explodedlibrary.info

no longer maintaining US permanent residency

One of the posts which has generated a few questions for me is this one from 2005, where I mention returning to the US once a year in order to retain my US permanent residency.

Since I made that post, a couple of things have changed.

Most importantly, there’s updated information from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services about this. It’s not very long, so anybody with a real interest in this topic should read the “Maintaining Permanent Residence” section for themselves. I’ll just point out one thing:

You may be found to have abandoned your permanent resident status if you:
Move to another country intending to live there permanently [my emphasis]

When questions of intention arise in this context, it is not so simple that an immigration officer might ask you what you intend, you tell her/him that you don’t intend to live in the other country permanently, and they just accept your word. No, US Citizenship and Immigration Services determines this intention from your actions.

I have found a few online sources which provide some information about how this intention might be determined. See here, here and here.

The bottom line is that just as it is usually a lot of work and hassle and paperwork to initially obtain a green card, it is not a trivial thing to keep it while while living long term in another country.

This leads me to the other thing which has changed since 2005. Since learning more about the requirements for maintaining permanent residency, I decided that I couldn’t justify doing all these things to keep open the extremely slim possibility that I may one day return to live and work in the US on a long term basis. In my first year back, which was fairly difficult, it was nice to keep that option open. But things have changed, and I feel a lot more at home in Australia. I’ll definitely return to the US as a visitor. Who knows what the future holds, if I wish to work there again, I’d rather take my chances with one of the new E3 Visas for Australians.

Something I’ve learned, both from moving to the US as well as returning to Australia, is that changing countries is not easy - at least for me. In fact it becomes more difficult as you get older. Let’s say that one day I do return to the US for several years, well if that happened, I couldn’t ever see myself moving back to Australia - except for short visits. I don’t feel ready for that.

ALLA 2008: Robin Tapper, Justice and emotion: legal education for human wellbeing

The most important thing I learned from this session:
I have recently grappled with the issue of whether the work which lawyers (and law firm librarians) do is morally justifiable. Robin Tapper's presentation was eye-opening because with her background in theology and the clergy, she has thought about these moral issues deeply, yet she has still chosen to return to the legal profession. Listening to her, I could sense her conviction that the work that lawyers do is not just a necessary evil, but it has the potential to be noble.

Read the rest of the notes

first impressions of ALLA 2008

I’ve just returned from the 2008 ALLA conference in Perth.

It was my intention to blog most of the sessions which I attended, but my notes are quite messy and so it will take some time to get them ready. Even after this editing process, I remain a bit diffident about the accuracy and value of these notes, so I’m going to put them in the expodedlibrary bunker, where I sometimes put things which I consider more “iffy”. I’ll be linking to each one from here, so they’ll still be accessible. I’m hoping to add a little value by linking to any books or websites or other linkable things which were referred to.

I won’t be going through my notes in any particular order - just whatever I feel like doing at the time. One will go up tonight, three will go up tomorrow, and then probably one or two each day of next week. If you want to read something right now, Kathryn Greenhill has some brief notes about the sessions she attended on Thursday afternoon.

Anyway, here are my first general impressions of the conference and my trip to Perth.

ALLA was a small and compact conference, with 190 delegates, lasting two days - excluding satellite events and other social activities.

I enjoyed it more than some of the larger conferences I’ve attended recently. I prefer smaller conferences, they’re not quite so overwhelming. You’re more likely to have a chance to have repeated informal chats with people, including the speakers. This was the first ALLA event I’ve attended, and although I noticed that it was close knit, it was not totally intimidating for me as a newcomer. People were generally very welcoming.

There seems to be a real sense of camaraderie amongst law librarians, especially law firm librarians. Could it be because it’s one of the more stressful library jobs, and so it’s nice to find other people who understand what we’re dealing with? Could it be that although from time to time we are on opposing sides of matters, we all face the huge common challenge of dealing with those bloody lawyers ;)

But I don’t want to be snarky. After all, many of the speakers were lawyers and it was gratifying to hear them say very nice things about how they value the law librarians in their organizations. On a related note, one of the themes which popped up in a few of the sessions was the idea that as people who have the tools and skills to find the law more easily than just about anyone else, law librarians have power, and it is our duty to recognize this power and use it responsibly.

