This year the average passage rate for the public schools in Texas is 87.4%. (Houston, Texas Tech, Texas, and Texas Southern). The average bar passage rate for private schools was 90.1%.

Click image for full-resolution image.

Examinees who passed the July 2009 Texas Bar Exam

The second candidate slated for an on-campus interview, Professor Richard Gershon, (Charleston School of Law; Tax, Estate Planning, Property) served for five years as the Dean for Texas Wesleyan School of Law. He went on to become the founding Dean of the Charleston School of Law from 2003 to 2007. Charleston has been provisionally approved by the ABA.

Professor Peter Rofes (Marquette School of Law; Constitutional Law) is the final candidate that is currently scheduled for an on-campus interview. Although Professor Rofes lacks ties to Texas, he has taken on leadership roles at Marquette, having served as the Director of Part-time Legal Education and currently serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

The on-campus interview schedule will be as follows:
Professor Brian Shannon October 6-7;
Professor Richard Gershon October 8-9;
Professor Peter Rofes October 13-14.

Letters of recommendation or support can be directed to the following members of the Dean Search Committee:

Search Committee Chair
Dean Fred Hartmeister (Dean of the Graduate School)
PO Box 41030
Lubbock, TX 79409-1030

Vice Chair
Professor Jorge Ramirez
1802 Hartford Avenue,
Lubbock, TX 79409

Members
Provost Bob Smith
PO Box 42019
Lubbock, TX 79409-2019

President, Guy Bailey
150 Administration Building
PO Box 42005
Lubbock, Texas 79409-2005

Chancellor Kent Hance
124 Administration Building
Mailstop 42013 Lubbock, TX 79409

Passage Rates:

• BAYLOR 97.06%
• UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 89.19%
• TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY 88.57%
• ST. MARY’S 87.50%
• S.M.U. 83.61%
• TEXAS 83.33%
• SOUTH TEXAS 80.67%
• TEXAS WESLEYAN 77.36%
• TEXAS SOUTHERN 40.74%

.

State Average for February 2009: 81.52%

Donald J. Guter served as dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh between 2005 and 2008. Prior to his service there, he served as Judge Advocate General in the Navy, leading a group of 1,800 lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. By comparison, in 2007 South Texas College of Law had 1,252 students enrolled. The school, located in Houston, is known for its trial advocacy program.  The only other Texas law school currently searching for a dean is Texas Tech.  Dean Walter Huffman, who is currently the dean of the law school at Texas Tech, will be retiring at the end of the semester.

A new website named AcademicEarth aims to provide just that. AcademicEarth has lectures from renowned professors from universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. There are courses from a wide array of subjects ranging from Economics and History, to Physics and Religion. There are even a few courses in the law section including a copyright lecture from MIT and a class on climate change law and policy from Berkeley. The videos are free to watch, and can be viewed without registering.

LectureFox, a site focused primarily on science lectures, does remarkable job of aggregating free lectures and organizing them so they are easy to access.

What other online lecture sites do you use?

Textfixer.com, a website originally designed for web developers who were editing code, offers a text-editing tool that is useful to anyone who regularly cuts and pastes text between documents: a line break remover. Line breaks are the broken lines of text seen when text is pasted between documents that are formatted differently. For lawyers and law students, this is most often seen when cutting text from a dual-column PDF document, such as a statute or case prepared on WestLaw or Lexis, into a word processing document. Unlike most formatting problems, pasting text as “plain text” does not get around the problem of line breaks. Although line breaks can be removed manually or by a “find and replace” command, using textfixer.com seems to be the quickest and easiest way to ensure properly formatted pastes.

Additionally,Textfixer.com preserves paragraph breaks while removing only the line breaks from the text. To use the line break remover, simply cut and paste the text from the source to the website, hit the “Remove Line Breaks” button, and then cut and paste the resulting text into the document you are working on.

Headline Image Credit: Immortal412

List of Students who Passed

Bar Passage Rates for First Time Examinees:

1. Southern Methodist University 93.97%
2. University of Houston 93.33%
3. Baylor 91.58%
4. University of Texas 90.24%
5. South Texas 89.57%
6. St. Mary’s 87.23%
7. Texas Tech 85.64%
8. Texas Wesleyan University 77.10%
9. Texas Southern University 59.71%

(Click chart for full-size image.)

The greatest improvement over the July 2007 passage rates was seen at Southern Methodist University with a 1.53% increase in the school’s bar passage rate, which placed SMU at the top of the July 2008 charts. Texas Wesleyan saw the most precipitous drop with a 14% decline in its passage rate since last year. While seven of the nine Texas law schools had passage rates of over 85%, this year’s top passage rate of 93.97% (at SMU) fell short of the July 2007 top passage rate of 97.85%. (Baylor).

