Legal Scholarship Online

Terry Martin

 

The web contains an expanding number of places to find journal articles and working papers on legal topics, from journals currently publishing directly on the web to images of converted print volumes of older issues. Summarized here are the most useful web sites for keeping up with new legal scholarship - whether published or in draft - and for topical research.

Current Awareness Services 

The Harvard Law School Library Current Awareness Service  is a weekly web service made available to all HLS faculty members. The "Online Update" section of the service highlights new resources in Westlaw, Lexis, HOLLIS, and other notable Internet resources. "Books Received" lists newer English language books cataloged by the Library during the previous week. The "Table of Contents" section is a compilation of contents pages from new issues of the 900 law journals available on Westlaw. Journal articles may be obtained by following the links to Westlaw or by filling out a FRIDA request.

A more focused service is offered by the University of Washington Law Library, which produces an electronic current awareness service covering only 400 English-language law journals. Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP) is available at the Web site of the New England Law Library Consortium every Friday. Faculty may request items via the Web page by following instructions on the main CILP page. Once you're there, you can list this page under your own bookmarks or favorites and get it to rapidly next time. You have a choice of formats for each week's issue, and if you pick MS Word, you can print it out in double column format. It includes all the major reviews, and just about every minor review that most faculty would want to check, and lists articles both by subject matter and by law review.

Interested faculty may also receive all or selected portions of CILP by e-mail.  The University of Washington, which produces the Current Index to Legal Periodicals, will send you a weekly e-mail called SmartCILP, which includes only listings of new articles in those journals and subject matter areas that you have selected. Each entry includes a clickable link to the article on Lexis and Westlaw. This is the same service described above, but personalized to the user's specifications and delivered by e-mail. A SmartCILP Sample is on the CILP homepage. Signing up is simple, with all the details handled for Harvard faculty by the Harvard Law School Library. Contact Jeanette Yackle or Michael Jimenez.

CILP is also available on Westlaw.

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) offers a number of topical abstracting services - which SSRN calls journals - through e-mail to subscribers. 21,000 working papers, pre-prints, and occasionally published articles in the fields of accounting, economics, finance, and law are summarized. Where possible, SSRN offers the full version to 8,500 of these papers in downloadable Acrobat pdf format. Since the Harvard Law School Library subscribes on behalf of HLS, you may sign up for as many of these notification journals as you wish. The Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) consists of almost 40 journals and 55 working paper series; the Economics Research Network (ERN) offers over 40 journals and working paper series. 

Working Paper Collections

SSRN indexes and abstracts several working paper series in law and economics. Many of these are available online at the home institutions and SSRN will provide links to these sites or will archive the full version themselves if the authors send SSRN copies. SSRN will publish working papers for institutions that do not wish to publish their own; Harvard's Law & Economics and Public Law & Legal Theory working papers are published by SSRN. Harvard's John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business Discussion Paper Series is duplicated on the HLS web site. 

SSRN provides good coverage of working papers in law and economics but many working paper series, such as the HLS Graduate Program Working Paper Series and Jean Monnet Chair Working Papers, are not indexed by SSRN. Jurist maintains a list of working paper series, but it is far from exhaustive and limits coverage to the US. 

Online Journals

Lexis offers 625 law reviews currently online; Westlaw has 900. Both also offer extensive collections of bar journals and legal newspapers. Both offer full text indexing of published articles; both offer most of the articles in the journals they publish; neither provides identical coverage to the printed journals. Most scholars seem to find the indexing and retrieval capabilities of both systems more than adequate; few seem ready to read them online; only a few more seem to find the format of the printouts acceptable.

Some law reviews are beginning to publish directly on the web. The FindLaw Academic Journal Page lists over 200 general, special subject, commercially published, and foreign law reviews that appear on the web to some extent, but a running list of law e-journals available on the net provided by the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology shows only 32 currently available online completely in full text. HOLLIS lists over 90 electronic journals in the field of law, many not covered by the FindLaw or Richmond. 

