finalized regulations, Treasury Decisions, and other IRS materials.  To make clear what can be confusing, expert commentary is provided.  The BNA Tax and Accounting Center is frequently updated with news about the latest developments in federal and state taxation.

A signature feature of the BNA Tax and Accounting Center is the U.S. Income Portfolios and the Estates, Gifts and Trusts Portfolios.  These portfolios cover a broad range of federal and state taxation issues from the simple (what is allowable income or a deduction) to the complex (everything else!).  Generally, contents of the portfolio include legislative history of the pertinent IRS code section(s), discussion of the topic, bibliography of primary and secondary authorities (e.g. law review articles), and working papers consisting of government reports and worksheets.

Search for a portfolio by keyword, topic in the indexes to the portfolios, or by IRC section.
For help in using the BNA Tax and Accounting Center, ask the Librarian on duty at the Reference Desk.

[Posted April 13, 2009]

Tax Profs’ Movie Recommendations for Law Students!

For all you fans of the Internal Revenue Code and movies, here is a noteworthy posting to the ABA Journal website authored by Debra Cassens Weiss:

Few movies involve taxes as a central plot element, but that hasn’t stopped members of the TaxProf Listserv from offering their tax film recommendations for law students.

Robert Nassau, a Rochester, N.Y., tax lawyer and adjunct law professor at Syracuse, is assembling the list, TaxProf Blog reports. Nassau noted the law school’s tax society has screened three tax movies and asked the law professors for additional recommendations. The screened and recommended movies include:

• A Taxing Woman (screened by the law students), a Japanese film in which a female revenue agent audits a gangster businessman, and the sequel, A Taxing Woman’s Return (recommended by Wayne State law professor Mike McIntyre).

• Stranger than Fiction (screened), in which Will Ferrell plays an Internal Revenue Service agent.

• Harry’s War (screened), described by Nassau as “a monstrously bad movie that glorifies the tax protester movement.”

• You Can’t Take it With You. Texas Tech law professor Bryan Camp says the family patriarch in the 1938 move is “a goofy old guy who brags he has never paid his income tax and then, in the final act, the IRS man shows up.”

• Say Anything. John Mahoney plays the father of the woman being courted by Jon Cusack. According to Camp, “Mahoney’s character has a house full of stuff that he bought for just under $10,000 representing disposition of unreported income; he eventually gets caught for tax evasion and lands in jail.”

• Slap Shot, starring Paul Newman. According to Pennsylvania law professor Michael Knoll, “The tax angle is that the owner holds the team as a tax shelter. The tax shelter story line has a nice teaching point since the owner claims she would be better off folding the team and taking a loss rather than selling it at a profit.”

• The Young Philadelphians, featuring Paul Newman as a tax lawyer.

• Tax Me if You Can, a PBS documentary.

• Star Wars, involving galactic turmoil over “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems.”

[Posted April 6, 2009]