Legal Portraits: Portraits of Lawyers

Yale Law Library’s Rare Books Blog announced the posting of a photo gallery of legal authors. Rare Book Librarian Mike Widener writes:

The star of the gallery is the portrait at [left], of Paolo Attavanti (1445?-1499), generally considered to be the very first author portrait to ever appear in a printed book. The woodcut appears in a summary of canon law that Attavanti authored, Breviarium totius juris canonici (Milan: Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler, 28 Aug. 1479). As such, it is the granddaddy of the author photos on today’s dust jackets.

If your interest in legal portaits is piqued, you may want to review Otto Vervaart’s article on researching legal portraits, The telling image: searching for portraits of lawyers. Of course, you may want to wait until after final exams.

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Teaching, Technology, and Eckstein Hall

There is convergence of ideas about teaching and technology around the Law School lately. The Law School is holding idea sessions as part of our strategic planning process.  A significant part of the discussion involves teaching: effectiveness, learners, full and part-time education.  Earlier this week Douglas Fisher published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “flipping” his database course at Vanderbilt. Flipping a course refers to taking the in-class lecture component and moving it to an online component, usually accomplished by recording the lecture. Earlier this summer I attended a presentation by Professor Norman Garland (Southwestern School of Law) who flipped his Evidence course and reported on the process and results. These threads all come together this week for me.

We haven’t flipped any classes here but we have blended (a term Garland prefers to flipping) a few. Some MULS faculty have been long time adopters of technology both in the classroom and outside. Many have electronic course pages, electronic supplements, electronic casebooks, and even video webcasts of course supplements. Several faculty here have blended some of their traditional in-class instruction with required out-of-class viewing of lectures. The MULS faculty who have blended their classes use the out-of-class lecture to establish the basics of the topic, which means in-class instruction can focus less on establishing the topic and more about exploring its nuances and its applications.

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What’s on your phone?

There has been plenty of news with the release of the new iPhone and new operating systems for Apple and Android. We’ve recently had a post on the volume of phone texting here. We haven’t had a conversation on how your phone helps you as a lawyer. I know that Dean Parlow and Prof. Grenig are dedicated iPad users and the teaching law librarians all have iPads. Those of us in the Media & Technology Group are both heavy Android and Apple users, although Android has a 3-1 lead for mobile phones and a greater lead in tablets.

What is the one legal app that you find indispensable on your phone or tablet? Obvious choices are email and calendar as the essential tools, so we’ll skip those. My choice is the productivity app Evernote.

Here are links to places that have lists of law and law-related apps:

eLangdell Commons (CALI); University of Florida – Apple and Android; Indiana Bloomington Mauer School of Law; Maryland School of Law; UCLA School of Law

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