Delaware Campus Library Blogs

Need to research a foreign law subject? The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is now available on HeinOnline. The IFLP indexes law journals published outside of the United States. HeinOnline’s IFLP includes records from 1985 to date. Any articles in IFLP that are available in HeinOnline are hot linked directly from the index. If you need a copy of an article that is not available on HeinOnline please contact a reference librarian for help.

Writing a paper and need non-legal sources? The Widener Law Library subscribes to three databases that can be very helpful for non-legal research. EbscoHost, ProQuest, and JSTOR each offer full text articles from many journals different subject areas, including economics, science, medicine and more.

Like many of our other databases, you can access all three from on campus and off. If you are off campus you’ll be asked to enter your name and the barcode number on the back of the Widener ID to log on.

With the new HeinOnline iPad app you can search and read law journals, legal classics, session laws, treaties and anything else available on HeinOnline right from your iPad. The app is free, as long as you have access to HeinOnline, as all Widener students and faculty do. You have to authenticate your subscription once every 30 days from the Widener campus but otherwise you can use the HeinOnline app from anywhere.

The state of Delaware has created a free ebook version of the Delaware Code. The Code is available in both ePub and MOBI formats, for iPad, Kindle and other ebook readers. You can download each title of the Code separately or download all of them at once.

The Jacob Broom House in 1975

Jacob Broom,  a modest and hardworking businessman, is one of the least known signers of the United States Constitution. There is not even a contemporary portrait available of him.

Broom was the only one of the five Delaware delegates to the Constitutional Convention who was not a lawyer. Born in Wilmington in 1752, Broom was a surveyor and conveyor of title.  He also dealt in real estate and operated a number of business ventures, including a machine shop and served as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Delaware Bank.

Being a delegate to the Constitutional Convention was his only venture into national politics, but he held a number of local offices, including chief Burgess of Wilmington, Justice of the Peace of New Castle County and member of the Delaware state legislature.

He married Rachel Pierce and had eight children. He was a member of Old Swedes Church. He lived originally in the city of Wilmington until 1795 when he built a house for his family near his cotton mills on the banks of the Brandywine. In 1802 he sold the house and mills to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, who founded his gunpowder mills there. These mills were the beginning of the DuPont Company. Jacob Broom died in 1810 in Philadelphia and is buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.

The Jacob Broom house, also known as Hagley, is privately owned and not open to the public.

Photo by: Jack E. Boucher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sources:

Jacob Broom genealogy page: http://www.mccullough.nl/Jacob_Broom.htm

Nomination form of Jacob Broom House for National Register of Historic Places

Signers of the Constitution Biographical Sketches

Campbell, William W. “Life and Character of Jacob Broom,” Historical and Biographical Papers of the State of Delaware, v. 5 (1909)

Drescher, Nuala M. Jacob Broom: A Biographical Sketch. Hagley Museum, 1959

Map of the Delaware Coastal Zone

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Delaware Coastal Zone Act. Originally signed into law by Gov. Russell Peterson in 1971, the Act prohibited new heavy industry uses in Delaware’s coastal area and regulates other uses.  Widener Law will present a program on September 30th on the Coastal Zone Act highlighting it’s history, controversies, and challenges.

Delaware Coastal Zone Act sources:

The Delaware Coastal Zone Act

Delaware Coastal Zone Act regulations

Delaware Coastal Zone Act Program

For more information on the Delaware Coastal Zone Act see:

Joel M. Goodman. The Delaware Coastal Zone Experience. 5 Envtl. L. 727 (1974-1975)

Kenneth T. Kristl. Keeping the Coast Clear: Lessons about Protecting the Natural Environment by Controlling Industrial Development under Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act. 25 Pace Envtl. L. Rev. 37 (2008)

The Widener law librarians have been busy creating research guides, called LibGuides on a number of subject areas. Each guide tells you how to get started and provides links to online resources or tells you where to find books and treatises on your subject.

New students might enjoy Law School 101: Resources for Succeeding in Law School by Widener law librarian Ed Sonnenberg. We also have Criminal Law by Maggie Adams and Voting Rights and Election Law by Susan Giusti. I’ve created a LibGuide on Food and Drug Law.