Online Archives or Self-Publishing Efforts

There is a growing movement, affecting several disciplines, to have scholars bypass the journal route and publish their works directly on the web themselves. Bernard Hibbitts at Pittsburgh has been a proponent of self-publishing and developed the Jurist Legal Education Network as a place to record and index those efforts. The Jurist site has much of value for legal academics, but it is a personal and not an institutional effort and might well disappear when Hibbitts loses interest or retires. Jurist provides listings of new books and articles and links to several journals and working paper series. It is not itself an archive.

Stevan Harnad, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Southampton, has advocated freeing the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving. Harnad wants to increase web access to scholarship and reduce the cost of access to scholarship over time. Harnad would be happy to see a future without print. He runs CogPrints, an electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science. With the advent eprint archives compliant with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI), it makes no difference, in terms of visibility or access, whether authors self-archive in a central disciplinary Eprint Archive, like ArXiv or CogPrints, or in their own institutional "home" Eprint Archives. OAI-compliance makes all the papers in all those archives interoperable, hence harvestable into single global "virtual archives" such as ARC or citebase. A full discussion of e-print archives can be found at eprints.org.

To provide a trusted e-print archive for legal scholars and to make it easier for authors to get their work on the web, we developed a set of web forms that let an author describe a piece of scholarship and then upload it to the web. This software suite, known as LEDA - Legal Electronic Document Archive, was developed at Harvard with the assistance of the Legal Information Institute and is now managed by LII. Several law schools have adopted LEDA. LII runs a test server for LEDA for those who want to check out both the process and the technology. 

The Harvard Law Library runs a publicly accessible LEDA server here. The Office of Academic Affairs is planning to run a LEDA server on the HLS internal site, accessible to faculty only.

Retrospective Collections

Hein Online provides access to a growing number of law reviews and journals, over 130 complete runs at the end of 2001. Some journals permit the most recent issue to be made available online; most require a waiting period of one or two years. But the journals are available from volume 1. All Harvard journals have signed agreements with Hein Online; the Harvard Law Review is complete from volume 1.  Hein Online provides access to the complete contents of a legal periodical, including articles, essays, book reviews and all other materials that appeared in print. Each legal periodical page is represented in both high quality image and OCR text formats. As a cost saving measure, Hein Online does not review the OCR scanned text for errors. Hein Online may be browsed by journal title, by author, or by article title; and may be searched by author and title or by full-text using keywords. An article may also be located by citation.

Our subscription to Hein Online limits access to the University community. Access is controlled by IP address not by user name and password. Thus, you must be connected to the internet via a Harvard network; connecting to the internet through private internet service providers, such as AOL, AT&T, EarthLink, MSN, Verizon, etc., will not give you access to Hein Online.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to create a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and to extend access to those journals as broadly as possible. The JSTOR archive currently includes the entire back runs of over 200 journals, and serves more than 1,000 participating libraries at colleges, universities and research institutions in 48 countries. The leading journals in political science, history, and economics are largely available. Like Hein Online, JSTOR has the ability to conduct keyword searches but displays only an image of the original printed volume. Its Moving Wall concept means that current issues are generally not available. JSTOR is available through HOLLIS.

Indexes of Legal Periodicals

LegalTrac is an index which provides citations to articles in 900 legal periodicals published since 1980. It covers law reviews, bar association journals, legal newspapers, and international legal journals. It also covers law-related articles from about 1000 additional business and general interest titles. Geographical coverage includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. For a complete list of journals covered, see http://www.galegroup.com/tlist/sb5088.txt. Also called Legal Resource Index, this source is available to all Harvard affiliates through HOLLIS (http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:legaltrc) and to law students, faculty, and staff on westlaw.com (LRI) or lexis.com (Legal Resources Index, or LAWREV;LGLIND).

Available on Westlaw, the Legal Journals Index (LJI) database indexes articles from legal journals published in the United Kingdom and Europe and journals covering topics pertaining to the laws of the European Community and of its Member States.  More than 430 United Kingdom and English language journals are covered.  A document is an index entry or abstract of a case report or comment, legislative text or comment, a commission decision, company data, a question and answer, a letter, an editorial, or a publication review.

The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) is also available through HOLLIS (http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:indxfolp) and contains citations to articles about foreign, comparative or international law. Materials indexed include articles from 450 journals, congressional reports, chapters in books, yearbooks, and book reviews from 1985. Materials in all languages are included. Greek, Cyrillic, and East Asian vernacular are Romanized and Arabic and Hebrew titles are translated into English or French. Articles about the legal systems of the U.S., the British Isles, and the British Commonwealth are not covered.

