This Week in the Law Library ... September 15, 2025

This week in the Law Library we’re teaching Researching Case Law and Using Citators, Introduction to Legal Research & the Hierarchy of Legal Authority, AI & the Law, Canvas Discussions & Quizzes, Researching Secondary Sources,  Research Tort Law, and celebrating Constitution Day and Week.

Monday, September 15, 2025

Lawyering I, Cohort 4

• 9:00am - 10:25am
• Researching Case Law & Using Citators
• Susan Boland, Associate Director

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

AI & the Law

• 10:40am - 12:05pm
• Profs. Laura Dixon-Caldwell, Shannon Kemen, Ashley Russell, and Michael Whiteman

Technology Tuesdays

• Canvas Discussions & Quizzes 
• 12:15pm - 1:15pm
• Zoom
• Shannon Kemen, Legal Technology & Research Instructional Services Librarian​

Lawyering I, Cohort 2

• 10:40am - 12:05pm
• Introduction to Legal Research & Hierarchy of Legal Authority
• Susan Boland, Associate Director

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Advanced Legal Research Civil Litigation

• 3:05pm - 4:05pm
• Laura Dixon-Caldwell​, Instructional & Reference Services Librarian​

Thursday, September 18, 2025

Lawyering I, Cohort 2

• 10:40am - 12:05pm
• Researching Secondary Sources
• Susan Boland, Associate Director

AI & the Law

• 10:40am - 12:05pm
• Room 235
• Profs. Laura Dixon-Caldwell, Shannon Kemen, Ashley Russell, and Michael Whiteman

LLM Research & Writing

• 1:30pm - 2:55pm
• Introduction to Legal Research & Sources of Legal Authority
• Shannon Kemen, Legal Technology & Research Instructional Services Librarian​

Torts

• 3:05pm - 3:30pm
• Researching Tort Law
• Laura Dixon-Caldwell​, Instructional & Reference Services Librarian​

Celebrate Constitution Week with us! In honor of Constitution Week and our Constitution Day speaker, our featured resources will focus on individual rights and Constitutional Law.

#Constitution Day is observed each year to commemorate the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787. Public Law 108-447 (PDF) requires that every educational institution which received Federal funds hold a program on the Constitution for students.

This year the College of Law’s Constitution Day speaker is Jill Hasday, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Centennial Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis. Her talk is titled "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality." In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision-making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

Forgetting women’s struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Professor Hasday argues that remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women’s inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.

America needs more conflict over women’s status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men’s spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America’s dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women’s progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

The lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Alfred B. Katz Constitution Day Fund in memory of Alfred B. Katz ’35. More at Constitution Day Event Details.

Visit our Constitution Day Table, curated by Rhonda Wiseman, outside of Room 160 before and after the Constitution Day lecture! The Robert S. Marx Law Library is home to one of the largest collections of rare and special law books in Northwest. The collection consists of approximately 10,000 volumes of historical legal books and pamphlets printed during the mid-1500s through mid-1900s. Most of the items in the Collection consists of scholarly, out of print books on English and American law and legal history. These include numerous classics in the field. The books have been individually selected and function together as a comprehensive research tool providing services to scholars and legal communities locally, nationally, and internationally on various aspects of the law and legal history, thus contributing to the further advancement of legal education and scholarship. The Collection is strongest in the areas of constitutional history and early English law.

To celebrate Constitution Day, the Robert S. Marx Law Library is pleased to present a display of a few noteworthy items within the collection