My immediate reaction was that I don’t see how this position and ability leads to power, but I’ve noticed that it is the nature of power and privilege that it becomes invisible to its owners. I’m a white male and sometimes I don’t see the privilege attached to being a white male, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. So I’ll try to keep an open mind and think about this some more.

But I digress. The organizing committee of the conference did a great job. The programme was interesting and nicely balanced, and having the new Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia speak was quite a coup! I don’t really have much to say about the trade exhibition. For some people these are the highlight of a conference, but it’s not like that for me. I’m yet to unlock the secret of successfully “working a trade exhibition”, although I did have a couple of good conversations. The social activities went really well, from the opening to the dinner and the closing drinks in the lovely WA Parliament House. The group activity at dinner, making art from discarded library materials, was inspired and turned out to be a great icebreaker.

I only have two gripes. I liked the venue, it was an appropriate size and style for this conference, but I wish it had been more tech friendly. Things like internet access at the podium so speakers could give live demonstrations of things on the web, and power outlets for people with laptops (but kudos for arranging workarounds). I also wish that the conference programme had been purely a single stream, or that it had a complete and equal second stream. I was initially quite miffed that I couldn’t attend the breakout sessions because they were only limited to 20 people and I hadn’t signed up in time. As it turned out, the two sessions I attended instead of the breakout sessions did exceed my expectations, so I’m ok-ish about this thing now.

I also enjoyed the conference because it gave me an opportunity to visit Perth, a city that I really liked. Perth seems to have a nice balance, with the infrastructure and opportunities and diversity one would expect from a large city, while not being as stressed and overloaded as Sydney.

Of course, Perth is the hotspot of Australian librar* blogging, and I was very fortunate to be able to have dinner with the bloggers behind Librarians Matter, Ruminations and Suelibrarian. Although much of blogging is like a conversation, it is nice to occasionally have these interesting conversations face to face.

the rewards of forgetting to have a life

There are times in our lives when we reach a fork in the road, and irrespective of obstacles, we need to decide whether to go in one direction or another. Sometimes these decisions are very easy and are easily forgotten, at other times the decisions are agonizing and can return to haunt us in the future.

Since I’ve been working in the law firm library, I have been confronted with regular reminders of a path not taken. I have a law degree (see my questions and answers post for more details) and my original career plan was to become a lawyer. During my final year of law school, I decided that I didn’t want to be a lawyer* and started looking for alternative things I could do, and eventually decided on librarianship. It’s pointless to re-open that decision not to pursue that career as a lawyer, but I still think it was the right choice for me. However since I’ve started working in this law firm, I’ve had more cause to think about that path not taken.

I recently read an article (Lisa Pryor, The gilded cage, Good weekend magazine, 23 August 2008) which seemed to crystallize the good things and bad things about being a lawyer. Well, to be honest, it looks more at the negatives. I would recommend the whole article, and would be interested in reading the book on which it’s from (Lisa Pryor, The pinstriped prison: How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate, Picador, 2008). The Gilded Cage [see also Mnemonic’s post quoting from this article] describes a lifestyle which is high-flying and exciting but ultimately unenviable. Work hard and play hard is taken to an extreme. The article describes an interesting paradox, how these young professionals are simultaneously exploited and privileged.

The most interesting paragraph of the article was a retelling of a speech by a NSW Supreme Court judge, the Hon. Justice George Palmer.

Recently a very bright young law graduate got a job with one of the largest and most prestigious firms in town. He couldn’t believe his luck when he was told he was going to work directly for the senior commercial partner. He was even more flattered when the senior partner invited him to his home for dinner to get to know him better. The law graduate arrived at the partner’s palatial Harbour-side residence and was shown around. Eventually they went into the partner’s study. The young man was incredulous to see a Picasso hanging on the wall.

“Gosh, sir,” he blurted out. “That’s a real Picasso, isn’t it? It must have cost an absolute fortune!”

“It certainly did,” replied the partner, putting a paternal hand on the young man’s shoulder . “And if you buckle down to hard work, my boy, put in fifteen to sixteen hours a day six days a week, forget about having a life and give yourself body and soul to the firm, in five years’ time, I’ll be able to buy another one.”

