Guide to the Stimulus

Plan on buying a car this year? Wondering what your tax bill will look like for 2009? Get a guide to the new Stimulus package enacted into law at the NY Times. This guide lets you get information on the stimulus by categories such as Tax Cuts for Individuals, Energy, Housing and many others. Here you will see the basics of the tax incentives for buying a car and many other measures.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

New Credit Crisis Victim: Bar Loans

Law.com is reporting that the newest victims of the credit crisis are some law students who seek bar exam study loans.  Criteria for obtaining a bar study loan has apparently tightened, causing more applicants to be denied than in the past.  The WSJ Law Blog has also commented on the article. 



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Pres. Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today. To assist citizens to understand this act a website was created to explain the act and to permit tracking of the money spent. Recovery.gov is a one stop site for this important piece of legislation.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Free Federal Court Docs

There was an article in the New York Times last weekend about public.resource.org, which has taken a large number of federal court documents and made them free and available on the general internet, rather than downloadable for 8 cents per page on Pacer.  Watch out if your social security number was ever included in a court filing, though.


Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Presidents' Day

In honor of Presidents' Day and President Lincoln - this year being President Lincoln's 200th - I will be prowling the Library from 10am-6pm (which coincidentally, is when the Library will be open). For those interested in the Lincoln bicentennial, check out the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Military Personnel Statistics

Those who are interested in finding the latest numbers for American military personnel on active duty, whether by rank or by region, will find the Department of Defense page for Military Personnel Statistics to be helpful. Just click "personnel" after following the previous link. Historical reports from 1994 through 2001 are available, as well.

Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Stay Up-to-Date with TicTOCs

If you are having difficulty staying up-to-date with content from your favorite scholarly journals, try ticTOCs. TicTOCs, a table-of-contents aggregator, is a free service which provides the most recent table of contents for more than 11,000 scholarly journals. You can view the table of contents, link to the full text of articles, or save your selections for future access.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Forms from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts

Finding appropriate legal forms is sometimes difficult, so it is a great help that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has prepared and made available some basic forms for use by practitioners. The forms can be found here. Note that there is a link to Bankruptcy forms on this page. Collier's on Bankruptcy does have forms, but it is good to have an alternative source.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Kindle 2

Amazon unveiled the Kindle 2 today--a "new and improved" version of its e-reader. The event took place at the Morgan Library and included a guest appearance and reading by Stephen King. I understand from several news sources (for example, here and here) that it was a well attended event.




Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

The Lighthouse in the Bronx

You know when you asked a librarian to help you find law review articles, and they sent you to some database that's not Lexis or Westlaw? That database was probably the Index to Legal Periodicals. It's owned by H.W. Wilson, which has had offices in the Bronx since 1917. Those offices are topped by a lighthouse, which is not there to direct trucks on the Major Deegan, but was originally put there as an advertisement for Wilson--which is still great at helping guide people through the vast sea of periodicals.

The NY Times' City Room blog had an anecdote last week about visiting Wilson's offices and trying to get into the lighthouse.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat