University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

A New Way to Browse UChicagoLaw Audio

One of our favorite ways to share the UChicago Law experience with the world is through audio recordings of lectures and informal talks by both our own faculty and some of the very distinguished visitors we've hosted. From academic conferences to visits by Supreme Court Justices, the Law School is bursting at the seams with fascinating voices. We've been recording audio regularly since 2005, and have accumulated nearly 300 (!) audio files on our website. With that much amazing content, it can be a little daunting to know where to start, so we've added some new functionality to help you find the material that is most interesting to you. On our audio page, you can now search by keyword, date posted, or event category. Want to find all of the Coase Lectures in Law and Economics, talks dealing with "international law," or just everything we posted in, say, 2007? Now you can.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to keep up with the great audio content being produced at the Law School: you can subscribe to the Faculty Podcast or the Student Events Podcast, "like" us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Introducing "The Advocate," the new clinic blog

The Law School has greatly expanded its clinical offerings this academic year, adding the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, the Gendered Violence and the Law Clinic, the Poverty and Housing Law Clinic, and the Prosecution and Defense Clinic to the already formidable list of clinics that call the Kane Center home. Keeping track of the accomplishments of all of these fine programs could keep you occupied for hours, but luckily the Kane Center staff have started a new blog on the Law School's website. Named "The Advocate" in honor of the print publication published by the clinics until 2006, this blog will keep the Law School community abreast of the challenges and triumphs of the students and faculty involved with these programs.

 

New Year, New Home Page

If you've been to the Law School's website lately, you may have noticed that just before the New Year, we quietly rolled out a new look for the site's home page. Highlights of the new design include:

• a striking new emphasis on the photographs accompanying our featured stories
• a streamlined and simplified information architecture
• more real estate devoted to publicizing our faculty's research
• removal of the old "News," "Audio," "Video" sections in favor of a "News & Media" column, which will aggregate not only those content types, but also blogs hosted both on our site (e.g. Accolades & Achievements) and elsewhere (the D'Angelo Library Blog, the Becker-Posner Blog, etc.) and other types of content that are updated regularly (such as The Record and Faculty Research).

Here in the Commmunications office, we're very happy with the changes. We feel that the new page, designed by Rogue Element, Inc. (the same firm that designed the previous home page and the rest of the site) continues to give visitors a glimpse of the vibrancy of the Law School, while making it easier for them to find the information they're seeking. But we want to know what you think -- please let us know in the comments.

Introducing the Law School's New Mobile Site

Today we're happy to officially unveil the Law School's new mobile-optimized website. Users accessing the Law School's website from a mobile device (with the exception of iPads) will now be automatically redirected to a version of our website that is specifically designed with mobile users in mind. How so? It features:

• A re-imagined information architecture, making it easy to find the information that, according to our research, is what our mobile users are usually looking for.
• Fewer images and other bells-and-whistles, so pages load more quickly (and with less drain on your data plan).
• Quick and easy means to find your way to and from the Law School, or to get contact information for faculty and staff.

Like all websites, our mobile site is a work in progress, so we welcome your feedback on how we can best enable your use of mobile devices to access the site.

When developing an institution's mobile presence, there are many options. You can, for example, build native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. as the University has done; and certainly, there are advantages to that approach. However, given the limited staff for this project and the increasing proliferation of new mobile devices, we wanted to create a mobile presence that would be platform-independent (i.e., viewable on all devices, from iPhones to Droids to Blackberries, etc.). Luckily, the content management system we use for the Law School's website, Drupal, is flexible, robust, and supported by an incredible community of contributors. By plugging in the Mobile Tools module and a modified version of the Mobile Garland theme, we were able to easily create a mobile site that serves up the same data as our standard site, repackaged in a mobile-friendly fashion.

Alumnipalooza! The New and Improved "Accolades & Achievements"

Here at the Law School, we love our alumni. We love them so much, in fact, that until now we had two different places on our website where we were compiling alumni updates and profiles: aside from our Accolades & Achievements blog, we also had a section of the site called "The 50-Year Plan," which included longer profiles from The Record, our alumni magazine. As of today we've consolidated the two, merging the Record profiles into Accolades & Achievements, and making Accolades & Achievements much easier to use. Want to see only updates from your class year, or only posts mentioning the phrase "Supreme Court"? Just use the handy-dandy filters provided on the Accolades & Achievements home page. If you so desire, you can also see only profiles that were contained in The Record, or  ones from a specific issue. Take a look, and let us know what you think!

Spotlight on Faculty Research

You may have noticed that, in an ongoing effort to promote the scholarship of our distinguished faculty, the Law School’s website is now highlighting faculty research on our  home page. A small archive of abstracts of articles is now live; aside from being featured on the website, these abstracts are also featured on the digital signage in the library tower, and will be automatically fed into our Facebook and Twitter streams.
 
At the moment, the Communications office finds most of this content by periodically checking SSRN for new uploads (the archive currently features articles uploaded to SSRN in the last 3-4 months). Faculty who have research that they would like us to highlight that is not included in SSRN should email me with the article’s title, coauthors (if any) and either a link to where it can be found on the web or a PDF that we can upload to the website. We are also happy to promote longer-form pieces such as books, though our methods for doing so will be different than those for promoting articles; please get in touch with myself or Marsha Nagorsky to discuss if you have a book coming out that you would like us to promote.

Website Updates Today (1/10/11)

The Law School's website will be undergoing maintenance this afternoon; while the upgrades should be seamless, it's possible that you may experience service outages during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Faculty Reading Recommendations, 2010 Edition

Just in case you haven't seen it on our home page, Facebook page, or Twitter account, our annual faculty book recommendations are now up.

Sharing Law School News: Now Even Easier

Love the latest Law School news story about your favorite professor's research, or a big clinic win? We just made it easier for you to spread the word far and wide. If you visit one of the Law School's news pages, you'll notice several new additions to the menu on the left-hand side of the screen: buttons to "like" that page on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, or share it using any number of other social media (or even print it or email it, if you're feeling old-school).

@oldspice, @shmoldspice: Get Video Replies from @UChicagoLaw

By now, you've probably heard about Old Spice's campaign creating video responses to questions received on Twitter and Facebook. Their self-proclaimed "ridiculously handsome" spokesmodel has answered questions from George Stephanopoulos about the President's poll numbers, from Starbucks about coffee, and from dozens of regular folks about sharks, his abs, and assorted other things of little consequence.

That's all well and good, but wouldn't you rather have answers to questions on some truly entertaining topics?  Statutory interpretation? Admiralty law? How to get into one of the nation's top law schools?

We thought so.

So send @UChicagoLaw a tweet with the hashtag #askUCLaw and we in the Communications office will find the faculty or staff member* with the expertise, intelligence, and wit** to answer that question in a way that will make the Old Spice guy's abs wilt in disgrace, and post a video reply.

You're welcome.***

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* Keep in mind that our faculty are busy people, and individual faculty members may be unavailable to answer your questions. We are unable to guarantee all questions will be answered. Also, requests for Judge Posner to answer questions while wearing a towel will be honored solely at the Judge's discretion.

**Wit not guaranteed, as evidenced by this blog post.

*** Please note: our faculty can provide information about the law, but can not provide legal advice.