Washington and Lee University School of Law

Faculty Publications

Joshua A.T. Fairfield, The Search Interest in Contract, 92 Iowa L. Rev. 1237 (2007), available at Westlaw.

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement (Duke U. Press 2007).

Melissa A. Waters, Normativity in the "New" Schools: Assessing the Legitimacy of International Legal Norms Created by Domestic Courts, 32 Yale J. Int'l L. 455 (2007) (Fifth Annual Young Scholars Conference the "New" New Haven School: International Law--Past, Present & Future), available at Westlaw.

Saved Searches in Current Law Journal Content

You can now store searches in CLJC and have them run weekly against tables of contents that were added during that week. To create a new profile go to http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC and click on "Create". If you already have a profile (which you will if you currently receive weekly tables of contents) then click on "Modify" and you will need your privateID that's included with each weekly e-mail. You can save one or multiple searches. CLJC has only author and title information for current articles (and occasionally an abstract), so remember that searches are primarily looking for words appearing in the title and author fields.

Reading Full-Text Books at Google Books

Google Books with full-text of around three million items is bigger and better than ever. It now has an advanced search allowing search limitation to author, title, publisher, and date fields. Scrolling through books is a pleasure, requiring no more than pressing the down-arrow key to scroll down through the pages. A search for the word "law" in the just the title of full-text books returns around 22,000 items that you can read from first page to last. Let's say that in your reading you came upon a reference to the "assize of bread and beer" and wanted some more in-depth information. Just entering that phrase in Google Books, and limiting to full-text items (i.e. excluding books that Google has in limited or snippet view) retrieves over 200 items that reference the phrase, including classic works by Pollock and Holdsworth. Note that Google is also digitizing journal volumes so some items will be articles and not books.

CALI Lessons

This year CALI (The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) celebrates its 25th birthday. The collection of CALI interactive lessons has grown to over 675 tutorials in 33 legal subject areas. The majority of these lessons can be run over the Web, but some must be installed on your local computer. The library also has copies of the lessons on CD-ROM available for anyone who wants to pick one up at the Circulation Desk. To access the online lessons go the law library's research page and click on "CALI". Note the information on that page concerning CALI's online registration process which will ask first-time users for the law school's "Authorization Code". Students and Faculty will need to register with CALI using that authorization code, and create their own personalized password.

Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876

W&L is subscribing to an online collection of over 700 early American newspapers published from 1690 to 1876. The collection is produced by the American Antiquarian Society and Readex. A list of the newspapers can be found here. Access to the newspapers is at Readex. Available issues may be browsed for a particular newspaper (and viewed as images of the original newspaper pages), or word searches may be conducted over one or all of the newspapers.

U.S. Congressional Hearings Online

W&L is purchasing an online collection of U.S. Congressional hearings from 1824 to 1979. The hearings collection is part of "LexisNexis Congressional" and is a work-in-progress, with over 10,000 hearings currently available. The publisher is working backwards in time from 1979. Coverage reaches now into the early 1970's and the complete collection should be available by the end of 2008. The online hearings are PDFs of the original printed hearings. To access, go to the law library's research page, and under the "Federal" category select Congressional/CIS. Note that in addition to PDFs of published hearings the database also includes the CIS Congressional Index 1970- for indexing information, and includes (from the Lexis database) selected transcripts of hearings from 1988 onwards.

Westlaw's New Web Search Engine

Westlaw has made available a general web search engine with a mission to focus on legally oriented web sites. This may be a useful adjunct to Google searches. For example a search for Virginia Animal Cruelty returns around 250 sites in Westlaw's WebPlus, and around 2 million sites in Google. A very useful feature of Westlaw's search engine is the capacity to further filter the retrieved search results by subject. Westlaw's WebPlus is available at websearch.thomson.com.

Annie Enhancements

Recent changes to Annie (annie.wlu.edu) have significantly changed the library online catalog as follows:

• You will often see a small book cover image, which is a clickable link leading to reviews, liner notes, and other information about the item
• A "WebBridge" link will take you to related resources (such as where full-text might be found)
• Location information has been improved on browse lists so that you can see immediately if the item is at Leyburn or Law, is on Open Reserve, etc. (note that only up to three locations can be seen on lists, so multivolume items will not all show at this level)
• If a book is checked-out there will be a "Request Item" button allowing you to recall the book
• Relevance ranking has been improved so that keyword searches default to being split into "most relevant", "relevant", and "other" categories (lists may be re-ranked by date or by title)
• You will see a "Save To List" button which allows the item's bibliographic description to be saved as a bibliography (after choosing one of more you will see a "View List" button that allows the saved bibliography to be displayed).

The European Library

The European Library is a non-commercial organization that provides the services of a physical library and the opportunity to benefit from a virtual environment in 20 languages. This website allows searching through the resources of 30 of the 47 national libraries involved in The European Library. Resources can be digital or bibliographical (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.). Currently The European Library gives access to 150 million entries across Europe. Access is available at European Library.

Doing Business Law Library

The World Bank claims that their Doing Business Law Library is the largest free online collection of business laws and regulations. All links are to official government sources wherever possible. Translations are not official unless indicated otherwise. The collection is updated regularly but they do not guarantee that laws are the most recent version. The site can be accessed at Doing Business.