Band 38, Heft 3

While both New Zealand and Australia have a shared history, each tells a separate story of sovereignty. Both began as British colonies and, when Australia became a federation in 1901, there was opportunity for New Zealand to join. It chose not to do so. To use an image from Moori, New Zealand's indigenous language, it decided to paddle its own waka (canoe). A century and a bit later, the New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII) is another iteration of that drive to differentiate, born of a hope that an indigenous online identity might help to build more comprehensive free access to its legal information.

The acquisition of legal information is critical to how lawyers conduct their work. The use of information-seeking models as a theoretical lens to analyze user behavior has been exhausted in the scholarly literature. However, very few models illustrate the dynamic relationship between lawyer and information professional. Furthermore, these models do not consider the demands of accessing legal information in a time-constrained environment. This paper explores this phenomenon and proposes a model that aids in understanding how practitioners obtain legal information in a law firm environment.

The debate regarding whether the origin of Louisiana civil law is based in the Spanish or in the French legal tradition has been ongoing since that state's incorporation into the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. Distinguished legal scholars have argued in favor of one tradition being dominant over the other, and each has been staunch in support of that view. This article proposes and demonstrates that the Spanish, not French, civil law had an enormous influence on the creation and evolution of Louisiana civil law, and that this legacy resonates today.

Improving information literacy in law translates into developing methods for improving legal research competencies among lawyers, law students and the general public. This paper summarizes four approaches for improving legal research skills of prospective lawyers in U.S. law schools and discusses their successes and shortcomings to help assess their potential application in an international environment. These approaches include: (1) offering mandatory law school courses in legal research; (2) adding elective (or optional) credit based courses in legal research; (3) offering non-credit legal research support to law students at their point of need; and (4) testing prospective lawyers on their legal research competencies as a requirement to being licensed to practice law.

In the past five years, we have witnessed extraordinary growth in the amount of legal scholarship, legal practice, and public policy at the intersection of law and neuroscience. For instance, in 2010 the first Daubert hearing was held on the admissibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection evidence; a Florida court was the first in the nation to admit quantitative encephalography (qEEG) evidence; and a Supreme Court decision on life imprisonment for minors cited brain development research. In France, the Prime Minister established the first Neuroscience and Public Policy program within the France Ministry for Social Affairs, and in the United States, multiple state legislators proposed bills related to neuroscience and law. Academics, too, have taken notice, with a number of symposia being offered around the country over the past few years.