Delaware Campus Library Blogs

The Sunlight Foundation has created Open States, a website that tracks legislative information for all 50 states. This information has been available from state websites but it isn’t always easy to use. Open States gathers all the information with one easy to use interface. You can track bills, check your legislator’s voting record, even click on a map to find out who your state legislators are. Having just tried to do the same thing on the state of Delaware’s voting district maps, Open States definitely has an easier map interface.

The Delaware coverage includes bills and even includes the synopsis note for those of you doing legislative history. Unfortunately right now the coverage only goes back 2 years. Open States also has a handy iPhone/iPad app that lets you access your state legislature on the go.

Along with Lexis and Westlaw, Widener Law Library now also has access to new competitor Bloomberg Law. Bloomberg Law provides access to statutes, case law and administrative law, as well as legal news. It also includes access to federal and selected state court dockets plus Bloomberg’s famous business information. Widener students can sign up for Bloomberg here or clicking on “Law Schools” on the Bloomberg Law web page. Be sure to use your Widener email address when you register.

HeinOnline is another great online research source available to you through the Widener Law Library webpage. You may have used HeinOnline to access law review articles but it has a lot more to offer. It’s particularly good for historic research because it has all state and federal session laws, Federal Registers, Code of Federal Regulations, Restatements of the Law and much more. They also have a nice app for iPhone and iPad that makes it easy to read law reviews on your iPad.

Rehoboth Beach boardwalk 1931. Someone might be disrobing behind a beach chair.

This is going to be my last post on weird laws of Delaware. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed researching them. Today I’m going to look at a number of weird laws on disparate subjects that all have one thing in common. See if you can figure out what it is.

In Rehoboth Beach, Delaware:

No person shall change clothes in his or her vehicle.

status: mostly true [It’s only illegal if your car is in a public place. Feel free to change in your garage.]

§ 198-14. Disrobing in public. No person shall disrobe under the boardwalk, on the beach or in any vehicle while such vehicle is parked upon any public street or way or other public place in plain view of the public.

One may not whisper in church.

status: mostly true [It’s only illegal if you are disrupting or disturbing the congregation. If the congregation wants to have an all whispered service they can go ahead.]

§ 198-23. Disturbing religious worship and lawful assemblies. A. No person shall disrupt or disturb any congregation or assembly met for religious worship by noise, talking or whispering, or by rude or indecent behavior, or by profane language within their place of worship, or within 300 feet of the place of worship.

No person shall pretend to sleep on a bench on the boardwalk.

status: true [This is a perfectly normal law for a beach town, except for the “pretending” to sleep clause. I guess the local judges got tired of people using the “I wasn’t really asleep” defense.]

§ 198-30. Sleeping on boardwalk. No person shall sleep, lie or occupy as a sleeping quarter, or under the guise of pretending to sleep on the boardwalk, any bench located on the boardwalk in any pavilion located at the end of any street or on any bench located on any street.

Changing into or out of a bathing suit in a public restroom is prohibited.

status: true

§ 198-15. Changing clothes in comfort station prohibited. No person shall change his clothing from bathing suit to street clothes or otherwise within the comfort stations maintained by the City.

Six-year-old girls may not run around without being fully clothed.

status: true [But this is a deliberately obtuse reading of the law. Obviously 60 year old women are equally prohibited from topless bathing.]

§ 198-13. Topless bathing suits prohibited. No female over the age of five years shall wear a topless bathing suit or otherwise fail to cover her breasts with less than a full opaque covering of any portion thereof below the upper portion of the nipple.

Alcohol may not be served in nightclubs if dancing is occurring on the premises at the same time.

status: true [Actually nightclubs that allow dancing may not serve alcohol at all, no matter when the dancing is occurring.]

§ 134-13. Alcoholic beverages prohibited. No person shall sell, give, dispense, provide or keep or cause to be sold, given, dispensed, provided or kept any alcoholic beverage on the premises of any dance hall establishment.

In Lewes, Delaware:

It is illegal to wear pants that are “firm fitting” around the waist

status: not true [This is one of the most commonly cited weird Delaware laws on the internet. It is definitely not in the current Lewes code of ordinances. It is possible it used to be a law but I can’t check because we don’t have older city ordinance for Lewes in our library.]

