Vincent G. Rinn Law Library

Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibits at The Newberry Library

  In commemoration of  the 200th birthday of America’s sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln,the Newberry Library is hosting the exhibit,"Honest Abe of the West". The exhibit focuses on his career as an attorney in Springfield and as a dedicated leader of the Whig Party. "Honest Abe of the West" draws on the Newberry’s rich collections related to Lincoln’s assassination  and "...items from the Alfred Orendorff Collection, on generous loan to the Newberry.  These include a docket book Lincoln used in the late 1830s and 1840 to track his legal cases and fees; a list of his office expenses from 1846, and various legal documents in Lincoln's hand, among others." This exhibit is from Oct. 10, 2009 - Feb 15, 2010.

It accompanies the broader touring exhibition from the Library of Congress, "With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition" which will run October 10, 2009 – December 19, 2009,at the Newberry Library.

60 W. Walton St. - Chicago, IL - 60610
Admission to all exhibits at the Newberry Library is free and open to the public.
Galleries are open Monday, Friday, Saturday from 8:15 am - 5:00 pm, and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, from 8:15 am - 7:30 pm.

Jim Lyons, 1971 DePaul Law Grad Named An Honorary Consul For Ireland

Mr. James M. Lyons, a 1971 law graduate of the DePaul Law School and member of the DePaul University College of Law Dean's Council, has been named as an Honorary Consul For Ireland in the Denver area. He will join five other Honorary Consuls in the U.S.

He served as a special adviser to former President Bill Clinton on peace initiatives and economic development in Ireland and Northern Ireland. He holds an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Ulster. As a partner in the firm of Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons LLP, Mr. Lyons area of practice is focused in complex business litigation and arbitration of all types, including corporate, securities and insurance law. As honorary consul, he plans to  promote the development of Ireland’s business and cultural ties to the Denver area.

Pioneering DePaul Law School Graduate, Anne M. Sullivan, Dies at 99

  When Anne Chawk ( Mrs. Anne Sullivan) was born in 1910 there were still numerous horse and buggies on the roads and very few female lawyers in practice. Working her way through school she was only one of five female graduates from the 1933 class of the DePaul Law School. She had to sign her job applications as "A.M. Chawk" to stand a chance of being considered for a position. In a 2009 DePaul Dialogue profile of her mother, her daughter Deborah Sullivan Roberts, says that her mother "...remembers that a woman would not dare use her first name when applying for a legal job." Anne commended DePaul for being a pioneer in admitting women to the law school.

Her first legal job was a volunteer position that she got with the help of her sisters in her legal sorority, Kappa Beta Pi. Within a year she was working  with the law firm of DeFrees, Fike, O'Brien & Thompson, where she met her future husband, John Sullivan. In 1948 they established their own practice as Sullivan & Sullivan. She maintained the practice after her husband died in 1973. In 1990 Anne and her daughter Deborah, also a DePaul law grad, partnered to practice probate law.

As if all this weren't enough of an achievement, Anne also managed to help raise eight children, a major job in itself. The Chicago Tribune obituary mentions that "A Tribune feature in 1960 on MRS. Sullivan's family-career balancing act lauded her as someone who "concocts a cake or legal brief with equal ease".

U.S. Courts Provide Helpful Consumer Videos On Bankruptcy

Difficult economic conditions have placed many consumers in circumstances in which they may be considering filing for bankruptcy as a way to deal with their excessive debts.Such consumers can find authoritative  and  understandable guidance on this process, from nine videos offered on the US Court's website.

They are produced by the Administrative Office of the US Courts and the Federal Judicial Center. They are designed to orient and guide consumers considering using bankruptcy in their situation. Topics covered include : Types of Bankruptcy, Limits of Bankruptcy, Filing for Bankruptcy, the Creditors' Meeting, Bankruptcy Crime, Court Hearings, The Discharge and the need for legal assistance. In addition to the videos, links to detailed written information are also provided on their Bankruptcy Basics page.

Prosecutors Unwilling To Learn From Students ?

At the web site of the Medill Innocence Project mentioned in the previous posting, David Protess of the project states that "Prosecutors sought the death penalty -- execution by lethal injection.  Instead, Judge Richard Samuels sentenced Anthony to natural life in prison. His appeals were denied by the Illinois Court of Appeals and the Illinois Supreme Court." He goes on to say in his conclusion, "In sum, the actual perpetrators were widely known at the time of the crime, yet law enforcement officials arrested, prosecuted and sought the death penalty for an innocent teenager who happened to be near the crime scene because he was being chased and needed their help."

Prosecutors are given the power to decide which criminal cases to prosecute to convict those guilty of serious offenses in our communities. Implied in this power is the expectation that they will not misuse this power by prosecuting those who may actually be innocent and therefore allowing a guilty party to continue to endanger the community. It is especially important in cases where capital punishment is sought. Mistakes or purposeful abuses of the legal process cannot be remedied when the defendant is dead. It may also be very difficult to uncover wrong doing when the case is closed by death.

Here in Illinois we have the exceptional lessons from the events that lead former Governor Ryan to imposed a historic moratorium on executions in Illinois and to pardon four prisoners awaiting execution, due to compelling evidence uncovered that in too many cases the wrong person was in jail while the true perpetrators had a "stay-out-of-jail card" courtesy of the malfeasance of law enforcement personnel, including prosecutors.

The Report of The Governor‘S Commission On Capital Punishment, George H. Ryan Governor, APRIL. 15, 2002, states that :

"State’s attorneys in Lake. DuPage and Cook Counties have advised the Commission that they already utilize the concept of a review committee within their respective offices to assist the  State’s attoney in screening cases which are potentially eligible for the death penalty. It is a good idea to constitute such an internal review conmitttee to provide a thorough analysis of whether a particular case warrants the death penalty. Written state-wide protocols for prosecutors would provide voluntary guidance for all prosecutors in the state with respect to how such an evaluation may best be conducted. For example, in making a decision about whether to pursue the death penalty, an individual prosecutor should consider not only whether the case meets the basic requirements to be death eligible under the statute, but should also consider the  degree to which the  evidence is sufficient to warrant such a serious penalty."
( Chapter 5, p.83 )

If such procedures are already recognized best practices to be followed in regards to prosecuting a capital case, why doesn't State's Attorney Alvarez  make use of the information that the students have so carefully discovered to correct what appears to be significant departures from these standards ? Rather than attempting to violate the student's  privacy in the guise of checking their information. They have already provided and  publicly posted what is needed for that.

State's Attorney Seeks Multitude of Documents from NU Innocence Project

The Innocence Project at Northwestern University helped to uncover evidence that they claim proves the innocence of a Harvey, Illinois, man who is accused of killing a security guard in 1978.  The Cook County state's attorney in turn has subpoenaed the student's grades, notes, witness interview recordings, the class syllabus, and student emails sent to each other and Professor David Protess at the University's journalism school.  The University has turned over some documents but is fighting the further request for grades, grading criteria, student evaluations, expenses generated during the investigation, unpublished student memos, and interviews not conducted on the record.  The state's attorney's office says it is seeking truth.  I suppose that depends on who is on trial.  In this case it seems as if it is the student activists.  There is a chill in the air and not all of it is coming from Lake Michigan.  More in the Chicago Tribune.  [MG]

( This posting is cross-posted from the Law Librarian Blog by permission from the author Mark Giangrande of our library staff)

Also see :

Chicago Tribune editorial re. actions of State Attorney's Office

Chronology of investigation by Northwestern University Medill Journalism students and Center on Wrongful Convictions at the law school’s Bluhm Legal Clinic from their web site.

Professor Bassiouni Quoted Regarding Goldstone Gaza Conflict Report

This past Friday The U.N. Human Rights Council voted  to endorse a Gaza war crimes report that calls on Israel and Hamas to carry out credible investigations into alleged abuses. If viable domestic investigations do not eventually take place, the U.N. Security Council could refer both matters to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecutions. ( See : Resolution - Human Rights Council ,The human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian,Territory, including East Jerusalem .   Human Rights In Palestine And Other, Occupied Arab Territories, Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Executive Summary.)

"The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, was tasked by the Council “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

"The report of the Mission, presented to the Council’s twelfth session, concluded that, while the Israeli Government sought to portray its operations as a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defense, the Israeli plan had been directed, at least in part, at the people of Gaza as a whole. The report also found that Palestinian armed groups had succeeded in causing terror within Israel’s civilian population through the launch of thousands of rockets and mortars into Israel since April 2001."

"It recommended that the Security Council require the Government of Israel to take all appropriate steps, within a period of three months, to launch appropriate investigations that were independent and in conformity with international standards; and with regard to the relevant Palestinian authorities, that it require the independent committee of experts to monitor and report on any domestic legal or other proceedings undertaken by the relevant authorities in the Gaza Strip."

