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End of Semester Legal Database Access

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With the semester ending and your jobs beginning, you may be wondering what kind of access you will have to the legal databases you have grown to love. Below are details of how much you can use Bloomberg Law, Lexis+, and Westlaw Edge this summer, and beyond.

Graduating students:

  • If you plan to use Bloomberg, Lexis or Westlaw after graduation, you must change your contact information for each database because your Penn State email account will expire before your access to each database does.
  • Bloomberg Law: You have access for six (6) months after graduation.  Your access will expire on November 30, 2021. You do not need to do anything to extend your access.
  • Lexis+: Your access will expire on December 31, 2021. During this time, there are no restrictions on how you use your Lexis ID, and you do not need to register for this additional access through the end of the year.
    • Graduates working for a public interest organization may sign up for the Lexis ASPIRE Program, which permits twelve (12) months of free, job-related access to Lexis+ federal and state cases, codes, regulations, law reviews, Shepard’s and Matthew Bender treatises. The ASPIRE Program is for graduates who are engaged in verifiable 501(c)(3) public interest work. To apply, go to lexisnexis.com/grad-access. You must also provide a letter from your employer to verify that it is a non-profit organization.
  • Westlaw Edge: To continue accessing Thomson Reuters products, graduates must register for “Grad Elite” access. Grad Elite offers 60 hours per month of usage for the first six (6) months after graduation and access to its job searching databases in Westlaw and TWEN for one (1) hour per month for eighteen (18) months after graduation.  Graduates may not use Westlaw in situations where they are billing a client.

Returning Students:

  • Bloomberg Law: There are no restrictions on your usage.
  • Lexis+: There are no restrictions on your usage.
  • Westlaw Edge: You have unlimited access for non-commercial research, but not if you are billing a client.
    • Examples of non-commercial research are: summer coursework, research assistant assignments, law review or journal research, moot court research, non-profit work, clinical work, unpaid externships for course credit.

If you have any questions about summer access and beyond, please reach out to me so that I can help you clarify your permitted usage: tfd5308@psu.edu.

 

Celebrate Earth Day Every Day!

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Earth Day was first proposed in October 1969 at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference in San Francisco, CA. During that meeting, John McConnell, an American peace activist, suggested the idea of a day set aside to celebrate the “life and beauty” of the earth as well as to further the cause of world peace. McConnell’s concern for the ecology and peace stemmed from his deeply held religious beliefs.

Based on McConnell’s suggestion, this day was held on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring. However, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson coined the name “earth day” and set its permanent date when he suggested that April 22, 1970 be set aside for talks and workshops across the U.S. teaching about the environment. This American event prompted over 20 million people around the world to filter into the streets in a protest to support of climate protection. Despite this worldwide outpouring, Earth Day was not planned as an official international event for another twenty years, and its principles have only recently memorialized for all nations in the 2016 Paris Agreement.

While April 22, 2021, is celebrated as Earth Day, you do not have to limit yourself to one day to commemorate the event. Here are 5 practical things that you can do this Thursday, and every day, to celebrate Earth Day:

  1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: While there are concerns about how effective recycling actually is, few can argue with the benefits of producing less trash. If you reuse a container, gifted or purchased, you put less into your trash. This means less money spent on trash bags, which is especially great if you live in a city or town that requires special bags on trash day. And it means less trash bags to haul out to the curb or the dumpster for disposal.
  2. Compost: Just about everyone loves fresh produce. Even better if you can grow it yourself. You can use some of your kitchen waste to fertilize your garden. Instead of throwing it into the trash, you can gather a pile of old fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and leaves and lawn clippings, and mix it with other organic matter to nourish your garden, and help your herbs and flowers grow. See this Better Homes & Gardens article and video on how to make your own compost with things you would normally throw away. And BH&G can also tell you how to make sure your compost doesn’t stink!
  3. Shop Locally: In our socially distanced world, it’s convenient to have a delivery driver put household goods and food at our front door. While I’m not on a first name basis with these angels, I do recognize the sound of their engines. You, and I, can reduce the ecological impact of household deliveries by shopping local.  A number of groceries and retailers will let you socially distance and shop. If you don’t want to go inside, you can shop online and, when your order is ready, park at the store and let the nice associate put your groceries and household goods in your trunk without having to interact with any other persons. This cuts down on the number of boxes you need to break down on recycling/trash day and keeps money in the local economy.
  4. Watch an environmental documentary: It can be easy to remain ignorant of the impact that we humans can have on the environment. But an easy way to educate yourself in the midst of these socially distanced times is through documentaries. They can be easily found on a streaming platform, or YouTube. Break up your binge-fest to watch one. See this list of environmental documentaries to watch.
  5. Spend some time outside: For the past few years we have been socially distanced from one another. But, when was the last time you went outside just to breath some fresh air or sit in the sun? As we leave winter, take advantage of the warmer weather to move your inside activities outside if you can. Lay in the warm shade. Dig in your garden, or plant one. Go for a walk. Open the window or door and breathe some fresh air. Seems like a good way to celebrate Earth Day would be to enjoy the earth and her atmosphere.