Did you figure out what they all have in common? They are all local laws, municipal ordinances that have been passed by a town or city in Delaware. Many of the laws cited on weird laws websites are often local laws. Laws passed to deal with local problems do often seem strange when taken out of their local context. For instance, many of the laws from Rehoboth Beach were probably passed to deal with the problems of a beach town, by trying to discourage nightclubs, stop day trippers from changing out of their bathing suits on residential streets, and keep drunk college students from sleeping on the boardwalk. Many beach towns have similar laws.

Legal research classes don’t spend much, if any time teaching how to research local laws, but these laws can greatly affect your clients’ everyday lives, so it’s worthwhile taking the time to learn how to find them. The internet has made researching local laws easier than it used to be. Many cities and towns have their municipal codes available on their website. There are also two companies that specialize in creating municipal codes, Municipal Code Company and General Code and many local codes can be found free on their websites. For more information on researching local laws, I’d recommend reading this excellent article by Mary Whisner of the University of Washington.

Photo credit: Delaware Public Archives. Board of Agriculture Glass Negative Collection.
http://cdm15323.contentdm.oclc.org/u?/p15323coll6,6621

For more information on local laws see: Mary Whisner. Enact Locally. 102 Law Library Journal 497 (2010)

We hope you enjoyed your holidays. The law library is back on its regular hours:

• Monday to Thursday: 8:00 AM to Midnight
• Friday: 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM
• Saturday: 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM
• Sunday: 10:00 AM to Midnight

The Widener law library will be closed December 22nd to January 1st. Enjoy your holidays and we’ll see you next year!

Here are our complete semester break hours.

• December 21st 8 AM to 6 PM
• December 22nd – January 1st CLOSED
• January 2nd – 3rd 8 AM to 8 PM
• January 4th 8 AM to 6 PM
• January 5th 9 AM to 5 PM
• January 6th 12 PM to 10 PM

A new book by Widener’s John G. Culhane is now available in the law library.  Same-Sex Legal Kit for Dummies, co-authored with Carrie Stone was published this month by Wiley.

Samuel Burris, engraving from William Still’s Under Ground Rail Road Records

Samuel Burris was born in Kent County, Delaware in 1808. Although he was a free man, he left the slave state of Delaware for the free state of Pennsylvania and lived in Philadelphia with his wife and children. He became a member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a conductor on the Underground Railroad, traveling to Delaware and Maryland to help slaves escape to freedom. He made many successful trips until he was eventually caught in Dover, Delaware in 1847. Tried and convicted of aiding runaway slaves, he was sentenced to be sold as a slave himself.

As a slave state bordering on the free state of Pennsylvania, Delaware had harsh laws punishing those who helped slaves to escape. The Delaware law at that time provided for a fine of $500 for aiding runaway slaves. The penalty for free blacks who aided runaways was even harsher. They would be sold into slavery for a period of seven years and then forced to leave the state forever. (Revised Statutes of the State of Delaware (1852), chap. 80, sec. 15)

Burris’s friends in the Anti-Slavery Society hatched a plan to rescue him. They had abolitionist Isaac Flint, a Wilmington grocer, pretend to be a slave trader. Flint went to Dover where he bought Burris at auction and helped him return safely to Philadelphia. According to William Still’s account, even Burris did not know of Flint’s true identity and was greatly relieved when Flint whispered the good news to him after the auction.

Burris never returned to Delaware (the penalty for returning was to be whipped with 39 lashes and sold as a slave again). In 1852 he moved with his family to San Francisco, where he died in 1869.

Sources:

William Still. Still’s Under Ground Rail Road Records. (Rev. ed.) Philadelphia, 1886.

William H. Williams. Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639-1865. SR Books, 1996.

Boy howdy is there ever an app for that…this all started because I read about an app developed by New York Law School’s Mendik Library.  I looked them up in the iTunes App Store and happened to click the “related” option and down the rabbit hole I went.  For an even more detailed list of apps see the libguides prepared by UCLA & University of Akron.

