Latest and Greatest – Federal Deception Law

By Jonathan Sheldon and Carolyn L. Carter

Published by National Consumer Law Center (2016)

KF 1609 .S3 2016

The Harris County Law Library has recently received the new edition of Federal Deception Law, just one of many titles available from the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) in its Consumer Credit and Sales Legal Practice Series. Other titles in this series include Foreclosures, Student Loan Law, Truth in Lending, Consumer Bankruptcy Law and Practice, Consumer Warranty Law, and Automobile Fraud. A companion treatise to NCLC’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices, Federal Deception Law focuses on federal and parallel state rules and remedies applicable to consumer transactions. Chapters address FTC trade regulation rules and their scope, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules, telemarketing fraud and unwanted calls, texts, and Spam, federal and state RICO requirements, the Federal False Claims Act, and much more.

Database Access

Did you know that the online versions of the NCLC materials are available at the Law Library? With the online versions, you will have access to the full text of the treatises as well as any forms and pleadings. Moreover, the online editions are updated more frequently than their print counterparts, so you will always have access to the latest information. In addition, you can print, download, or email the results of your research. To use the database, simply ask at the reference desk, and one of our librarians will gladly log into the database on the Law Library's research computers. Visit our downtown Houston location for more information.

Using Styles to Format Appellate Briefs

According to the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure, briefs must follow very specific formatting conventions. Spelled out in Rule 38, these conventions ensure that all appellate briefs are consistently uniform in appearance, organization, and theme. Meeting these specifications fulfills the requirements of the court, conveying not only compliance with court rules but professionalism and credibility.

Formatting can be a time consuming and sometimes frustrating process, but drafting documents in Microsoft Word, taking full advantage of its built-in tools, simplifies the process considerably.  The Styles feature, which is often overlooked by even the most proficient MS Word users, is one such time-saving tool.

A Style is a collection of formatting instructions, applied consistently throughout a document to standardize the font, titles, spacing, paragraphs, headings, and sections. Using Styles to create a document template, you can cleanly and properly format your briefs, substantially transforming the draft-writing process to one of ease and efficiency. Due to the cascading effect of Styles, any one title or heading is formatted just like all of its kind. Therefore, one minor change in some basic feature of the text, particularly one that repeats throughout your brief, is no longer a source of aggravation and wasted effort. And Styles are an excellent remedy for the frustration of formatting your tables of contents and tables of authorities as well. For a useful resource guide, see Georgetown Law School's Styles, Tables of Contents, and Tables of Authorities in Microsoft Word 2010. 

Training Opportunities Calendar

Attorneys need training opportunities, but finding them can be difficult. Even with so many groups offering fantastic CLEs and webinars to Houston’s legal community, it can be time consuming to track them all down. The Training Opportunities Calendar from the Harris County Law Library can help with that.

The Training Opportunities Calendar is an aggregate collection of training session announcements from local providers, like the Houston Bar Association, and names you know, like Westlaw. With a combination of local CLEs and online webinars, there are options to fit all schedules. Event listings are available in calendar format to help you find opportunities by date. You can also limit listings by whether they are local events, online webinars, or offer CLE credit. All events listed are free and links to registration information appear at the bottom of each entry.

Find new training opportunities each month on the Law Library website.

Digitized Historical Texas Statutes from the Texas State Law Library

Earlier this month, the Texas State Law Library announced a new collection of digitized historical Texas statutes available on its website. The collection now includes all Texas statutes from 1879 to 1960. The newest content includes works with copyrighted material published between 1928 and 1960, which is now available under an agreement with the copyright holder Thomson Reuters and in collaboration with the Austin Bar Foundation, which provided a grant to fund digitization. Visit the Historical Texas Statutes page on the Texas State Law Library website to learn more and to download copies of these newly-digitized, searchable documents.

Minding the Gap

Despite the Texas State Law Library’s giant leap forward in making historical Texas statutes available online, there is still a gap practitioners must keep in mind. Thomson Reuter’s Westlaw provides access to historical statutes back to 1987, which is likely to cover most researcher’s needs. However, a criminal defense attorney might need to know the language of a 1985 DWI statute to determine its effect on a client's sentence, or a real estate attorney may need to read a probate statute from the 1970s to see how it will impact a title in a pending sale. When research falls into the gap, the Harris County Law Library is here to help. We have historical statutes and legislative history materials to help you reconstruct historical Texas statutes and we provide free access to Westlaw on our legal research computers for your 1987-to-present research needs. Visit the Law Library any time we can assist with your historical Texas statutory research.

Texas Law Blogs from Texas Bar Today

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Blogs make it easier than ever to get news tailored to your professional interests delivered to you every day. For lawyers in Texas, the question isn’t “where do I find Texas legal news?” It’s “how can I parse through so many Texas law blogs to find news for my practice area?” Texas Bar Today comes to the rescue!

Blog List

Texas Bar Today is a service of the State Bar of Texas that organizes a list of over 160 blogs focusing on Texas law and curates top posts on its website. The list has categories ranging from specific practice areas to “Hobbies & Humor” to help you find blogs tailored to your current-awareness needs. Staff at Texas Bar Today read posts from all the blogs daily to bring you the best from around the state and post the top posts to the TBT homepage.

Get Your News Delivered

You have several options for getting the best blog posts from Texas’ legal community delivered to you each day. The usual options include an RSS feed and the ability to follow on various forms of social media. However, the best option for doing as little work as possible to have the best in Texas legal news delivered to you daily is to submit an email address to receive a daily digest of the top blog posts in your inbox. Visit the Texas Bar Today homepage for more on available delivery options.