1. Internet Legal Research – ICLE May 8, 2003 Legal News and Periodicals
Next topic is “Legal News and Periodicals”. We are going to take a look at specific web sites that will make the task of searching out legal news and periodicals easier and more time-efficient.
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Wendy E. Moore, M.S. in L.S.
Acquisitions/Serials Librarian
University of Georgia
School of Law Library

2. When NOT to use Google…
Many legal periodicals and legal news sources are freely available on the Internet…
…but sometimes it can be difficult to track down quickly a specific topic or article
Otherwise know as: When NOT to use Google, but instead use a specialized legal web tool
There are a growing number of legal periodicals and legal news sources that are freely available on the Web…
…but sometimes tracking down a specific topic or article can be a lot of work.
No matter how good a searcher you are, if you do a search in Google for news on a legal topic, it is nearly impossible to get back a concise, useable list of articles…
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3. for example, if we put in the terms “recent Immigration Law news” into Google…
we get over 21,500 hits
with most of the top hits, supposedly the most relevant, being made up primary of newsletters
from law offices specializing in Immigration Law
These links are not going to keep you informed about a recent decision made effecting Immigration Law practice – in fact the information on these sites may not even be “recent”
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4. Instead…
Using SPECIALIZED LEGAL WEBSITES is the FASTEST AND SIMPLEST way to locate specific information, such as legal news or legal periodical articles
Instead…
The BEST searching method to follow is making use of specialized legal websites which assist in finding legal news and periodicals on the Internet
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to find a news item or a legal periodical on the Web – someone has already done the work for you!
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5. Best Web Tools for locating:
“Headline” Legal News
Legal Periodicals
Table of Contents Services for Legal Periodicals
We are going to look at 6 of the BEST WEB TOOLS for locating the following information:
“Headline” Legal News
Legal Periodicals
and
Table of Contents Services for Legal Periodicals
First, let’s look at Legal News web sites…
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6. “Headline” Legal News THREE Best Legal News Websites:
JURIST – Legal News
FindLaw – Legal News & Commentary
LexisOne – Headline Legal News
Legal News Sources on the Internet
First piece of advice:
Forget about digging around CNN.com and the New York Times in search of legal news. When you want to follow news in the legal world, the BEST way is using a specialized legal news web site.
The THREE BEST Legal News Web Sites are:
JURIST – Legal News
FindLaw – Legal News & Commentary
LexisOne – Headline Legal News
All three sites are of high quality and easy to navigate.
Each pulls up unique articles not listed by the other two, making it worth while to use all three sites when trying to get as much information as possible on a news topic.
For daily use, any one of these three would provide you with a good overview of news developments in the legal world.
So, let’s take a look at each of these sites…
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7. JURIST – Legal News http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/issues/index.htm
broadest coverage
non-commercial
academic
JURIST – Legal News
Of the three sites, JURIST – Legal News provides the broadest coverage
Hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and edited by a team of law school professors, it is a non-commercial site designed for people learning, teaching, or researching the law.
Since the site is non-commercial, there are no “fee based only” sections, nor advertisements.
The URL listed on screen takes you to the “Breaking Legal News” page, with the latest headlines pulled from a variety of sources including newswires, newspapers, and magazines.
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8. more on JURIST… Legal News subdivisions The Paper Chase Hot Topics
Full Coverage
In addition to the “Breaking Legal News”,
on the left navigation bar, under “Legal News”
there are three additional news subdivisions:
“The Paper Chase”, “Hot Topics”, and “Full Coverage”
Which we will take a closer look at…
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9. “The Paper Chase” is a weblog, or “blog” of new law in the news,
written by legal professionals with links to the news and sources discussed in the weblog.
You can also sign up for a daily digest of this weblog.
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10. The “Hot Topics” page organizes news items into categories of “Current Topics in the news”, such as:
“Death Penalty”,
“Human Cloning”,
“Microsoft Antitrust”,
and “Iraq Crisis”
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11. The “Full Coverage” section provides an even more extensive list of news topics, currently around 100 different subjects.
These appear to be made up of popular topics
and former “hot topics”.
You have to look on both the “Hot Topics” and “Full Coverage” pages in order to see all topics available.
So, that was a brief overview of JURIST. The next legal news web site is…
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12. FindLaw – Legal News & Commentary http://news.findlaw.com/
commercial site
wire stories
additional links under “News Front Page”
FindLaw – Legal News and Commentary
FindLaw is a commercial site targeted to legal professionals, businesses, and students.
The bulk of news sources in FindLaw are wire stories from AP and Reuters.
The front page of FindLaw’s news section provides links to “Top Legal Headlines”.
There are broader news topics listed in the left navigation bar, under “News Front Page”, such as “Business”, “Immigration”, “Labor”, etc.
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13. NEXT PAGE  Also on the left navigation bar,
there is a link to “Special Coverage” topics, such as “Enron”, Napster”, and “Tire Litigation”
and a link to sign up for FindLaw’s free newsletters,
including a daily “Legal News Headlines”.
The last legal news website that we are going to look at is…
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14. LEXISOne – Headline Legal News http://www.lexisone.com/news/index.html
commercial site
targeted to practicing attorneys
broad array of news sources
LEXISOne – Headline Legal News
LEXISOne is a commercial site
targeted to practicing attorneys.