Handy Apps for Law Students

Fastcase – a free legal research application.  It contains cases and statutes from all 50 states.  There are 3 ways to search: by citation, keyword, or browse the statute collections.  It can be downloaded for free from the iTunes App Store and can be used on the iPhone & the iPad.  There is also an Android version.

LawStack – it is described as a “law library in your pocket.”  With this app you get the US Constitution (as amended 5/5/92), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure,    Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Federal Rules of Evidence, and the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy  Procedure (effective as of Dec. 1, 2011).  You can also add the DE Code, New York Code, & CFR.  This is a free app available for download at the iTunes App Store.

CaseBriefs – it includes these features which are aimed at law students: student briefs, course outlines, & law school exam preparation materials.  It is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

U.S. Code – the entire U.S. Code for your iOS device, where you will be able to access all the federal statutes without using the internet.  Available for free from the iTunes App Store.

iStudiez Pro – award-winning app that helps you (the busy student) organize your life.  It offers many ways to organize your schedule and is available for purchase from the iTunes App Store for $2.99.  There is an    iStudiez Lite which is free but is not as feature rich.

Law School Dojo – this app will help take some of the boredom out of studying.  “It offers hundreds of multiple choice questions to learn legal doctrine,     vocabulary, and procedure, along with random legal trivia.” Available to download for free from the iTunes App Store (there are additional versions e.g. quizzes on torts, Civil Procedure, etc but these are not free).

OpenRegs – with this app you will be able to take the Federal Register with you no matter where you go.  It is free and available for download from the iTunes App Store.

LexisNexis Law School Q&A Series –  this app is available to download for free from the iTunes App Store, each in app purchase is $14.99.  It is the Q&A exam prep series as an interactive app.  It includes 27 subject areas (available as in app purchases): Civ Pro, Evidence, Torts, Constitutional Law, Crim Pro, Constitutional Law etc.

The Delaware General Corporation Law of 1899, with ancient mystical notations

I’m kind of late in noticing this but I just found this article. In 2010, satirical newspaper The Onion published 20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America, which includes this reference to the Delaware General Corporation Law: “A joyful noise filled the hall as the priest pulled the first virgin’s heart from her chest and recited the ancient, mystical section 102(a)(3) of the Delaware General Corporation Law.”

Like much of the Onion it’s only mildly amusing, but whoever wrote that actually read the Delaware General Corporation Law. Section 102(a)(3) is “The nature of the business or purposes to be conducted or promoted. It shall be sufficient to state, either alone or with other businesses or purposes, that the purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of Delaware, and by such statement all lawful acts and activities shall be within the purposes of the corporation, except for express limitations, if any;”

If you were going to intone a section of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which one would you pick? I think I’d go with section 397 “Whoever prints or publishes this chapter without the authority of the Secretary of State of this State, shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than 3 months, or both.”

Horse and jockey at Delaware Park in the 1940s, not on a Sunday.

It’s time for another look at the weird laws of Delaware. This time I’m taking a look at what you can and cannot do on Sunday in Delaware. You may have seen this cited on the internet as a weird Delaware law:

Delaware prohibits horse racing of any kind on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Status: True

Yes it’s true, Title 28, section 906 of the Delaware Code reads, “There shall be no horse racing of any kind on Good Friday or Easter Sunday.” You might think that this is just an old law that was accidentally left on the books, but it was only passed in 1973 (59 Del. Laws 1973, ch. 25, § 1), and is actually a liberalization of the state’s earlier law which banned horse racing every Sunday.

Horse racing was just one of the many activities that used to be banned in Delaware on Sundays. Laws reserving Sunday as the Sabbath and a day of rest were brought to the American colonies from England and existed in all of the original colonies. They were commonly called “blue laws.” Interestingly, no one seems to agree on why, it may have been because they were originally printed on blue paper, or possibly, because the Puritans and their strong religious scruples were often called “blue” as in “bluenose.”

Delaware’s early Sunday laws were strict but typical of their time. The 1852 Delaware Code prohibited the performance of “any worldly employment, labor, or business, on the Sabbath day (works of necessity and charity excepted)…” Delaware law also prohibited leisure activities such as “fishing, fowling, horse-racing, cock-fighting, or hunting game” on Sundays, as well as assembling to “game, play or dance.” (Revised Statutes of the State of Delaware chap. 131, sec. 4 (1852))

A 1939 petition to the Governor of Delaware, asking him to support a referendum allowing movies to be shown in Wilmington on Sundays.

By 1953 the Delaware Code no longer banned all work on Sundays, but still banned horse racing, along with auctions, dances, theatrical performances and motion pictures, at least in unincorporated areas. Incorporated areas were permitted to make their own rules, but these activities could not be held before noon or between 6 PM and 8 PM. Also banned on Sunday was barbering (24 Del.C. (1953) § 415) but, curiously, not ladies hairdressing, which eventually led to a Delaware Supreme Court case which held that the law was “… an unjust and unreasonable attempt to discriminate against this class of persons [barbers]; that its effect is not to benefit the interests of the public; and that it constitutes an arbitrary interference with private business.” Rogers v. State, 57 Del. 334, 339, 199 A.2d 895, 897 (1964)

Sunday closing laws as a whole were never found unconstitutional and have been upheld by the United States Supreme Court. (McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961), Gallagher v. Crown Kosher Super Mkt. Inc., 366 U.S. 617 (1961), Two Guys v. McGinley, 366 U.S. 582 (1961), Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599 (1961)) Many states in the U.S. still have restrictions on Sunday activities.

Currently in Delaware besides the ban on horse racing on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, liquor can only be sold on Sundays between 12:00 noon and 8:00 p.m. (4 Del. Code § 709) (with some exceptions for small wineries, distilleries and breweries), hunting is prohibited on Sunday (except fox hunting with dogs) (7 Del. Code § 712), taking shellfish for commercial purposes (with some exceptions) is prohibited (7 Del. Code § 1904), “adult establishments” must be closed, (24 Del. Code § 1625), and you can’t use drifting gill nets until after 4 p.m. on Sunday (7 Del. Code § 923). Luckily for me it’s not illegal to write blog posts on Sundays.

UPDATE: The story of how 500 people were arrested in one day and the Delaware blue laws were finally repealed.

Photo credits:

Delaware Public Archives. Delaware in World War II Collection. http://cdm15323.contentdm.oclc.org/u?/p15323coll6,10024

For more information on blue laws see:

Neil J. Dilloff, Never on Sunday: the Blue Laws Controversy, 39 Md. L. Rev. 679 (1980)

Lesley Lawrence-Hammer, Red, White, but Mostly Blue: The Validity of Modern Sunday Closing Laws Under the Establishment Clause, 60 Vand. L. Rev. 1273  (2007)

NOTICE: THE LIBRARY WILL BE CLOSED Monday,October 29 and Tuesday, October 30 due to Hurricane Sandy.

If you are looking for an online, interactive study aid, the CALI lessons have what you are looking for. CALI has lessons on all law school topics and can be used on PCs, Macs and even iPads and smartphones. Check their website for a list of lessons by topic, by subject outline, or even by casebook. CALI also produces Lawdibles, a series of short podcasts on legal topics.

The first time you use CALI you’ll need to register for an account. You’ll need the Widener authorization code. To get the code just contact the law library reference desk. If you have any trouble registering contact the reference desk. Or you can watch this hand how to register video on YouTube.

The Delaware Corporate & Commercial Litigation Blog has posted a guide to Delaware practice for non-Delaware lawyers. The guide was written by Eckert Seamans attorneys Francis G.X. Pileggi, Kevin F. Brady, and Jill Agro.

New Castle Courthouse Museum

A new play based on the 1848 trial of Delaware abolitionists Thomas Garrett and John Hunn will be performed at the New Castle County Courthouse Museum, the scene of the original trial. In 1848 the two men were tried for violating federal law by helping the Hawkins family escape from slavery in Maryland. They were found guilty and heavily fined.

The interactive play is one of a series written by local playwright Colin Adams-Toomey There will be three performances of the play, August  18th, 19th and 21st. See the News Journal for more information.