• Constitutional Law CALI Lessons
  • Available on CALI, these are interactive exercises for students studying Constitutional Law. You will need to set up a password to use CALI online. To set up a username and password, you will be asked to enter UC Law’s authorization code. You can get this code from any reference librarian or at the Circulation Desk.
• Constitutional Law: Individual Rights: Examples & Explanations
  • Available via the Aspen Learning Library study aid subscription, this is a problem-oriented guide to the principle doctrines of Constitutional law as covered in the typical course. This text walks the student through the provisions that protect individual rights. It combines textual material with examples, explanations, and questions to test the students’ comprehension of the materials and provide practice in applying legal principles to fact patterns. New to the Tenth Edition: inclusion of nearly 50 new Supreme Court cases and more than 30 state and lower federal decisions; as well as analysis of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. (2022), overruling Roe v. Wade (1973), and leaving any protection of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy up to the states; discussion of how state courts, applying state constitutions, have responded to the Court’s invitation in Dobbs; consideration of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023) and the Court’s new, less deferential approach to race-based college admissions programs; expanded treatment of race-based legislative districting plans, including Alexander v. S.C. State Conf. of the NAACP (2024); discussion of freedom of speech in the social media setting, as exemplified in recent decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC (2024); and exploration of the current Court’s approach to resolving Establishment Clause claims, as set forth in Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist. (2022).
• Understanding Constitutional Law
  • Available via the LexisNexis Digital Library study aid subscription, this study aid covers all of the central concepts and issues students encounter in any basic constitutional law course. Structure of Government issues revolve around the twin themes of federalism and separation of powers. Individual rights and liberties follow a concept organization-Due Process, Equal Protection, and First Amendment. Clearly written and authoritative, Understanding Constitutional Law addresses the central concepts and issues students encounter in most Constitutional Law casebooks. “Structure of government” issues revolve around the twin themes of federalism and separation of powers. Individual rights and liberties follow a concept organization – Due Process, Equal Protection, and First Amendment.
• Constitutional Law Stories
  • Available via the West Academic study aid subscription,
    Dorf’s Constitutional Law Stories provides a student with an understanding of 15 leading U.S. constitutional law cases. It focuses on how lawyers, judges, and socioeconomic factors shaped the litigation, and why the cases have attained landmark status.

• World Constitutions Illustrated
  • This database, available on HeinOnline, provides access to the current constitution for every country in its original language format along with an English translation, as well as substantial constitutional histories for each country.

• Exam Study Guide — Constitutional Law
  • This guide page features study aids to help you with understanding Constitutional Law and for review and exam preparation.

• Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance & Procedure
  • Available on Westlaw, Nowak and Rotunda's Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance and Procedure provides scholars, practitioners, judges, and officials with an up-to-date analysis and synthesis of federal constitutional law. The focus is primarily on the Supreme Court and incorporates the political, historical, and economic background of court decisions.The text analyzes constitutional questions in terms of precedent, political science theory, economics, and American history, making the leading cases understandable concerning both their overall significance and the precise legal rules they establish.

• Federal Law Part I: Overview of Constitutions, Statutes, and Legal Authority
  • This video introduces US Constitutional and statutory law. It explains where they fit in the hierarchy of legal authority, what a session law is, what a code is, and the difference between official and unofficial codes. The video is 11:24 minutes long and features closed captioning
• Federal Law Part II Video: Researching Constitutional & Statutory Law on Westlaw
  • This video provides an overview of researching the US Constitution, federal statutes, and federal court rules on Westlaw. It covers retrieving by citation; using the notes of decision; making sure a statute is still good law; finding materials citing a statute; navigating to the United States Code Annotated when you don’t have a citation; and using statutory finding tools such as the table of contents, index, and popular names table. This video is 10:36 minutes long and it is closed captioned and features a table of contents.
• Federal Law Part III: Researching Constitutional & Statutory Law on Lexis
  • This video covers researching the US Constitution, federal statutes, and court rules on Lexis. It covers finding statutes, court rules, and constitutions by citation, finding them when you don’t have a citation, navigating the annotated code, using the annotations, and shepardizing them. It is closed captioned and is 10:26 minutes long. It also features a table of contents.

• Constitution Annotated
  • The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation ("Constitution Annotated" or "CONAN") provides a legal analysis and interpretation of the United States Constitution based on a comprehensive review of Supreme Court case law and, where relevant, historical practices that have defined the text of the Constitution. This regularly updated resource is written in "plain English" and useful for a wide audience: from constitutional scholars to those just beginning to learn about the nation's most important legal document. In publication for over 100 years, the Constitution Annotated is a comprehensive, government-sanctioned record of the interpretations of the Constitution.

Posted September 15, 2025 by Susan Boland

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