Underutilized tool

As you finish up your papers for the semester, we are getting some questions on finding some background on some interesting topics. Sometimes full text searching for law review articles just pulls up far too many irrelevant articles. If that is the case, or if you have a very current issue, remember to use a legal periodicals index. My particular favorite is Index to Legal Periodicals-Wilson, available under Article Finding off of the Library's Online Resources page.

Another index that is just as good is LegalTrac - also under Article Finding.

Happy hunting and good luck on exams!!

Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Blawg Reviews

Many law reviews are now offering their articles for free on their websites. This move to 'open access' publishing is changing the look of legal scholarship. Some law reviews are becoming more interactive--with responses to articles now sometimes coming in comments pages and short online responses, rather than only in lengthy printed articles. A New York Law Journal article reviews this phenomenon, saying that this more interactive format is making some law review websites look similar to law blogs.

A few places to get started looking for open access law review articles are:

www.lawreview.org -- You can search open access law review articles here
www.doaj.org -- the Directory of Open Access Journals
and
Library of Congress list of law reviews online



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

The Legal Workshop

The Legal Workshop is a new venture put together by several leading law reviews. It offers short versions of articles that appear in the print versions of those journals and some short responses to those articles that do not appear in the print versions.

There's some blawg reaction here and here.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat