Month: January 2023

The Return of the Great Pizza Wars

Hold onto your aprons as the tri-state pizza front has grown hot again following the introduction of a bill in Connecticut’s senate to declare pizza the state’s official food.  It’s only been a few years since the governors from Connecticut and New Jersey engaged in vicious battle over twitter, after Governor Lamont declared that we had the best pizza in the United States.  A while later, Connecticut Senate Democrats returned fire after Governor Murphy announced that New Jersey was the pizza capital of the world.  In the wake of these ongoing hostilities, the Connecticut Legislature took its first shot at enshrining pizza’s status here in the Nutmeg State into law, introducing a bill in the house.  The world took notice with celebrities from Stephen Colbert to Dan Rather weighing in.   While the bill passed out of the house, it died in the senate and the pizza war went cold.  That is until just a few weeks ago with the senate’s bold new action sure to reignite the passions of pizza partisans everywhere.

To conduct pizza legal research of your own here in Connecticut, your best bet is taking advantage of the search functionality of the General Assembly’s website: https://www.cga.ct.gov/default.asp.  There you can run an Advanced Bill and Document Search by clicking the Bill Info tab and selecting it under the Search heading.  From there you can specify what materials you want to search and decide what years you want to cover.  Doing so for all Bills and Related and for the word Pizza in the Document Text for the last 5 years helped me find the two bills mentioned above.  Do your part in the great pizza wars and learn how to follow legislative action as part of your research toolkit.  Visit us at the reference desk to learn more!

Introducing Westlaw Precision!

Westlaw homepage

As you are returning for the Spring semester, you may notice some changes when you log into Westlaw.  Westlaw Precision is now integrated right into Westlaw Edge.  Your account will automatically convert to this update and will include a new interface and 6 new features.  The underlying content of the subscription (secondary sources & primary law) will remain the same. 

A major difference you will notice on the homepage is the Precision Research feature.  Otherwise, you will see the same content categories available. 

Westlaw Precision allows you to search and filter by legal issue and outcome, fact pattern, motion type and outcome, to quickly find a core set of highly relevant cases.  

 Other highlights include: 

  • KeyCite Cited With: Shows related cases that have a pattern of being cited together even if neither cites the other.  
  • KeyCite Overruled in Part: Indicates, via a new red-striped flag, that a case has been overruled in part and enables navigation directly to the language in the case discussing the point of law that has been overruled. 
  • Graphical View of History: Displays a graphical visualization of research history, mapping out each step and highlighting the searches and documents with more research interaction.  
  • Keep List/Hide Details: Allows users to save cases of interest and hide cases they have determined are not relevant to current research.   
  • Outline Builder: Enables users to organize research by dragging and dropping text into a customizable outline. Linked and formatted citations and KeyCite information integrate automatically, and the outline can be exported to begin drafting a brief.  

      Want more info?  Check out the YouTube tutorials below: 

        Let us know if you have any questions at refdesk.lawlib@uconn.edu, and happy researching!