…

There are many lawyers, like the senior commercial partner I told you about, who will tell their impressionable protégés that a successful practice in the law can give you a high standard of living; it can give you kudos amongst your professional colleagues; it can give you a warm glow of satisfaction when you win a case or tie up a successful transaction. They probably won’t add that the warm glow lasts as long as five minutes – if you’re lucky. They won’t say that your legal practice is not a companion and a solace to you when you come home late every night to an empty apartment and you feel that the only way you can get through the silent hours ahead is with a drink – or two, or three, or six.

This is relevant to me as a librarian in a large law firm, because some of the lawyers who ask me to do work are in this situation. It’s good to understand where they’re coming from and know that if they ever snap at me, it’s probably because they’re being shouted at by their superiors.

It’s also relevant to me personally, because it short-circuits those “what if” questions, what if I had become a lawyer etc…** My current job takes me slightly closer back towards that path not taken, and I have a better view of its pros and cons. And I can say for certain that I am happier where I am.

 

* I was able to receive my law degree without paying for up-front tuition fees and so graduated without an immediate debt. I mention this because I know that if I had been educated in the USA, I would have probably had student loans needing to be paid shortly after graduation and I may not have been able to switch careers into something lower paid such as librarianship.

** Of course, I would be making a grave mistake if I were to suggest that working in a large corporate law firm is the only career path for lawyers. This is digressing and off-topic, but I'd guess that less extreme legal careers would have fewer of the downsides.

one good and one bad thing about my newish job

First with the good.

It can be very exciting.

Some people who don't work in libraries think I have chosen a path of seclusion, where I can escape from the real world in the quiet and calm of the library. But for me in this law firm library, it's not like that all. I don't know if any real working library is such a mythical haven of peace.

The majority of my job is reference work. Every new question - whether it's a phone call or email or somebody approaching the reference desk - is an amazing unknown. It could be from a partner (by refusing to capitalize partner I am rebelling, just a little bit) or a paralegal or from a lawyer or another librarian. It could be in an area I know a lot about and will allow me to test and expand that expertise, or it could be about something I know next to nothing about, in which case I'll learn even more. It could be something challenging and interesting, or kind of dull and tedious. I have been answering reference questions in some shape or form for almost ten years now, and even after all this time, there's a frisson of fear. What if I can't answer the question or find anything useful? What if there's a totally unrealistic deadline? What if the man or woman asking the question is a jerk? Of course, once I get the question, all those thoughts dissipate.

Of course I would prefer that I only received interesting but challenging questions from nice and helpful users with very reasonable deadlines, but it's the random nature of my job which makes it so exciting, and keeps me on my toes.

And now to the bad, which is an excuse for me to have a little rant.

I hesitate to use the word "luddite", but law firms in Australia are extremely conservative when it comes to implementing new technologies - or at least the information sharing technologies I care about. I feel like I've taken a trip back to 2004, when I had just returned to Australia from the US, and nobody was familiar with blogs or RSS, let alone anything as radical as a wiki. A part of this is the fault of the judges.

They're appointed for life, they're not going to lose their jobs if they thumb their noses at the last 30 years of technology like anyone else would. They can do what they like - including insisting that cases used as authorities be photocopied from the hard copy rather than from the legal databases which law firm libraries pay gigabucks for.

The concern is that if I cite a case, let's call it A vs. B, everybody else - the other side, the judge - should be able to look that up and see exactly the same thing. The judges are worried that that if I submit to Court an electronic version of this case, then it would be easy for someone to change the words ever so slightly, so they're in my favour. That would open a terrible can of worms and create this dreadful question mark about the authenticity of materials cited.

The judges don't realise that that question mark is already there. With an image editing programme, I could tamper with a photocopy of a printed case, and change the words, and have it look totally authentic. That cat is already out of the bag. At least with electronic materials, it's easier to do comparisions between different online copies and find any differences in the text. It seems that the NSW judges are particularly conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. I despair of seeing any reform in this area of the law until the Baby Boomer judges have all retired.

living with myself as a law firm librarian

I will preface this post by acknowledging that this is a very imperfect discussion of a difficult topic. There's a risk that if I get the balance wrong, I will appear as either hopelessly naive or a cynical rationalizer. Still, some questions exist not to be definitively answered, but pondered. The worst thing is to leave these questions ignored in the too hard basket.

This post follows on from the end of my last one, "It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm. How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?"