( Source : Human Rights Council Endorses Recommendations, Of Fact-finding Mission  Led By Justice Goldstone  And  Calls  For Their Implementation ) 16 October 2009 )

In an AP story today,Professor Bassiouni of the DePaull University Law School and a driving forces behind the creation of the International Criminal Court, stated that"If it sends the report to the Security Council, to the Secretary-General and to the General Assembly, it is sending it not for general informational purposes but for action,". The author further describes Bassiouni's observation that, "Arab and African countries will likely point to any U.S. efforts to block referral to the international court as an example of double standards, since it was Western countries that referred Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court in March for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes".

( Source : UN rights council endorses Gaza war crimes report, By Frank Jordans )

It is very uncertain whether the national parties involved will undertake internal proceedings to investigate and possibly prosecute the war crimes alleged in the Goldstone Report. Even more uncertain, is whether these cases would ever be referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council, given some members of the Council would likely exercise their veto over such a decision.

Mr. Goldstone at a recent press conference, puts forward a slightly more hopeful expectation. "In the end, the mission had decided to give full recognition to the concept of complementarity. It had been recognized by the Rome Statute that the first choice in an incident was domestic investigation.  It was only where such domestic activity was not possible that the International Criminal Court could accept jurisdiction. While the mission was critical of both sides for having done far too little in that regard, it had concluded that, although there might be unwillingness, there was ability.   Israel was clearly able to hold open, transparent investigations.  In Gaza, courts and lawyers were operating, and if there was a will, investigations could be held."

(Source :  Press Conference On Report Of United Nations Fact-finding Mission On Gaza Conflict )

Tools For Saving Web Pages & Digital Docs

A posting last month on the DePaul iddblog (Instructional Design & Development) by Melissa Koenig,  "Two Tools For Finding Old Web Pages", got me looking to see if there were other such tools lurking in cyberspace.

Her post identified the Internet Archive which has a service called "The Wayback Machine" and also a relatively new online service called "iCyte". The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 and has been methodically crawling the web since then. The Wayback Machine search function allows you to input any URL and find find previous "snapshots" of that web page over certain time periods.

A service that grew out of the Internet Archive is Archive-It, a subscription service that allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. As a subscription service for organizations, it will crawl designated URLs at user specified frequencies and archive the results in publicly searchable repositories for those organizations. While not cheap, Archive-It can allow institutions that have a mandate to archive their web content but may lack the resources to do so.

The iCyte service is described as "...a browser plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer that allows you (while browsing) to save any html content (including youtube videos) to your free account.  Once your pages are saved, you can annotate and tag them, group them into projects, and share them with others. The saved content is on the iCyte server (not your desktop)."

The iCyte service functionality resembles many of the capabilities to be found in the Microsoft application called "OneNote" which comes with MS Windows. It also aggregates user content into updateable and shareable notebooks. Using Internet Explorer, it can capture web pages with all the links or just an image of a page, if that is all that's needed. OneNote allows a series of web pages to be saved as one big HTML file to save or burn to CD.The documentation indicates that it can be used in instructional settings , as well as a personal productivity tool.

Another online service,Scribd, allows users to save content such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel which are made accessible via a permanent URL.Documents published on Scribd can be easily embedded and shared on thousands of other Websites.In addition to this basic functionality the site has evolved into into an Ebook publisher.

A recent review of Scribd on the site techcrunch.com also alerted me to a few other similar online services out there:

"Docstoc is the premier online community and marketplace to find and share professional documents. Docstoc provides the platform to upload and share documents with the world, and serves as a vast repository of free and for purchase legal, business, financial, technical, and educational documents that can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded."

"Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications. It's our mission to empower individuals, companies, and institutions to publish their documents across all digital platforms."

"edocr.com provides a highly interactivity environment for publishing and distributing an organization’s public documents across the Internet. Once uploaded to edocr.com, both the organization as well as the growing edocr community and visitors who come across the documents start to distribute to friends and colleagues as well as to the world’s most popular social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter."

Having online locations where one's web pages and other digital documents can be stored and made easily accessible, often for free,greatly facilitates our growing use of the social web and instructional applications too.

Remembering The Murdered & Missing Women of Juarez, Mexico

Professor Ottley Speaks on Post-Conflict Justice & Alien Torts Claims Act