This Issue:
It Depends by Professor John Paul Jones
Announcements
DataSources
Examination Procedures
Muse Library Facts
 ID Please--Yes, I Mean You!! : Library Access Restricted During Exams
Intersession Hourshttps://scholarship.richmond.edu/museletter/1072/thumbnail.jp

Barden, John R.

English

University of Richmond

University of RichmondUR Scholarship RepositoryMuseletter Muse Law Library11-2003Museletter: November/December 2003John R. BardenUniversity of RichmondFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/museletterPart of the Other Law CommonsThis Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Muse Law Library at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion inMuseletter by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu.Recommended CitationBarden, John R., "Museletter: November/December 2003" (2003). Museletter. Book 71.http://scholarship.richmond.edu/museletter/71( THIS ISSUE: "It Depends" (Art & Law) 1 · Announcements 2 DataS011rces 3 Exam Proced11res 3 Exam Period Access 4 Intersession Hours 4 Fall 2003 ( Regular Library Hours Sunday 10:00 a.m. - Midnight Mon.-Thurs. 7:30 a.m. - Midnight Friday 7:30 a.m.- 9:00 p.m. Saturday 9:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. Thanksgiving Break Tues.-Wed. Nov. 25-26 7:30 a.m;--6:00 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 27 Closed Fri. Nov. 28 1:00 p.m.--6:00 p.m. Exam Period (Dec. 5-18) Sunday 10:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m. Monday-Thursday 7:30 a.m.-1:00 a.m. ( Friday 7:30 a.m.-12:00 midnight Saturday 9:00 a.m.-12:00 midnight IT DEPENDS Volume 18, Issue 3 November / December 2003 BY PROFESSOR JOHN PAUL JONES Editor's note: The Law School is currently hosting a display of the works of arlist Dan Calder. Patt of this exhibit is in the display case and on the walls just outside the Law Ubrary. In the fol-lowing commentary, Professor John Paul Jones explains how he sees the relationship between this arl and the law. Last August, I found myself a few minutes early for lunch with a grad, and opposite the front door of the downtown art gallery called 1708. Inside, I found Dan Calder's works on display. Let me tell you why I pursued their visit to our law school. The pig iron attracted me right away. That certain emotional or spiritual states might be "heavy" is an ordinary enough expression in our conversation, almost to the point of cliche. We humans generally understand when we hear of grief weighing a person down or envy hobbling someone, and we humans trained in law speak of opinions as weighty or carrying great weight and of the burden of proof when resolving doubts or issues. Giving form and substance to these concepts by impressing their names on ingots of iron seemed to me particularly apt expression. Once the set consists of more than one stamped ingot, it invites ordering. We order things like guilt and opinion personally and internally all the time, as often as we are tempted. What we do inside, Dan's work allows us to display outside, by arranging the denominated pigs spatially. Does duty come before opinion? Will envy be found be-hind guilt? When he adds stilts, and allows for stilts of different heights, he equips us for ordering our pigs, that is, for loading our spiritual baggage, in a third dimension. It complicates things, but allows more precise visual expression of our internal efforts. Guilt can follow envy, but duty can be higher than either. A pig in a shallow box of sand enjoys a status denied other pigs simply resting on the shelf. And none of the ordering is fixed or dictated; the arrangement of pigs is personal and transient, and ready for rearrangement by the next person prompted to make a statement for -- or to -- herself, or by the same person with a second thought or a better understanding. The paintings are even better, but I didn't know it at first. I left the gallery impressed with the pigs and indifferent to the paintings. But the latter simply had longer fuses. Within an hour, scattered flashes were coming, and by that night they had really hit me. Simply and essentially described, the paintings repeat a pattern of vertical bands, -light and dark. The first image they evoked for me was that of the old fashioned hot-water radiators under my windows at home. That image added texture to the light: hard iron separating dark space, or dark space dividing hard iron. And that led me immedi-ately to cell or cage bars. Now I was seeing paintings of cells or cages, and wondering whether I was inside looking out, or outside looking in, wondering whether I was being restrained for the safety of others out of sight beyond those bars, or enclosed for my (Continued on page 2) Page 2 Volume 18, Issue 3 (Continued from page /) own safety from threats in the dark beyond them. When we confine by force of law what are we think-ing, what should we be thinking? Dan's paintings are black and white and shades in between. Ain't we all, and doesn't our law, that law of bars, reflect both the contrast and its intermediate shades fading to communion? Isn't the progress of law so often the muting (by legislative revisit or judicial interpretation after life intervenes) of initially stark contrasts into shades of grey, especially at the edges? (Assume time is the dimension repre-sented in fore- and background: Is an order emerging from chaos or is chaos emerging fror:n our or-der? A newspaper is black and white and read all over. Some of Dan's paintings repeat with a colored over-wash the motif otherwise expressed in black and white. To me, they signal the influence of emotion on the mental labor of sorting out the black and white, the truths from the lies, the real from the false, and the guilty from the innocent. The colors offer an additional layer of complexity in representing this deci-sion making, like the stilts elevating and subordinating the pigs. I don't know what the pigs and paintings meant to Dan when he set out to create them; I don't know what they meant after the unanticipated and uncontrolled parts of creating asserted their influence on the outcomes. I might not believe him if he tried to tell me more than he has. They might mean some-thing entirely different for the next person to view them. But, for me, they teach about the laborious and uniquely human operation of deciding. AHHOltHtOHiOHIS There will be a new face in the library begin-ning January 5. Caroline Osborne will join us as a Reference/Research Services