The site provides access to a broad array of news sources – not just news wires, but also content LEXIS has re-packaged from various newspapers, legal publications, and industry newsletters (sources include the AJC and the Fulton County Daily Report).
The front page contains a major section called “Headline Legal News”
and a smaller section called “Noteworthy Decisions”.
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15. On the right had site of the page there is a drop-down menu labeled “…more News Topics” that has links to legal news topics of interest to practicing attorneys, including “Business Litigation & Bankruptcy”, “Criminal Law”, “Estates, Trusts, and Tax Law”, ”Family Law”, “IP Law”.
These take you to a page with links to news articles on those topics
That concludes are look at Legal News web sites. Next let’s look at finding Legal Periodicals on the Web…
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16. Legal Periodicals TWO Best Legal Periodical Directories:
University of Southern California Law Library – Legal Journals
JURIST – Law Reviews
Many legal periodicals, especially law reviews sponsored by law schools and newsletters from non-profit organizations, are publicly available with full-text coverage on the Web. Commercial legal periodicals, too, will sometimes offer articles freely on the Internet, or at least make the table of contents or an abstract available publicly.
Today we are going to look at the 2 BEST Legal Periodical Directories:
University of Southern California Law Library – Legal Journals
JURIST – Law Reviews
both sites are non-commercial and hosted by Law Schools
in the paper I also included two other directories that aren’t quite as complete as these two, but make good supplemental resources (LawSource & LEXISOne)
One problem with locating legal periodicals on the Web is that the links to the articles are often buried deep on their host’s websites. This is when a specialized directory, such as the two we are going to look at, is the most appropriate search tool to use. Legal periodical directories take away much of the guesswork and ease the problem of locating articles.
So, let’s look at these sites…
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17. University of Southern California Law Library – Legal Journals
BEST directory available
nearly 250 publications
organized by categories
coded content level
F=full-text
A=abstract
T=table of contents
S=subscription info
The best directory for legal periodicals currently available is the University of Southern California Law Library – Legal Journals site.
It covers nearly 250 publications,
organized into categories such as: General Law Reviews, Commercial Law Journals, Subject Specific Law Reviews, Foreign Law Journals, etc. Nearly half of the publications listed provide full-text of the journal articles.
Each title is clearly marked with a code, indicating what level of content is available at that site. The codes are: F = Full-text; A = Abstracts; T = Table of Contents; S = Subscription Information.
Whenever there is a discrepancy between this site and another legal periodical directory concerning the level of content available (such as if a particular journal is full-text or not), this site almost certainly has the correct information.
There are also useful brief annotations describing each publication when appropriate.
The other site to look at is…
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18. JURIST – Law Reviews http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/lawrev.htm
American law reviews
alphabetical
nearly 100 titles in full-text
links to specific parts of each journal’s site
The JURIST – Law Reviews site provides
a listing of American law reviews that have a substantial web presence.
The display is an easy to browse, straight alphabetical list, with no categorizations or annotations.
The nearly 100 titles available in full-text are clearly marked with a "Full Text" surscript note.
A unique feature of this site are the links to specific parts of each journal's website.
These links display as the following: Current | Back | Search | Submissions | Subscriptions | Board | Contact
So, those are the two best directories for finding legal periodicals…I just keep them bookmarked and go to them whenever I need to locate a law review on the Web.
On a related note…let’s take a look at Table of Contents services for legal periodicals
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19. Table of Contents Services
There is only ONE site that you need to use:
Tartlon Law Library – Contents Pages from Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals (Univ. of Texas School of Law)
A table of contents service can help you stay current with recently published articles in legal periodicals. While there are current awareness pages available at many educational and commercial sites, scope and coverage is limited at most of them.
The one site that rises above all the rest, because of its depth and search capabilities,
is the Tartlon Law Library – Contents Pages from Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals from the University of Texas School of Law
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20. Tartlon Law Library – Table of Contents
keyword searchable
tables of contents for more than 750 law reviews
updated daily
previous 3 months received
The site is made up of a keyword searchable database of tables of contents
from more than 750 law reviews and other scholarly publications about the law.
The database is updated daily,
and covers titles from the United States and abroad received over the previous three months at the Tarlton Law Library.
One can simply view table of contents pages for specific journals or do a keyword search on a topic of interest.
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21. NEXT PAGE  When you do a keyword search,
such as for the word “bankruptcy", it returns a list of links to each table of contents page containing that word.
The site also provides lists of the journals indexed in the database
and links to those journals on the Internet (for example here is the included list of journals published outside the U.S.).
It really is the best Table of Contents Service freely available and when combined with one of the legal periodical directories linking to full text articles (USC or JURIST), make a powerful current awareness tool.
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22. Finally… Learning these 6 web tools will help you:
locate a particular legal periodical
stay current with the latest articles on a specific legal topic
keep abreast of the current news headlines in the legal world
Finally…
Whether you are trying to:
locate a particular legal periodical,
stay current with the latest articles on a legal topic,
or keep abreast of the current news headlines in the legal world,
using these 6 web tools we just reviewed can make you successful in locating your desired information quickly and easily and without having to pay a commercial vendor.
Thanks…
Any Questions about these sites???