I imagine that these questions are a lot easier for people who work in public libraries or school or academic libraries.

Working in a big law firm library is exciting because whenever I read the news, I recognize particular companies and issues which the firm is involved in, and which I have been doing work on.

I hope that the clients of my firm are good companies and individuals, and that my firm (and by extension, me) are helping them do good in the world. But I can never know this for sure. It's possible that the opposite is happening, that sometimes my firm is helping our clients do things which are against my own personal values. That's why I'm ok with not knowing everything which is going on. On an intellectual level, I think it's logical to hope that the good and bad will even out in the wash and that's enough.

That's one justification, but it's pretty weak, so I looked for a more positive answer.

Any analysis of the ethics of being a law firm librarian must begin with lawyers. After all, they're the people we work for. If they're amoral, then so are we, because we're helping them. Although the legal system we have is very flawed, it's the only one we have right now. Yes, it's overly expensive and complicated but so are a lot of things in the twenty-first century.

In this legal system, lawyers play a very important role. On an individual level, having a lawyer doesn't mean that you're definitely going to get justice, but I think that most of a time it will cause a better outcome for you. On the macro level, if people generally have access to lawyers, it's more likely that they can use their full legal rights while not over-stepping the mark and infringing on other's rights, and if they're ever in a dispute, it's more likely that both sides of the story will be heard, which will lead to fairer outcomes.

If one of the problems with legal services is that they're too expensive, law librarians have a positive effect because we can generally do legal research more quickly and more effectively than lawyers, for a lower cost. We also have a training role and help lawyers and paralegals do better research, which ultimately saves time, reduces costs and leads to better outcomes for our clients. I think that law librarians serve as the eyes of the law firm, in both reactive and proactive ways, in the work that we do with current awareness and tracking information.

This leads back to my initial dilemma – what happens if I am indirectly helping a client do things which conflict with my personal values? Well I'll still do my best for that client. This is when I need to trust in the system and hope that the lawyers (and law librarians, if any are involved) on the other side do their best job, and that the judge or jury get it right, and that eventually a fairer outcome is reached. As a law firm librarian, I don't just work for lawyers (directly) and clients (indirectly), both of these things are a part of working for the legal system.

I cannot know on a day to day level if my work is causing good or harm in the world. All I know is that without lawyers and law librarians, our complicated legal system would grind to a halt, and that would be a bad thing. Although the legal system sometimes doesn't cause justice as much as we would like it to, we still need it, and working for this is a good thing in the world.

my return to law library land

A lot has happened in the last couple of months. My normal inclination is to write one humungous post where I try to make sense of everything, but I don’t think that such a post will ever be finished - at least not before my life has moved on and I’m thinking about other things.

So here’s one part of it. My new job.

For some reason this job seems totally different, even if it’s not. After all, I’ve worked as a law librarian before - that’s what I did when I first started blogging. Being a law librarian was my initial goal when I decided to become a librarian.

The difference is that my previous law library position was in an academic law library. The majority of my career has been in academic libraries, but this new job is with a big law firm.

In Australia, law firm blogging doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that it has in the US. For the time being, I’d rather not mention the particular firm where I work. It’s no dark secret (actually I am really glad to be working for this particular firm), but once I mention that word here, my name and my employers become inextricably linked through Google and other search engines. Later on I may change my mind and provide those details. That’s fine and I’d rather err by being over-cautious in the beginning. After all, if I say everything now, I can’t unsay that later on.

My initial impression is that being a law firm librarian is very different from being an academic law librarian and it’s also different from non-legal special library positions I’ve had.

One big difference from being an academic law librarian, is that in the law firms, information is not meant to be free. It is expensive and it is power and there are some boundaries which it is not permitted to cross.

The most obvious boundary is attorney-client privilege.

Another way that information is constrained are by Chinese Walls, to use the un-PC Australian colloquial term. Other words include firewalls and cones of silence. Whatever you call them, these are used when one firm represents different parties with different interests about something. It would not be a good idea to have information flowing freely between the lawyers representing these different interests.

I’ve noticed another aspect of this information exchange issue. When I receive a research request, I don’t usually receive a whole lot of background or contextual information. It was very different in academic libraries, where I saw reference interviews which resembled interrogations. It is true that more contextual information usually helped the research process.

The more I’ve started to think about this, I wonder if maybe this lack of context is a mercy. After all, it would be quite disturbing for me to to hear detailed information about how my work was facilitating behaviour by individuals or companies which were at odds with my own personal values.

This leads to the next big issue on my mind, which will be the topic of my next post. It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm.

How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

sample lease and other tenancy documents

Something I've been looking for lately has been a sample Australian residential tenancy lease. Sadly not being in a law library with easy access to formbooks and form databases, this has been more of a challenge. Particularly because I have been looking for a sample lease that was free, authoritative and not obviously biased in favour of landlords or tenants. I did find something, and that's why I'm blogging about it - to make it easier for other people to find such documents.

This sample lease was created by the South Australian Office of Consumer and Business Affairs. There are only a few things which seem specific to that jurisdiction. Because I was able to convert the pdf to Word, it's easy enough to remove those.

There are other free tenancy documents on this page - such as an inspection sheet.

revisiting linking rights

I have discovered a little contradiction within myself. On the one hand, I am a zealous believer in the right to link. Links have been and remain the lifeblood of the web. The anti-linking policies which seemed fashionable a few years ago were invariably flouted and led to the wide-spread ridicule of the things which they were meant to be “protecting.”

That’s only one aspect of the right to link. In 2005, the issue of the linker’s liability for linking to copyright infringing material hosted by third parties has received some judicial attention in Australia. But I would argue that even the Universal Music Australia v. Cooper case doesn’t yet endanger the right to create a bare link to infringing materials, provided there’s no question of “authorizing” copyright infringement.

A bare link does not provide any endorsement, agreement or authorization of the material being linked to. A bare link to a web site is just a statement of a fact - that at a certain place on the web this information exists. While there is any strength left in the ideas and expression of ideas dichotomy, US National Public Radio (a past offender) can't prevent a blogger from linking to them, no more than it can copyright any other fact, such as 2+2=4. For NPR to prevent anybody linking to them is like claiming copyright in their own physical address.

To use a different analogy, anti-linking policies make as much sense as an author claiming that merely being cited in a journal article infringes on her/his copyright.

It might be different if there’s more than a bare link happening. For example, if I linked directly to a certain image on the illegal-art website and wrote, “Check out this hilarious parody of the Starbucks logo!” That might get me into trouble, so I’m not going to do that.

I believe in the right to link and that if somebody chooses to make their website or blog available to the world, anybody has the right to link to it. On the other hand, in my own personal conduct I had decided that I would prefer being courteous over exercising this right. For example, with the list of Australian librarian blogs on my sidebar, I have often requested permission before adding blogs to this list.

Courtesy is very good and nice, but I have now decided that it is too much of a good thing if it gets in the way of adding new blogs to this list. It has even caused me to temporarily lose some of the blogs which I intended to add. I know, losing a blog is a very embarrassing and silly thing to do.

From now on, I’ll just add the blogs as I find them. If anybody has a problem with being added, they are welcome to email me about it and we can talk about it.

unsmiling passport photos, returning resident alien

[25 May 2009: See here for updated information about maintaining US permanent residence]

How quickly one year passes! It's almost time for me to make my obligatory annual visit to the US to re-establish my US permanent residency status. Or as it's worded in officialese:

A permanent resident alien returning to the United States from a visit abroad of less than a year may apply for readmission  by presenting an Alien Registration Receipt Card ("green card") to the immigration authorities at a port of entry.
[Returning Resident Alien Leaflet, U.S. Department of State]

Even more scary is how quickly the past ten years have gone by. My Australian passport has expired after ten years and it's time for me to renew it. I have discovered that by law, my new passport photo must be unsmiling. I gather that smiles cause problems with new face scanning technologies, where scanners in the airport try to match the faces with the passport photos. Maybe unsmiling passport photos are also a lot more realistic, especially considering how most people feel at the end of a long-haul flight.

So, I'm going to be visiting Hawaii between the 9th and 15th of September. Hawaii doesn't have the reputation of being a cheap destination, but it's the cheapest US destination for me to reach from Australia. It's weird to think that for the time being, I have to go Hawaii once a year, but I'm also looking forward to having a little break.

I like living in Australia and think it was the right decision for me to return. I have no plans to move back to the US, but I also want to keep my options open. At least for the time being.