You know what’s great about the new year?  It’s a chance for renewal.  Spring cleaning for the soul, is what it is.  Recently, the RCLL has been working on it’s own soul-searching-spring-cleaning by weeding our collection.  That’s right, weeding.  What that means is that we go through the collection looking for resources that are no longer useful for whatever reason and should either be tossed or upgraded.  While we are finding a lot of weeds that should be pulled and discarded, we are finding a number of resources that I have never seen but that are pretty awesome. 

For instance, one of those found gems include Primer on the Analysis and Presentation of Legal Argument (West, 1992).  One of the biggest complaints I hear from seasoned attorneys is that newer attorneys don’t know how to write a decent legal argument.  Newbe attorneys have the cut-and-paste thing down pat but actually being able to formulate a legal theory and be able to run with it has been, apparently, lost on this new group of attorneys.  This is why this resource caught my eye.  Key elements of this resource include:

• Begin able to identify the relationship of case facts to legal principles and legal analysis,
• The methodology for presentation of a written argument, and
• The method of presenting an oral argument

The thing is, some people can write and some people can talk; few people can talk about what they wrote which makes this book very helpful.

Another resource I found while weeding our collection is Trademarks Laid Bare: marks that may be scandalous or immoral (Lexis, 2011).  Really this is more of a joke book (well, I was laughing) because this resources identifies a whole lot of marks that were rejected because they were found to use slang references, used mild profanity, were sexually suggestive, encouraged violence, made possible vulgar suggestions, or were otherwise found to be in bad taste.  For example, there were

• Moonies (which used the “oo” to depict a set of mammary glands) which were supposed to be a line of dolls for children
• The word “FRIGGIN” to be used as a decorative refrigerator magnet
• A picture of a frog holding up what appears to be its middle finger
• “W.B. Wife Beater” for a line of t-shirts (for guys, I’m presuming)
• The acronym “MILF” for a line of cosmetics, and
• The word “cocaine” for a line of energy drinks (which actually makes sense, if you’re into that sort of thing)

The next resource in this list is School Safety Legal Anthology (Pepperdine Press, 1985).  The reason this caught my eye was years back when I was in Jr. High School (in the heart of Orange County California), a group of racially motivated students actually scheduled and clandestinely advertised a school-wide, racially motivated fight inviting like-minded students from every school in the district.  Days before the scheduled fracas, administrators were going locker to locker removing guns, billy clubs, brass knuckles, and other items of personal destruction.  These days, things have not changed all that much (except for maybe now kids get bullied on the Internet, which is a twist).  Issues stressed in this resource include

• School crime and violence
• Potential legal remedies, and
• The attorney’s role in education

The last resource I’m going to touch on (because there are just too many to mention in just one blog post), is Representing Children in Child Protective Proceedings: ethical and practical dimensions (Lexis, 2007).  The thing is, we have a number of great resources on how to represent children in legal proceedings.  The kicker is that they are all located close together in sections like “Family Law” or “Child Custody.”  This resource was stuffed somewhere around the welfare section and had we not been weeding the welfare/social security section, I would never have noticed it.

Anyway, Representing Children in Child Protective Proceedings is a great resource if you are an attorney looking to break into this area of practice, an attorney who is already in the business but is looking to bone up on key issues, or parents looking to secure custody of their children. Key areas covered in this text include:

• An overview of the Lawyers Role
• Mapping the Child’s Universe: revolving the representation around the child from day one
• Making Decisions with the Child Client
• Representing the Child in Context: five habits of cross cultural lawyering
• Pursuing the Goals of the Representation: the theory of the case and the lawyer at interdisciplinary meetings

Yep, there are a whole lot of great resources available at the Riverside County Law Library.  Good thing there are Librarians here who are on the ball to help you find whatever it is you are looking for.