Librarian. Ms. Osborne earned her J.D. here at UR Law in 1991 and has an LL.M. in taxation from Emory. She is currently completing her M.S.L. S. at UNC-Chapel Hill. In addition to handling questions at the Reference Desk, Ms. Osborne will also teach first-year Legal Research to Sections 7-8 in the spring semester. Library Director Timothy Coggins and Hazel Johnson, a librarian at McGuireWoods, gave a very well-received presentation on "A Quick Primer on Websites for Attorneys" at a Virginia Trial Lawyers Association conference in Char-lottesville, October 9. The presentation, which focused on the usual and some not-so-usual sites for law-related information, was written up in a lengthy article in the October 27 issue of Virginia Lawyers Weekly. J.P.J. Deputy Director Joyce Janto and Head of Ref-erence John Barden both made presentations at the joint conference of the Virginia Library Association and the Virginia Association of Law Libraries, held at The Homestead, No-vember 5-7. Ms. Janto spoke on the implica-tions of the USA Patriot Act for libraries. Mr. Barden participated in a joint presentation on digitization techniques and strategies for small and medium-sized libraries. ) ( ( ( Museletter DATASOURCES Ever wondered what the Richmond Law website (or any other website) looked like when it first started? Thanks to The WayBackMachine, you can look at the history of a website back to 1996 (assuming the site existed in that paleolithic period of the Web). The Machine is a project of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which has been combing and ar-chiving the WWW for over six years. As you might imagine, the storage capacity of such a site is huge, comprising gazillions (a technical term meaning "heaps and heaps") of web· pages. The site is very easy to use. From their home page at www.archive.org, enter the URL of the site you want to visit. You will get a chart of all the versions of the page that are ar-chived. (E.g., there are 28 captures of the law.richmond.edu page archived for the year 2001 alone:) Asterisks denote updated versions of the page. When you open a page, some internal links are preserved, some are not. Think of the evidentiary possibilities: ''No, sir, our website never said that." "Your honor, I want to introduce this printout from the WayBackMachine." Thank you, Internet Archive! An archive of another sort, The Ml!tmory Hole {"rescuing knowledge, freeing information"), captures and republishes data that is removed or suppressed or concealed by other sources. Many of these documents are from Federal agency or legislative sources and have never been publicly released. The Memory Hole recently scored a coup with the ad-dition of over 300 Congressional Research Service reports, as well as some CRS videos. These highly-sought-after, data-rich analyses are often referenced in other governmental reports but seldom released. The home page of the website (www.thememorvhole.org) also lists a number of other provocative sources that they are now providing to the public. Examination Procedures The formal procedures for examination taking at the Law School have been posted on the Dean's Office noticeboard. According to Dean Williams, this information will be brand new to most 2L students, who have not had to deal with the Flexible Exam system before. For 3L students, this is, all old stuff, except for one change involving Take Home Exams: Previ-ously Take Home Exams could only be picked up at the Flex Administration Desk during the first half hour of the Flex Exam period. Under the new rule, Take Home Exams can be picked up or returned at any time during a Flex Exam period. Regular {non-take home ex-ams) can still be picked up only during the first half hour of the Flex Exam period. All students should read and understand the examination procedures prior to the start of the exam period. Please go through the Pegasus noticeboards to find the full document. 1 Ls who may not be used to the noticeboard setup can get assistance at the Computer Help desk. Page 3 ·Muse Library Facts A recent survey showed that the Muse Law Library ranked 20th in the country in per-student expenditures for library materials. "ID PLEASE-YES, I MEAN You!!": LIBRARY ACCESS RESTRICTED DURING EXAMS Once again, the Law Library will limit evening access dur-ing the exam period, so that students will have a quieter place to study. After 5:00 p.m. on Sunday through Thurs-day, only the following persons will be able to gain en-trance: law students, faculty, staff and their families; Uni-versity of Richmond students and faculty; alumni of the Law School, and lawyers with a valid bar card. These re-strictions will be in effect from Sunday, December 7, through Thursday, December 18. The Library will set up a check station near the Circula-tion Desk. The check station will be staffed by law stu-dents, who will check the ID of every person who enters the Library. Although the Law School community is small, the students at the check station will not recognize every-one. Please give us your cooperation by carrying your University or other picture ID and showing it when asked. Remember that the Library does not ask patrons to leave if they arrive before 5:00 p.m. However, if persons not in one of the above categories leaves and then attempts to reenter after 5:00 p.m., they will be refused access. John R. Barden, Interim Editor Muse letter Law Library, School of Law University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173 The Muse letter is ihe official newsletterof the William Taylor Muse Law Library at the School of Law of the University of Richmond, Richmond, VA23173. Interim Editor: John R. Barden Contributors: John PaulJones INTERSESSION HOURS Friday, December 19-Sunday, January 11 The Law Library will be closed Wednesday, December 24, through Sunday, January 4, and will have reduced hours at other times. For de-tails, please see the following schedule: Fri. Dec. 19 7:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Sat. Dec. 20 & Sun. Dec. 21 Closed · Mon. Dec. 22 & Tues. Dec. 23 7:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Wed. Dec.24-Sun.Jan.4 Closed Mon. Jan. 5-Fri. Jan. 9 7:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Sat. Jan. 1 O Closed Sun.Jan. 11 10:00 a.m.-12:00 midnight .~, ••• ( 

Museletter: November/December 2003

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Museletter: November/December 2003

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