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), is a multidisciplinary database available through HOLLIS, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the social sciences. It indexes 1,700 journals spanning 50 disciplines, as well as covering individually selected, relevant items from over 5,700 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (footnotes), you can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work. If you see an icon marked "View Full Text" on the abstract page, it means that the online article should be available - just click on the link. Harvard ID and University PIN required. 

For access to general, non-law periodicals, Westlaw provides access to UnCover, an online database that provides table of contents indexing to 17,000 scholarly and popular periodical titles. Bibliographic citations for more than seven million articles as recent as the current week are available and can be searched. Some citations have brief abstracts. Issues are entered into the database as the journals are received from the publishers, so articles appear in the database at the same time the periodical issue is delivered to libraries and newsstands. A network of 20 academic, public, law, medical, and scientific research libraries located around the world own the periodicals containing the bibliographic citations in the UnCover database.

The University Law Review Project - sponsored by AustLII, FindLaw, Jurist, LII, and Stanford - provides a full text search of multiple law journals on the internet and also offers abstracts of new law review articles by e-mail. Both services are run by FindLaw and cover only a small number of available papers, but the concept is admirable.

A note on vocabulary. 

Current awareness sites operate in one of two ways. Our library operates a "pull" site. We update it every week but you have to remember to visit it. SSRN and CILP offer "push" services: you may sign up for an e-mail report on new developments and not have to remember to check periodically. WESTLAW also offers a sort of "push" service in WestClip, a clipping service that runs your Terms and Connectors queries on a regular basis and delivers the results to you automatically. (Choose WestClip or Clipping from the drop-down list on the toolbar.)

Image files are digital pictures of printed pages; they may be in different formats but the Adobe portable document format (pdf) is the most popular for law sites. The practical advantage is that they retain the look of and can be cited like the printed page. LSN, which uses pdf, and Hein Online, which does not, are good examples of image sites.
To obtain your free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, click on the Acrobat button.

Full text files usually appear on the web in hypertext markup language (html). Their practical advantage is that they can be searched for the words they contain. Lexis and Westlaw are the prime examples here. 

Some web sites give you both pdf and html formats. Sites that do not use PDF to present the image of the printed page often run a searchable text version behind the scenes; usually these hidden text files are less than 100% accurate representations of the original printed text, but they are still useful. JSTOR and Hein Online are examples of this approach.

Though the number of freely accessible web sites offering legal scholarship is increasing, the most useful sites are still the ones offered by commercial (and even non-commercial) publishers for a fee. Included here are both the free sites and those for which license fees have been paid by the Harvard Law School Library on behalf of the HLS community. From a Harvard computer, the distinction between free and licensed is often not apparent. Away from Harvard, passwords, PINs, or proxies come into play. In general, resource vendors accept

Lexis and Westlaw still require HLS users to have a password to access their databases.  A resource password may be obtained by visiting the Langdell reference desk in person or by emailing Michael Jimenez jimenez@law.harvard.edu using your HLS email account. Please include your full name and position in the text of your message.

Harvard is requiring users to use PINs for more and more purposes. A Personal Identification Number, or PIN, is intended to serve as a secure means of authenticating your identity to gain on-line access to University records or to licensed databases. A Harvard University PIN is strictly designed to authenticate your identity as a Harvard University affiliate. From a security standpoint, the most important difference between a PIN and a password is that the former can only be transmitted across a secure connection on the Internet. This ensures an extra layer of security for your PIN. More about Harvard PINs can be found here.

Put most simply, a proxy is "a server that sits between a client application, such as a Web browser, and a real server. It intercepts all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. If not, it forwards the request to the real server." (from the Webopedia definition). The Harvard Libraries run a proxy server that identifies on-campus users and users with Harvard PINs to the computers of vendors from whom we have licensed resources. 

More information on access and security issues can be found from HLS Information Technology Services, from the Harvard University Library, from the Harvard University PIN Administration Site, or from Harvard University Information Systems.

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Last modified: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 10:47 AM by Terry Martin.