Have a Happy Earth Day every day!

A History of Daylight Saving Time

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Daylight Saving Time [DST] begins at 2am every year on the “second Sunday in March.” This year on March 14 at 2am, most of the U.S. will set their clocks forward to 3am. However, until Congress began legislating this issue, every municipality determined its own local time based on the location of the sun. Calculating time based on the fluctuations of sunrise and sunset, as well as the will of a multitude of elected officials, meant that knowing the time with certainty in a given region was next to impossible. Yet, with the rise of intercontinental railroads, standard, consistent time became a necessity.

November 18, 1883, known as “The Day with Two Noons,” was the first successful attempt at organizing consistent, standardized time across the U.S.—sometimes called Standard Railway Time; this was done in order to safely schedule train track usage and to take advantage of mechanical clocks to keep local time. In 1884, the U.S. hosted world leaders at the International Meridian Conference to discuss “a common initial meridian … and ultimately to standardize time worldwide.” The result was that the time zone in which the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, England sits, which had customarily been treated as the zero meridian, was officially designated as longitudinal midnight, and the rest of the world was divided into 23 remaining time zones spaced in 15° longitudinal increments from Greenwich Mean Time.

The U.S. did not adopt Daylight Saving Time until the March 19, 1918, “Standard Time Act” (40 Stat. 450).  (The Act was modified in 1921 to transfer all of Texas and Oklahoma into the same, Central, time zone.) This legislation, adopted during the last year of WWI, mirrored the European desire to conserve energy as part of the war effort. The codification divided the U.S. into 5 time zones including the Territory of Alaska and established DST as the period from 2am on the last Sunday of March (springing forward an hour) until 2am the last Sunday of October (falling back an hour).  The U.S. eventually repealed this law  in 1919, but a number of cities maintained the DST practice while many farms and rural areas returned to standard time.

After entering WWII, the U.S. again instituted Daylight Saving Time, under the War Time Act (56 Stat. 9). On January 20, 1942, Congress set DST to begin at 2am (springing forward) on the “twentieth day after the date of enactment of this Act.” It further declared that the end of daylight saving would occur on the last Sunday of the month “six months after the termination of the present war,” or earlier should Congress decide; and incorporated the time zones established by the 1918 Act. DST began at 2am on Monday, February 9, 1942 and ended at 2 am Sunday, September 30, 1945.

After the war, the country again devolved into a hodgepodge of competing time zones within the same region or state, with some cities and states employing DST, but beginning and ending on conflicting days, and some states and rural areas maintaining standard time within the same regions and time zones. Because of the impact on transportation and interstate commerce, the 1966 Uniform Time Act was passed (80 Stat. 107). Its purpose was “to promote the adoption and observance of uniform time” with DST legislated to last from 2am on the last Sunday of April until 2am on the last Sunday of October. The Act further set out eight time zones across the U.S. and its territories, required states to formally opt out of DST rather than not comply at all, and authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission to bring any violators of the law to court.

Since 1968, the Congress has passed a number of acts regarding Daylight Saving Time. This includes the experiment of requiring full-time DST from January 1974 – April 1975, as well as moving the start date to the beginning of April. It was in 2005 that Congress legislated that the current DST  would begin on the second Sunday in March, and end on the first Sunday of November (119 Stat. 594).

DST is not necessarily a settled issue in the U.S. From the beginning, many sued the government because they felt such legislation was governmental overreach. And not every part of the U.S. complies with the law. Hawaii and Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have opted out of DST, maintaining standard time. According the National Conference of State Legislatures, a number of states would like to permanently observe DST, having passed and proposed such laws within their state legislatures. However, these state laws cannot take effect until there is an amendment to the current federal legislation, which only allows states to maintain standard time but not elect fulltime DST.

Until those laws are changed, don’t forget to set your clocks this Sunday, March 14, according to your state’s observance Daylight Saving Time.

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