New Year’s Resolutions
By Shirley H. David, Sacramento County Public Law Librarian

It’s the end of the year and time to think about New Year’s resolutions for improving your legal knowledge and skills.

Resolution Number 1: Get those last MCLE credits done before January 31. Sacramento County Public Law Library has partnered with West LegalEdcenter to offer its seminars online! Enroll in any Sacramento County Public Law Library program before January 31, 2004 and save 50% from the list price. You can select from six topics taught by local judicial officers including: summary judgment motions, juvenile dependency, search and seizure law, jury selection in criminal cases, effective voir dire, and law and motion. To take the class at your leisure on your computer, simply visit www.westlegaledcenter.com. Click the “ Find a Program” link. Select “Sacramento County Public Law Library” from the list of providers. Choose your program, and proceed to checkout. Enter the promotion coded SCPLL03 during the checkout process.

Resolution Number 2: Get up to speed on the changes in civil jury instructions. The new official plain-English civil jury instructions adopted the Judicial Council of California are available on the Judicial Council website at: http://www.courtinfo.ca. gov/reference/documents/civiljuryinst.pdf. The 800 newly adopted annotated instructions are available for free in a PDF format. Instructions are bookmarked by topic. The annotations are to code sections and secondary sources. A note of caution, if you try to print from your browser, pull down file and change the print page choice from all to specific pages or current page. If you go directly to the printer icon on your toolbar you will be printing the entire 2282-page document.

Can you still use the BAJI instructions? In the Jury Instructions taskforce states in the “guide for using Judicial Council of California civil jury Instructions” chapter, “Rule 855 of the California Rules of Court, adopted by the Judicial Council on July 16, 2003, provides: ‘The California jury instructions approved by the Judicial Council are the official instructions for use in the state of California The Judicial Council endorses these instructions for use and makes every effort to ensure that they accurately state existing law Use of the Judicial Council instructions is strongly encouraged.’” The new instructions include a “related instructions” table that cross-references BAJI to the new CACI.

LexisNexis is the official publisher of CACI. Subscriptions to the print version and an interactive software version that allows for customization of the instructions to fit the facts of the case are available from LexisNexis.

Resolution Number 3: Change the way you find a book on a topic in the library. Library catalog subject searches can be so frustrating because the number of subjects each book may be cataloged with is no more than three. Most books cover more than three subjects and the subject headings are not necessarily the term of art a legal researcher would use. For example, the Library of Congress subject heading for the topic wrongful termination is “employees dismissal of.” Until recently the two options we could suggest for finding wrongful termination practice guides were try using the terms in a title keyword search or by typing a broad word such as “employee” or “employment” in a subject keyword search. Once a few titles are identified then search the indexes of the books you find on the shelves by the topic “wrongful termination.”

The library now subscribes to an on-line database called Indexmaster . Indexmaster includes tables of contents and indexes to over 10,000 legal publications by ninety publishers including: CEB, LexisNexis, West, Aspen and PLI. The service is available on the library public computers at both the main library and the branch library. The new method of subject searching looks this way. Begin your subject search in Indexmaster using the term “wrongful termination.” You will find eighty-nine titles. Check them out by viewing the references in the books’ table of contents or indexes. If you are sure there is a CEB book on the topic you can narrow down the search even more by typing in both the subject term and the publisher. Then go to the library catalog for availability of titles you have selected and their location in the library.

There, aren’t these resolutions better than forgoing the food and wine mentioned elsewhere in this issue?