(Click graph for full-size image.)

(Click graph for full-size image.)

Before arriving at Texas Tech School of Law, Brian Shannon graduated first in his class from the University of Texas School of Law in 1982. He went on to work at the Pentagon for the Office of the General Counsel to the Secretary of the Air Force before joining Hughes & Luce in 1986. Two years later, Professor Shannon joined the faculty of the Texas Tech School of Law. Since that time, Professor Shannon served as Associate Dean of Programs, Student Affairs, and Academic Affairs during separate terms. Professor Shannon currently holds the Charles “Tex” Thornton Professor of Law endowed chair.

A prolific author, Professor Shannon has written extensively on issues relating to mental illnesses and alternative dispute resolution. Texas Criminal Procedure and the Offender with Mental Illness, which he co-authored with Professor Daniel Benson, has become the primary reference book for issues relating to mental health in Texas. In 2007, Professor Shannon’s article on reforming the insanity defense in Texas received the Texas Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Law Review Article Award. Professor Shannon also received the award in 2002 for his article entitled, Confidentiality of Texas Mediations: Ruminations on Some Thorny Problems. Professor Shannon allowed both his article to be published through Texas Tech Law Review, bringing further recognition to the school and to Texas Tech Law Review.

In 2000, Brian Shannon filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit and later in the Supreme Court in the case of PGA Tour, Inc. v. Casey Martin. Working pro bono, Professor Shannon advocated on behalf of Casey Martin, a golfer who was diagnosed with a medical condition known as Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome, which limited Martin’s ability to walk the golf course during competitions as required by PGA Tour guidelines. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of Casey Martin, allowing him to use a motorized cart in PGA golf tournaments.

Professor Shannon is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and was appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry to serve on the Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities. He served as a chair of the State Bar of Texas’ committee on Disability Issues and is slated to be the next NCAA representative for Texas Tech.

Professor Shannon has strong ties to the Lubbock area, as a long-time resident and as President-elect of the Lubbock Bar Association. Having served in various leadership positions at Texas Tech, Professor Shannon offers the experience and insight needed to build on the success the law school has seen under the leadership of Dean Huffman. Professor Shannon’s academic credentials and unassuming manner make him universally liked and respected among law students, faculty, and members of the legal community at large, and if selected he will no doubt live up to the expectations of everyone who believes he is the ideal successor to Dean Huffman.

As the amount of scholarly material available on the web increases, so to does the need to an efficient means to find, sort, organize and cite the material. Below are twenty of the best tools available on Firefox that researchers can choose from to build a customized, highly efficient research tool.

Part I: Find What You Are Looking For.

1.  Use Firefox Quicksearch

Setting up a quicksearch allows you to run searches from the address bar using very simple customized search commands instead of visiting a search engine or installing a toolbar to run searches.

For example, I’ve set up a quicksearch for Google, so that all I have to do to run a Google search is go to the address bar and type in “g searchterm” and hit enter.

Example:

Typing in “g olympics” and hitting enter

results in:

Adding thumbnails next to your Google results is covered later in the story. You can skip directly to it by going to Tip #12.

Creating a QuickSearch is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Visit any webpage that has a search field that you commonly use. (For example, go to http://google.com)
2. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search…

3. The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “Google” and create a keyword e.g. “g” and click “Add.” The Keyword is going to be the command you use to run the search so keep it short and make sure it is something that is intuitive to you.

Now to run a quicksearch, all you have to do is go to your address bar and type in the keyword and search term to run a quicksearch. If you set up the Google Quicksearch described above, try typing in “g olympics” in the address and then hit enter to see your results.

2. Find in Tabs

With the advent of tabbed browsing came the need to be able to sort quickly through open pages. The Find in Tabs extensions allows users to search multiple open tabs at once. It displays all occurrences of the search terms from your open webpages in  a display pane that also highlights the search results in context, making sifting through search results a breeze.

3. Resurrect Pages

Resurrect Pages allows researchers to bring webpages back after they have shed their ethereal coils. When a webpage is not longer available, either because the content changed or the website no longer exists, Resurrect Pages searches caches and archives that mirrored the content while it was available, so that in many cases you can still retrieve the information you were looking for. Resurrect Pages searches the best caches including Google, MSN, and Yahoo Caches, CoralCDN, the Internet Archive.

4. BugMeNot

BugMeNot allows users to bypass registration at many free websites. This is a great way to skip registering for news websites merely to read archived articles.

5. BlueOrganizer

BlueOrganizer creates “smart menus” and “smartlinks” based on the page you are visiting to offer helpful features that aid in research. For instance, it recognizes book names, movies, individuals, and songs to find more information about those items quickly and effortlessly.

