Related Research Articles
Wexis is a humorous portmanteau used to refer to the alleged duopoly of publishing conglomerates that dominate the U.S. legal information services industry – namely, West Publishing and LexisNexis.
Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.
LexisNexis Quicklaw is a Canadian electronic legal research database that provides court decisions from all levels, news reports, provincial and federal statutes, journals, and other legal commentary. It also offers a case citator and case digests. In 2002 Quicklaw was purchased by LexisNexis and is now a subsidiary of LexisNexis Canada.
HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co., Inc., a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company began in Buffalo, New York, in 1961 and is currently based in nearby Getzville, NY. In 2013 WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.
A law library is a special library used by law students, lawyers, judges and their law clerks, historians and other scholars of legal history in order to research the law. Law libraries are also used by people who draft or advocate for new laws, e.g. legislators and others who work in state government, local government, and legislative counsel offices or the U.S. Office of Law Revision Counsel and lobbying professionals. Self-represented, or pro se, litigants also use law libraries.
The Federal Reporter is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System. It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The third and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions. It is estimated that the Fourth Series of the Federal Reporter will begin sometime around 2025. The United States Reports are the official law reports of the rulings, orders, case tables, and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Ohio Revised Code contains all current statutes of the Ohio General Assembly of a permanent and general nature, consolidated into provisions, titles, chapters and sections. However, the only official publication of the enactments of the General Assembly is the Laws of Ohio; the Ohio Revised Code is only a reference.
John V. Orth is an American legal scholar and author. He is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Jeralyn Elise Merritt is an American criminal defense attorney in private practice in Denver, Colorado, since 1974. She served as one of the trial lawyers for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case in 1996 and 1997. In 2002 Merritt founded and is the principal author of the blog TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime. She also serves as a legal commentator for news media programs and as an internet journalist.
Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information to support legal arguments and decisions. Finding relevant legal information can be challenging and may involve the use of electronic research tools as well as printed books and materials. However, many resources that are useful for legal research are fee-based, and many are not easily accessible.
Computer-assisted legal research (CALR) or computer-based legal research is a mode of legal research that uses databases of court opinions, statutes, court documents, and secondary material. Electronic databases make large bodies of case law easily available. Databases also have additional benefits, such as Boolean searches, evaluating case authority, organizing cases by topic, and providing links to cited material. Databases are available through paid subscription or for free.
Public.Resource.Org (PRO) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States and internationally. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based in Sebastopol, California.
The Columbia Journal of European Law was established in 1994 and is one of the few legal publications in the United States devoted exclusively to European law. It currently ranks among the top five foreign and civil law journals in the US and is the most cited journal of European legal scholarship worldwide. The journal is published under the auspices of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School. Columbia students are entirely responsible for CJEL’s publication. Close collaboration is kept with the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, which keeps the journal abreast of recent developments in the case law of the European Court of Justice. CJEL publishes three issues per year—Winter, Spring, and Summer—and contains articles exploring every dimension of European law in its broadest sense. This includes the law of the European Union and law at the national or regional levels, as well as jurisprudential questions relevant to the development of law and legal institutions in Europe. Its articles cover a range of issues and are authored by leading academics and practitioners. Many articles are comparative in nature and directly relevant to the United States.
Legal information retrieval is the science of information retrieval applied to legal text, including legislation, case law, and scholarly works. Accurate legal information retrieval is important to provide access to the law to laymen and legal professionals. Its importance has increased because of the vast and quickly increasing amount of legal documents available through electronic means. Legal information retrieval is a part of the growing field of legal informatics.
A table of authorities is part of a legal brief that contains an index of the cases, statutes, and secondary sources cited. This article deals specifically with the characteristics of tables of authorities in the United States. The table of authorities, often called a TOA, is frequently a legal requirement for litigation briefs; the various state courts have different rules as to what kinds of briefs require a TOA. The TOA list has the name of the authority followed by the page number or numbers on which each authority appears, and the authorities are commonly listed in alphabetical order within each grouping. The intention is to allow law clerks and judges to easily and rapidly identify and access the legal authorities cited in a litigation brief.
Bloomberg Law is a subscription-based service that uses data analytics and artificial intelligence for online legal research. The service, which Bloomberg L.P. introduced in 2009, provides legal content, proprietary company information and news information to attorneys, law students, and other legal professionals. More specifically, this commercial legal and business technology platform integrates Bloomberg Law News with Bloomberg Industry Group's primary and secondary legal content and business development tools.
The law of Colorado consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, regulatory, local, and case law. The Colorado Revised Statutes form the general statutory law.
The law of Ohio consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory, local and common law. The Ohio Revised Code forms the general statutory law.
The law of Georgia consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law and local law. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated forms the general statutory law.
Public law libraries provide access to primary legal sources and secondary sources used in legal matters. In most U.S. states, public law libraries are part of the trial court system, a department of the state or county government, or an independent local government agency managed by a board of trustees. Public law libraries serve several user groups with different information needs: judges and their support staff, attorneys in all types of practice, and the general public.
References
- Markoff, John. "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free", The New York Times, August 14, 2007. Accessed August 23, 2007.
- Arewa, Olufunmilayo. Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 10, p. 797, 2006. Accessed August 23, 2007
- Columbia Law School. Press release, August 23, 2007.
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