InSITE
A Current Awareness Service of
Cornell Law Library

ISSN 1521-9046

Current Issue

Vol. 17, no. 16
July 30, 2012

InSITE highlights selected law-related World Wide Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database.

The law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. These information can be accessed as following:

    1. Current Issue
    2. Archived Issues
    3. Searchable and Browseable Database
    4. Syndicated Search of all Annotated Web Sites
    5. RSS FeedsRSS FEED of the Current Issue Editions [What is RSS?]
    6. E-mail subscription: write the following request in the body of the message: join INSITE-L 'your name'and send it to lyris@cornell.edu;
      where 'your name' (include the quotation marks) is the name you want to be available to the list's administrator. You must send this message from the e-mail address where you want to receive the e-list's messages. Leave the Subject line blank.
    7. In print format for the Cornell Law School community

Arms Control Association
    URL: http://www.armscontrol.org/
    The Arms Control Association (ACA) was founded in 1971 and is a national nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies. Through its public education and media programs and its magazine, Arms Control Today (ACT), ACA provides policy-makers, the press and the interested public with authoritative information, analysis and commentary on arms control proposals, negotiations and agreements, and related national security issues. The ACA has an excellent website that provides access to much of its work. It is searchable and provides the researcher with many ways in which to follow its activities through a variety of social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Google+. The website is logically organized and easy for the researcher to maneuver through. Most of the information is available to the user without a fee, including access to the organization’s publications. From its homepage, interested researchers can quickly and easily see what’s new and have access to the current issue of Arms Control Today. Access to archived issues of this publication is also provided (back to 1996). Other content includes archived editorials back to 1996 and online indexes for 1991-2012. A librarian’s dream! Book reviews back to 2004 and Books of Note back to 2010 (list of books on point without full review) are also available on the ACA website. The organization has done an excellent job providing the researcher with both current and historical material. The Subject Resources page classifies the ACA material by topic. It includes important documents and treaties, ACA fact sheets, and relevant Arms Control Today news articles, features, and editorials. These pages are an excellent way to access everything you need to know about a particular aspect of arms control. Featured subjects—the biggies--like New START and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are pulled up front, then a listing of all subjects organized alphabetically appears below the featured subjects. Country Resources allows the user to browse ACA resources by country. ACA offers in-depth profiles, fact sheets, and commentary from a range of arms control experts. ACA also has RSS feeds enabling its users to stay up to date on all the latest arms control news. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in arms control, including scholars, professors, and academic librarians.
    [Author: C. Hepler]
Fair Contracts.org
    URL: http://faircontracts.org/
    Citizen Works, a 501 (c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, along with a number of volunteers and allies, created the Fair Contracts Project at Faircontracts.org. Their goal is to rebalance the power between businesses and individual consumers by educating consumers about, and reforming harmful provisions in, standard form contracts. The intention is to replace the unfair fine print and make business-to-consumer standard form contracts fair, accessible and understandable for consumers. This website is clearly laid out with links across the top of the page, starting with a description of the problem with standard form contracts and some solutions. Next, the user will find links to contract provisions by topic. Clicking on the topic link will provide a description of the particular provision as well as a sample agreement utilizing the provision. Next is a link to the issues the organization is investigating. In this section the user will find in-depth descriptions of a broad range of contract-related issues, including airlines, cell phones, health care, mortgages, and many others . The Resource tab provides the user with links to relevant articles, organizational websites, audio files, and federal and state statutes governing the issues. Some parts of the site are still under construction. For example, each issue page has two links at the top of the page—one to sample contracts and one to audio/video material. Clicking on these links often leads to blank pages. It appears to be their intent to add sample contracts and other material and it just hasn’t happened yet. What is on each issue page, though, is the ability to create an RSS feed for that page, thereby allowing the user to be notified when there have been changes to the page. Likewise the Stories section does not have any content, except for a request to submit a story. The researcher can search this site and can also keep current on the issues by following them on Twitter.
    [Author: C. Hepler]
Lowering the Bar
    URL: http://www.loweringthebar.net/
    "Lowering the Bar" is a blog containing a treasure trove of "legal humor." It is authored by Kevin Underhill, a partner in the San Francisco law firm office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Much of the material is of the inadvertently humorous (rather than intentionally funny) variety. The frequent posts often tell humorous legal stories culled from news stories and case reports, but there are also several collections. For example, there is a collection of Comical Case Names, and the Case Law Hall of Fame gathers LOL-worthy quotes from court opinions. The Attorney Ad gallery has many tongue-in-cheek lawyer ads that might just prompt readers with a sense of humor to engage the advertiser (like the famous Chicago billboard "Life is Short. Get a Divorce."). There are also links to Mr. Underhill's essays which were written and published in the law journal The Green Bag, "If Great Literary Works Were Written by Lawyers." Reading through the blog will certainly make you smile and sometimes chuckle, and law faculty can find material that will lighten the atmosphere in class.
    [Author: S. Leers]


InSITE contributors: C. Hepler. S. Leers, J. Pajerek (Editor)
© 2013 Cornell Law Library

The contents of this publication and any recommendations therein are the opinions of the authors and do not reflect the views of Cornell University.