One of our perpetual challenges is keeping with with changes to
tools that we learned to use some years ago. We might assume that they
are the same as they always were, but features could have been added ...
or taken away.
My stale research knowledge was recently exposed when a student
asked for help with Shepard's Federal Statute Citations. His text said
that it should include references to amendments, repeals, etc., and he
found examples in the bound volumes but not in the supplements. After
checking with him, I tried various other sources, including
helpcite.shepards.com, eventually posing our question to the email help
desk at the website. The answer? Shepard's hasn't included legislative
treatment since approximately 1995.
If there were announcements at the time, I had forgotten them. I
think it would be appropriate for Shepard's to consider including in its
instructions for the set a paragraph explaining that the information is no
longer listed -- so that users like the student (and I) could tell quickly
what the story is.
I am posting this to law-lib because I suspect that there are
others out there who, like me, missed this change. Jacobstein, Merky &
Dunn, for instance, still think that Shepard's gives legislative treatment
(Fundamentals of Legal Research, 7th ed. 1998, p. 349). Kunz, Schmedeman,
Downs, & Bateson, who wrote the text the student was using (The Process of
Legal Research, 4th ed. 1996) also missed the change. Cohen & Olson,
however, were up to the minute when they revised Legal Research in a
Nutshell for the 6th ed. in 1996: "(Shepard's has recently discontinued
listing amending statutory provisions in U.S. Citations, but it is not yet
clear whether this change is permanent.)" p. 150.
I am not particularly sad at the loss of legislative treatment:
there are certainly other ways researchers can update statutes. (For that
matter, I've never used statutory shepard's that much anyway -- for cases,
I'd rather use an annotated code.) What concerns me is the lack of clear
documentation about the change. If some of us law librarians and authors
of legal research texts missed the change, then isn't it likely that a
bunch of lawyers who learned how to do research a while back also missed
it? Would they shepardize a provision, see no codes for amendment or
repeal and assume that the statute was still current? Shouldn't there be
something in the instructions or list of abbreviations that says: by the
way, this set won't tell you any more if your code section has been
amended or repealed?
My correspondence with Shepard's is below.
Yours in research,
Mary
Mary Whisner, Head of Reference
Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington
whisner@u.washington.edu
Library's website: http://lib.law.washington.edu
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 12:57:35 -0700
From: "Whitney, Robert B. (SHEP)" <Robert.Whitney@shepards.com>
To: 'Mary Whisner' <whisner@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Shepard's Federal Citations -- amendments, repeals, etc.
Shepard's has not included legislative treatment since approximately 1995.
Bob Whitney
Editorial Support
800-899-6000, Option #5
-----Original Message-----
From: Mary Whisner [mailto:whisner@u.washington.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 1999 12:31 PM
To: editsupport@shepards.com
Cc: whisner@u.washington.edu
Subject: Shepard's Federal Citations -- amendments, repeals, etc.
Last week a student came to me in the Reference Office and asked why he
couldn't find any reference to recent statutory amendments in Shepard's
Federal Statutory Citations. We went to the set together and did some
more looking. He had found examples in the bound volumes, but the
supplements did not seem to have any such references. I pulled some
recent USCCAN volumes off the shelf, finding USC sections that had been
amended, then checking the Shepard's pamphlets to see whether the
amendment was noted. Again, we couldn't find any examples in the
supplements.
We noticed that the paperbound supplements no longer listed on the
inside cover the codes for legislative treatment (amended, repealed,
etc.) -- only for judicial treatment. We did not notice anything in the
instructions that indicated that the editorial policy had shifted and
that legislative treatment was no longer indicated.
This morning, I did a some similar checking on LEXIS-NEXIS. I searched
for public laws that amended U.S.C. sections, then shepardized the USC
citations online. Again, Shepard's did not indicate the amendments.
For example, 16 U.S.C. 272 was amended by Pub. L. 105-329 on 10/30/98;
shepardizing it does not tell us that. 16 U.S.C. 7421(c) was amended by
Pub. L. 105-328 on 10/30/98; it doesn't even show up in Shepard's. And
29 U.S.C. 2201 et seq. was repealed by Pub. L. 105-394 on 11/13/98.
Thinking that these examples might be too recent, I searched for
something that was affected by legislation in 1997. 20 U.S.C. 1491 et
seq. was repealed by Pub. L. 105-17, 111 Stat. 37, 6/4/97. Shepardizing
the U.S.C. citation doesn't reveal that. (I checked the Shepard's
entries for 20 U.S.C. 1491, 1491-1491o, and 1491 et seq.)
The student was puzzled because his text (Kunz et al., The Process of
Legal Research) said that Shepard's should contain this information. We
have checked other legal research texts which also state that. And, of
course, it fits with our recollection of how this set works.
Could you please explain?
Thanks,
Mary Whisner, Head of Reference
Gallagher Law Library
University of Washington
whisner@u.washington.edu
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