From Jamestown farm boy to Supreme Court justice

We were excited to see that the front page of the Daily Record today featured a story on a recent MCBA program on former U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. Among the speakers was Presiding Justice Scudder of the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, which admitted Justice Jackson to the practice of law in 1913 at the tender age of 21.

Library staff were involved in various aspects of the research into Justice Jackson's history with the Fourth Department - "a fun project," says one librarian who worked with the original bar admission documents. A librarian who worked on locating cases Jackson argued before the Fourth Department recounts one case that struck her as particularly evocative of its time and place, "One fascinating case Jackson argued before the Fourth Department in 1925 involved a typhoid epidemic traced to tainted milk. Jackson represented the dairy farmers in their contention that sewage discharged by the city of Jamestown into a creek was the cause of the infection in their milk. The case was won on retrial and affirmed at appeal."

Adverbs on trial

There's an amusing little piece in the Wall Street Journal today about adverbs. Stephen King apparently has written unkind things about them, prompting some legal types to come to their defense, among them James M. Donovan, director of the University of Kentucky College of Law Library, who asserts in his recent essay "On Writing with Adverbs," "Contrary to the ordinary view that adverbs are superfluous, law generally, and criminal law especially, emerges through its adverbs." Bryan Garner also weighs in.

Welcome, MCC paralegal students!

Weekly legal research classes for Monroe Community College paralegal students will be held in the library from October 2nd through the 23rd. The library has commitments to the community beyond local attorneys and litigants, including a longstanding relationship as library of record for the paralegal program at MCC. We’re happy to be part of a successful program benefitting both students and the legal community.