6. Surf Canyon

While Google is often a researcher’s search engine of choice, there are times when you don’t find what you are looking for on Google. For those times, there is Surf Canyon. It adds top search results from Yahoo, MSN, Craigslist to your search results. The additional results remain hidden under a bull’s eye icon and can be easily displayed and hidden again by clicking on the icon. Surf Canyon can also find the most relevant results from deep in your search results and bring them to the forefront.

7. Customize Google

This add-on removes Google ads from search results, suggests topics as you type, and allows you to quickly search other engines like Yahoo, Technorati, and Ask Jeeves.

8. Update Scanner

If you have a page you want to watch for changes, Update Scanner will notify you of changes made the to the page. It highlights the changes made to a page since you last visited the page and can notify you when the page changes.

9. Breadcrumbs

If you have ever found what you were looking for, only to lose it again because you forgot to bookmark or print out page, you will understand just how useful Breadcrumbs is. Breadcumbs can search through the pages you recently visited so you can find the result you were looking for without retracing your steps by running the original search over again.

10. Read It Later

Read It Later is a tool specifically built for those pages you want to get back to to finish reading, but aren’t certain you want to bookmark just yet. Read It Later offers a simple interface that makes marking a page to read later as simple as clicking a check mark at the end of your address bar. Once you’ve read the story, click on the checkmark again to remove the page from your to-read list. You can also have your to-read list delivered to you as an RSS feed so it is accessible wherever you are.

11. Highlight All

This add-on highlights every instance of a given word or string of words on a webpage. To use Highlight all, hit F8 to enable the extension, and then select any word with your mouse, all other occurances of the word on the page will also be highlighted. This is an excellent way to focus you initial read of a long document when you are going through a large number of search results.

12. GooglePreview

GooglePreview adds a thumbnail image next to each of your Google search results so that you can quickly determine if the page is worth a further read.

13. Cooliris (Formerly PicLens)

Cooliris is to image and video searches what the iPhone is to phones. Cooliris offers an amazing interface that allows you to sort very quickly through hundreds of images and supports sites including Google Image Search, Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa. It is hard to imagine an interface that beats coverflow on Macs and iPhones, but the CoolIris interface does.

Check out the demo:

The interface is so good, that in response to user requests, CoolIris has even come out with a PowerPoint plugin and instructions for users of Keynote to add CoolIris functionality to desktop presentations.

Part II: Save, Organize, Annotate, and Cite Your Search Results.

14. Iterasi

As previously mentioned, Iterasi allows you to save dynamic webpages for future reference, even after the content of the original page has changed. Since I posted my review of Iterasi, Iterasi has added support for Mac OS X, and a scheduler which automatically archives webpages on a regular basis. In a conversation I had with Alex Williams, the Director of Product Marketing for Iterasi, I mentioned the availability of short permanent URLs to access the notarized pages would be a feature I thought users would really appreciate so they can more easily use Iterasi for citations in professional publications. I am happy to report that the most recent version of Iterasi offers this new feature. This is a company that is listening to what users want and responding quickly. Keep an eye on this add-on for additional features in the future.

Scheduler Tool Unveiled:

15. Zotero

Zotero allows you to “collect, manage, cite” your research sources. What is great about Zotero is that it not only organizes saved webpages, and search results, it also allows users to add external material like files or documents to the organized structure.

16. Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious Bookmarks lets you to save bookmarks and tag the pages so you easily find them later. The bookmarks are available from any computer with access to the Internet by logging on to your Delicious account, which make it an ideal took for users who research from more than one location. Delicious bookmarks also allow you to find the most popular pages for any tag and access your bookmarks  from any computer.

17. Fireshot

At its most basic level of functionality, Fireshot allows users to capture images of the pages they are visiting. Unlike taking a screenshot using your operating system, Fireshot can take a picture of an entire webpage, even when portions of the page are not visible on the screen. Fireshot also features a built-in editor that allows you to crop the pictures, annotate them, and save them for future reference or to share with colleagues.

18. Diigo

Diigo allows you to highlight, annotate, and save annotated webpages for future reference. While registration is required, and it adds a toolbar to your browser, pages 2 and 3 of the registration process can be skipped and the toolbar can be hidden.

19. Clipmarks
This allows you to save portions of webpages for future reference, print only the parts of pages you want, and email portions of pages to yourself or others. It is the perfect tool for printing or saving multiple non-continuous sections of a page.

20. PrintPDF

If your computer does not already have the capability of “printing” a file to PDF format, PrintPDF adds the capability to save webpages as PDF files directly from your browser.

If you have a favorite Firefox plugin or tip for researchers, or if you agree or disagree with the suggestions, leave a comment. Thanks!

[ratings id="756"]