You can access the complete list of LibGuides from our LibGuide site or click on “Research Guides” on the Widener Law Library webpage.

The state of Delaware has digitized its session laws and made them available on the Delaware Heritage Collection website. Titled “The Laws of Delaware,” these session laws contain all of the laws of Delaware from 1700 (vol. 1)  to 2000 (vol. 72).  The session laws are particularly useful for historical research and compiling legislative histories.

There are other sources of the Delaware session laws. More recent volumes of the Delaware session laws are available on the state of Delaware’s webpage.  Most of the Delaware session laws have also been scanned by Google Books. They are also on HeinOnline‘s Session Law Library, which is subscription only. But the Delaware Heritage Collection is the most complete and best of all, it’s free.

I’m very pleased to see that the volumes have been scanned but I do have a couple of suggestions for improvement. First, I find the Delaware Heritage Collection website rather unintuitive. It took me quite a while to figure out how to print/download more than one page at a time. How to do that is in the help section under “Viewing Compound Objects” (basically, you have to change the view drop down to “subset of print version” and then print) but that’s not the first place (or maybe even the tenth place) anyone would look for printing instructions. The second problem is finding individual laws in each volume. The Laws of Delaware are commonly cited by chapter number, not by page, and yet the navigation is by page number, which makes it difficult to find a particular law, even when you have a cite.

Finally, I hope the state of Delaware will publicize the Laws of Delaware collection and make it easier to find. I just happened to find it accidentally one day while browsing photos on the Delaware Public Archives website. There is no direct link to the Laws of Delaware collection from the Archives website and as far as I can tell, none from the state’s website either.

Widener Law professor Paul Regan was part of a panel on Delaware: The First State for Corporation Law at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries. Other speakers were:  Randy J. Holland, The Supreme Court of Delaware; Robert S. Saunders, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; and Andrea B. Unterberger, Corporation Service Company. The moderator was Leslie Corey Leach of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

We have Leslie’s great handout on sources for Delaware corporation law research available for download in case you missed it.

Follow the latest US Supreme Court cases on your iPhone or other mobile device with OyezToday. OyezToday has easy-to-grasp abstracts for every case granted review, timely and searchable audio of oral arguments + transcripts, and up-to-date summaries of the Court’s most recent decisions including the Court’s full opinions.

The app was created by IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and is available for both iPhone, iPad and Android devices FREE.

The Law Library of Congress has posted a helpful guide for researching the law of the new nation of South Sudan.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice has posted a collection of legislative histories on its website. These were compiled by librarians at the Dept. and were previously only available to Dept. of Justice employees.

HeinOnline is down right now. We hope to have the problem corrected soon.

We had a great turnout for Prepare to Practice: Free Online Legal Resources and Research Tips for New Associates, Summer Associates, Interns, Clerks, Law and Paralegal Students. Did you miss it? Don’t worry the handout for this informative program is now available:  Free Legal Resources Handout [pdf]

This great engraving from Yale Law Library seems to be suggesting that back in the old days, you did legal research by standing around a law library waiting for a goddess to stick the magical hat of wisdom on your head. But that won’t cut it in the modern workplace. Be sure to attend the Widener Law Library’s Prepare to Practice workshop for legal research tips for the new attorney, summer associate, or law clerk.

Prepare to Practice: Free Online Legal Resources and Research Tips for New Associates, Summer Associates, Interns, Clerks, Law and Paralegal Students

Thursday, April 14th at 12:15pm and again at 5:15pm in the Library’s Special Collections Room.

The cost of subscription based legal information continues to rise as courts, firms and non-profits are looking for ways to cut costs. All legal professionals should be aware of the resources that are available for free online.

As part of the Legal Information Center’s National Library Week Celebration (April 10th – 16th), come learn about all of the free primary legal materials available online. We’ll cover Federal, State and Local legal resources available for free on the Internet as well as advanced searching techniques that will help you in “the real world.”

Note: This is an abridged version of the library’s popular CLE , Free and Low-Cost Online Legal Research. Presenters will be librarians Maggie Stewart Adams and Mary Alice Peeling. For more information contact Maggie Stewart Adams – mmstewart@widener.edu