by Dan Brackmann, guest author AILALink is the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s “one-stop shop for immigration law research.” Within it, you will find primary materials, governmental memos and cables, government manuals, conference proceedings, and digital versions of most of AILA’s various treatises (under “AILA Books” in the left-side navigation bar), many of which discuss immigration law’s interactions with other areas of law.  These treatises include, but are not limited to,: Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook Immigration Law & the Military Immigration Consequences of ..read more

by Dan Brackmann, guest author With the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the Second World War, this Resource Review highlights Hein’s new Military Legal Resource library. Based on materials scanned from the U.S. Army’s JAG School, this collection includes obvious elements such as the legislative history of the Code of Military Justice and transcripts of various Nuremberg trials (including the Judges’ or Justice Trial). However, it goes well beyond this by including significant coverage of other topics such as war crimes, the Geneva Convention, treatme ..read more

We interviewed author and law professor Marcia Zug about her book available January 9, 2024, You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love. What prompted you to write this book? My great aunt Rosie left New York City and traveled to Europe in the 1930s to marry a Jewish man who had no other way to get to safety. Asylum law or immigration law should have helped him, but those avenues were blocked at that crucial time. Marrying an American was the only way he could get the life-saving benefit of US citizenship. This family history was the early spark for my interest in how ma ..read more

From 1969 to 1973, the Gavel Raps was considered the official Student Bar Association newspaper at the University of South Carolina School of Law. The USC SBA continued to support the Gavel Raps from 1973 to 1995, but not as an official law school publication. Now Online Thanks to the digitization work of law librarians Lillian Bates, Dan Brackmann, and Michael Mounter, the Gavel Raps are now freely available online. The searchable PDFs are available as a special collection within the USC School of Law’s Scholar Commons site: scholarcommons.sc.edu/law. Many thanks to Lillian, Dan, and Mic ..read more

by Dan Brackmann, guest author   Textual analysis is a research method rapidly gaining popularity in many different academic disciplines. Text analysis is a subset of data mining, using computational methods to study natural languages as unstructured data sets, allowing researchers to explore connections between words and topics and uncover patterns, trends, or relationships within the content. University Libraries provides support for all USC faculty wanting to learn more about how to use text analysis in their research. A good starting point for learning more is the University Libraries ..read more

The seal of the University of South Carolina appears on the front cover of the current edition of the South Carolina Law Review. The South Carolina Law Review was called the Year Book of the Selden Society from 1937 to 1948. At the time, it was published by the USC School of Law’s student chapter of the Selden Society, which remains a learned society and publisher focused on English legal history. As far as the University of South Carolina law librarians are aware, South Carolina’s Year Book of the Selden Society has never been digitized and is not searchable in any online database such a ..read more

Google Scholar is a free resource for case law. If all you want to do is pull up a case with a known citation, it works pretty well. Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes Google Scholar Doesn’t Work As Expected Here’s an example. Try searching for the drag-racing case State v. Fair, 209 S.C. 439, 40 S.E.2d 634 (1946) on Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/). On August 3, 2023, searching for the South Carolina Reports citation 209 S.C. 439 does not retrieve State v. Fair in Google Scholar. Maybe the error will be fixed at some point. But as of August 3, 2023, your law librarians have tried ..read more

Congratulations to reference librarian Dan Brackmann, incoming parliamentarian of the University of South Carolina’s Faculty Senate! “A consultant trained in parliamentary law who advises the chair and others on matters of parliamentary law and procedure. • The parliamentarian, who is often a professional, only advises and never ‘rules’ on procedural issues.” PARLIAMENTARIAN, Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019) Check out law library resources on parliamentary practice!  ..read more

The University of South Carolina Law Library is proud to recognize two notable Americans of Caribbean heritage this June for Caribbean Heritage Month. Colin Luther Powell, 65th Secretary of State Photo from the State Department President George H. W. Bush selected General Colin L. Powell to be the twelfth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell was born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents. When Powell became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on October 1, 1989, he was the first African-American, the first ROTC graduate, and, at fifty-two, the youngest officer to serve in the position. He ..read more

Have you seen this form? Maybe you’ve filled it out over and over? Farewell, old form! Don’t worry, you won’t see it anymore, because interlibrary loan just got easier! Requesting Materials from the Law Library Catalog When you search the law library catalog (law.sc.edu/library) and see that the item you want is not available, click Sign in.  After signing in, you can click to: Request a USC item to be delivered to the law library Request via PASCAL Delivers, for an item to be delivered from another SC higher education institution to the law library Request through interlibrary loan: Ch ..read more