Thursday 8 April 2010

A very sad day for legal research

legal research tragedy Well, my legal research at least.

Yes, it's official. The university at which I completed my LLM has finally suspended my IT account meaning I've lost access to the plethora of precious legal databases which all law students are groomed to fall in love with. It’s just as well I got that paper written before the end of last month, eh, and spent the past few weeks downloading just about everything from Lexis’ Forms and Precedents that I think I’ll need for the future.

Just kidding. Or am I? ;-)

Actually, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to deactivate it. The uni I was at during my undergrad years, suspended accounts with the eagerness of an overzealous guillotine operator from the French Revolution. I found this out to my detriment whilst studying abroad on the ERASMUS scheme!

As we’d got to March, I was beginning to hope they might leave me 'on their books' until the next cohort were enrolled in September.  Obviously my luck didn’t hold.  A very sad day indeed. :-(

8 comments:

  1. I miss the legal databases...thankfully I get my access back in September!

    The one I miss most is LexisNexis as it gave me access to the Stair Memorial Encyclopaedia (roughly this is the Scots equivalent of Halsbury's)

    Thankfully my last Uni gave me a months notice before they removed my IT access.

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  2. Yeah I guess I shouldn't complain... I got 6 or so extra months out of them! :D

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  3. Losing Westlaw is a sad, cold, approaching dot on the horizon for me. I dunno what I'd do after that. It would be harder to work from home for one.

    I never like people referring to Stair in such high regard, it always makes think I'm really missing something.

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  4. I'm led to believe that it mainly concerns rules about kilts and porridge.

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  5. Stephen,

    I love Stair for the simple reason it allows me to find the basics quickly and give me a point of reference to direct me to appropriate cases / statues. Always the beginning of any research I do.

    The courts take it seriously enough for it to be cited from before them as well – must be okay if they’ll accept it :p

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  6. I of course meant statutes and not stautues above!

    (shhh...I'm tired)

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  7. B or B - Good one! ;-)

    I'd not even heard of Stair before, though I guess there's no particular reason that I should have.

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