by Kristine Lloyd
For those, like me, who suffer from testophobia, your fears may soon be quelled if you are applying for law school. It seems the venerable old ABA is considering making the Law School Admissions Test voluntary. With law school rankings so closely tied to test scores, it’s hard to believe any dean would be willing to loosen her tight grip on the ranking rung achieved with those scores. After all, the mother of all rankings, the U.S. News & World Report’s, places considerable weight on the LSAT scores of incoming first-years.
A 2009 sociology study highlighted the law school obsession with scores. Many schools invest more money in merit-based scholarships to attract students with high LSATs and drive up their rankings, often at the expense of need-based scholarships.
In addition to skewing rankings, detractors of the test say that it also undermines diversity. Two law school professors studied shutout rates of minorities and concluded that these rates were closely correlated with LSAT scores.
If after 40 years of mandatory test-taking, the ABA decides to make the test voluntary, it will be interesting to see if law schools change their admissions processes. With such a well-oiled system in place, who would want to reinvent the wheel, even if given the option?
The LLOPS Grants Committee is pleased to announce an award of $285 to Kim Ositis, Reference Services Librarian of King County Law Library. The award supports Kim’s attendance at DrupalCon 2011. Kim will be in Chicago from March 7-10 learning basic as well as more advanced features of Drupal, the open-source content management system which will power the new KCLL website. Hard to believe that the current website is already nine years old. The Grants Committee is pleased to support Kim and her involvement in the project to design and build a completely new website.
The LLOPS Social Committee is organizing a team to participate in this year’s King County Bar Association Fun Run & Walk. The event will be held on Sunday, March 6 at 9 a.m. at Seward Park in Seattle. Event proceeds support the KCBA Young Lawyers Division program including the Neighborhood Legal Clinics located throughout King County. It should be lots of fun!
If you’d like to be a part of the LLOPS team, please register and pay your entry fee. Event information and links for registering here.
Team name: LLOPS, Team Captain: Jennifer Hill
We’ll figure out logistics like a group meeting place and time as we get closer to March 6th. Please email Jennifer Hill (jhill@kellerrohrback.com) if you are going to participate so that we have an idea of how big our team will be.
I hope all walkers and runners will join us! Your friends, family, co-workers, etc. are also invited to join our team. The KCBA says even dogs are invited so yeah, bring your dogs too!
By Lori Fossum
The House Judiciary Committee has placed HB 1479, Revising the publication requirements of the statute law committee, on its agenda for public hearing on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 8 a.m.
Location:
House Hearing Rm A
John L. O’Brien Building
Olympia, WA
The Committee’s public hearing agenda for 2/2/11, which is subject to change, lists HB 1479 as its first bill. The Committee has placed HB 1479 on its executive agenda for the following day, 2/3/11.
Welcome! The Website Redesign Committee is thrilled to launch the new llops.org. We hope you enjoy using the new site – please let us know if you find any dead links or need help locating a page. Many thanks to Kristine Lloyd, Tina Ching and Robyn Hagle for all their help in completing this long-awaited project! We look forward to adding new functionality to the site – next up on the to-do list is online registration and payment for the Professional Development Workshop.
-Kim Ositis, LLOPS webmaster
As you may have heard, Washington’s Statute Law Committee has requested a bill regarding the Committee’s publication requirements be introduced and passed this Session. The bill is House Bill 1479 and may be tracked on the Legislature’s web site.
This bill affects the publication and distribution of the RCW and the WAC. The House Judiciary Committee was assigned this bill on January 24, 2011.
by Philippe Cloutier
This image comes from the Wikipedia entry on the Project Triangle, which, in and of itself, is entirely interesting and an important consideration for project design. However, in library school I learned that the same triangle applies to online databases.
Take Google for instance. It is certainly fast, with search results literally taking less than a second to run. It’s also as cheap as it gets: free. Their business thrives on pushing advertisements towards the searcher/user. Google: home of the fast and cheap. Continue reading 'The Database Triangle'»
Planning for the annual professional development workshop is well underway, and we’re very excited about the program that we’re putting together. Registration will open in mid-February; we hope that we’ll see you all March 15th at the Seattle University School of Law Annex for what promises to be an informative and interesting day of programming.
Program descriptions are not yet finalized, but below is a sneak preview of what is being planned.
Managing Electronic Resources: The rapid increase in the availability of resources in electronic formats has created many new resource management challenges for libraries. Chris Mulready, acquisitions librarian at Boeing, will address issues including cataloging, access and serial control. Continue reading 'Professional Development Workshop: March 15th'»
by Philippe Cloutier
Like something out of a Salvador Dali painting, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City is designed with dream-scapes in mind. Built over urban desolation, the library not only boasts incredible architecture, but also an extensive surrounding botanical garden.
The building make-up of steel, concrete, and glass takes advantage of natural light. With multimedia and conference rooms, a massive audio, print, and braille collection, and an auditorium that seats over 500, the Vasconcelos Library emphasizes that everything isn’t online (though it has over 600 computers for public use). Continue reading 'José Vasconcelos Library'»
by Kristine Lloyd
There are those of us who are merely curious about the subtle differences between caselaw research on Lexis and Westlaw, and then there are others who are fascinated, nay, obsessed by those differences. So much so that they spend hours pouring over results sets to analyze the differences. If you have the time and the inclination, I say go for it. If you do not, then I say take advantage of others’ scholarly pursuits. If you can get past the first sentence, then you’ll find some interesting tidbits in this article by Dennis Crouch about how coverage differs between the two systems. And then see if you can tell them apart in a blind search test.
Comments Off on Taking the LSAT Just for Fun 
Themocracy