Mary,
As always, I enjoy your contributions to the list.
Aru
-----Original Message-----
From: Mary Whisner [SMTP:whisner@u.washington.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 1999 10:25 PM
To: Law Library Discussion Group
Subject: USCS Advance surprise
Once again a student has helped me learn more about a familiar
set. This student asked how she could use the table in USCS to find
whether her law had been amended recently.
Happy to help, I grabbed the latest pamphlet of USCS Advance
(December 1998, covering through Pub. L. 105-306). We looked in the Table
of Code Sections Added, Amended, Repealed or Otherwise Affected. Her USC
section wasn't listed. So she was fine, right?
Well, no. It happened that her statute was a section of Title 17,
Copyrights. I remembered from Lolly Gasaway's excellent AALL workshop
in November (there are more sessions coming in March and May, by the way
-- check AALLNet for registration info!) that there was big copyright
legislation in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. so I *knew* that Title 17 *should* have
been listed. Further investigation revealed that the new laws
were published in the very USCS Advance pamphlet that we were
using, at pp. 4409 and 4442.*
So why didn't the table show *any* changes to Title 17? Because
the table only covers through Pub. L. 105-284, even though the pamphlet
itself has laws through 105-306. I was surprised. If I hadn't known
about the new law, the student surely would have stopped looking when the
table showed no amendments. It requires a lot of reading of fine print to
pick up that the table doesn't cover everything in the pamphlet. Not
every researcher is going to have at her side someone who happened to have
recently attended a workshop on the subject and knows to look more
carefully. Wouldn't most of you experienced researchers thought that
checking the table was enough? *I* would have.
Seizing the "teachable moment," I took the student to look at
USCCAN. There the latest pamphlet *did* list Title 17, and it was easy for
her to see whether her section had been affected by the new law.
Well, just another quirk in a tool that I thought I knew how to
use correctly. Learn something new every day.
-- Mary
Mary Whisner, Head of Reference
Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington
whisner@u.washington.edu
Library's website: http://lib.law.washington.edu
--------------------------
*Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Pub. L. 105-298, Oct. 27, 1998,
112 Stat. 2827; Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Pub. L. 105-304, Oct.
28, 1998, 112 Stat. 2860.
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