Now you can use HeinOnline to search for articles and book reviews in a collection of over 500 foreign and international legal journals, from 1985 to date. The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals “provides in-depth coverage of public and private international law, comparative and foreign law, and the law of all jurisdictions other than the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia.” There’s even an archive that allows you to search across a scanned print version of the index for articles from 1960 – 1984.
Once you find information about an article or book that looks interesting, HeinOnline will links directly to the full text when it’s available. (There are full-text links for more than 34,000 articles and book reviews in more than 100 periodicals.)
Law students: did you know that you can ask us reference questions anytime, from anywhere? The Law Library recently set up an email address for students to use when they have research questions but can’t get to the reference desk:
Bill Maurer (UCI Anthropology and Law) will talk about his research on the diversification of money: “Is Payment a Public Good? Lessons from “Mobile Money.” Professor Maurer recommends two recent essays as “background” for his presentation, both of which are available in PDF:
The Socio-Legal Studies Workshop is an interdisciplinary seminar that meets one Friday each month over lunch (12-1.15 pm) in the Law School. The conveners are Catherine Fisk and Chris Tomlins.
When: Friday, Nov. 4 at noon
Where: In the Law School (room 3500H).
Who: All interested law faculty members, faculty members from outside the Law School, law students, and graduate students are welcome.
The 19th edition of the Bluebook gives expanded guidance for using and citing electronic sources, including newspaper articles. In fact, no fewer than five different Bluebook rules address the use of electronic versions of newspaper articles!1 These rules reveal the tension between current trends in academic scholarship on the one hand, and the importance of reliable and authoritative references on the other. In practice, for example, academic authors seem to rely heavily on electronic sources, while the Bluebook continues to reference “traditional printed sources” in its citation rules. Other trends include enormous technological changes in the publication and consumption of news, and drastically shrinking budgets for print resources in the academic libraries that support authors and cite-checkers.
What does this means for cite-checkers? For one thing, it means that you can now think of Bluebook’s newspaper-citation rules, taken as a whole, as outlining two separate approaches to using and citing electronic versions of newspaper articles: 1) one for “exact copies” that look like photographs or photocopies of printed articles, and 2) another for versions that don’t look like printed articles.
Exact CopyNOT Exact Copy
1) Exact copies
You can use and cite an electronic version of a newspaper article exactly as if it were the original print source only if it’s an “exact copy” — that is, a PDF that preserves pagination and layout, according to R. 18.2.1(a)(iii). Several online resources have exact copies of newspaper articles, especially large daily papers. Finding exact copies isn’t always easy, but a good place to start is searching by the title of the newspaper in ANTPAC. You can also come to the reference desk if you’d like help searching for an exact copy of a newspaper article.
Examples of Exact Copies
Citation example
Source for Exact Copies
Robert Barnes, Justices Allow Funeral Protests, Wash. Post, Mar. 3, 2011, at A1.
(The Law Library will occasionally be able to get exact copies of newspaper articles via ILL, too. That process is worth a post of its own.)
2) Not “exact copies”
If the electronic version is not an “exact copy,” you can’t format your citation as if you used print. But Bluebook does allow use and citation to electronic copies of newspaper articles! Truly. If print (or “exact copy”) is “difficult or impossible to obtain,” you should use and cite electronic versions, according to rule 16.8.
Electronic versions will usually come from “Commercial Online Databases” like Lexis, Westlaw, or Proquest, or they can come from the Internet. (Bluebook makes a distinction between the two in both Rule 16.8 and in Rule 18.)
Sometimes it might be appropriate to capture screenshots of Internet content. For example, an author might make an assertion about changes in the content of an online breaking-news article that was updated throughout a day. The Public Editor of the New York Times gave examples of this type of online-update issue in June, 2011: On NYTimes.com, Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
Examples of citations to online newspaper articles in the 19th Edition of the Bluebook are in several rules: 16.6(e) and (f), 16.8(a), and 18.3.4.
1There are lots of rules for newspaper articles! When determining whether and how to cite (and use) an electronic version of a newspaper article, you should check your journal’s manual, and consult the Bluebook rules below.
16.6 provides general guidance on formatting citations to newspaper articles. Subsections 16.6(e) and (f) discuss online versions of newspapers.
16.8(b) tells cite-checkers to cite (and use) electronic versions of periodical materials — including newspaper articles — when the print is “difficult or impossible to obtain.”
18.2.1 provides “General Internet Citation Principles,” including a note that “exact” electronic copies of printed sources can be used and cited “as if to the original print source.”
18.3 says that citations to commercial electronic databases such as Lexis and Westlaw are preferred over other online sources.
18.3.4 says that you should still follow Rule 16 in formatting a citation to an electronic version of a newspaper article, and reprints examples from Rule 16.6(e) and 16.8(a).
(Bonus) 18.5 says that you usually don’t have to spell it out if you’ve used a document that’s been reproduced in microfilm.
2 Cite this without noting that the original printed article was reproduced in microfilm, because it’s not “otherwise difficult for a reader to identify and obtain the source.” R. 18.5.1.
Want to know more about the landmark school segregation case addressed by today’s guest speaker Judge Rick Aguirre? Check out Mendez v. Westminster: School desegregation and Mexican-American rights. Strum “provides a clear, cogent, and concise examination of the case, the major players involved, and the decision’s influence in educational law and civil rights jurisprudence.”1
By the way, this 2010 title is from the University of Kansas’s award-winning “Landmark Law Cases and American Society” series. Over 40 additional titles from this series are available at UC Irvine Libraries – you can browse the list on ANTPAC.
Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights. (Univ. Press of Kansas) 186 pages. Langson Library – KF4155 .S77 2010. Check Melvyl to see if it’s on the shelf at Langson, or to request an ILL from another UC library.
1 René Luis Alvarez, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights by Philippa Strum, 51 Hist. of Educ. Q. 138 (2011) (book review).
CALI has recently released e-reader versions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, and Evidence. These versions include Advisory Committee notes, and cross-references are linked for easy navigation.
These ebooks work on tablets and other mobile devices that support the epub format.
Law Library tours and related Library orientation activities are the afternoon of Thursday, August 18. Here’s some useful information for 1Ls.
Books in print or online are found in several ways. Two places to start:
ANTPAC – for books, journals, and other resources at UCI campus libraries, including the Law Library
Melvyl – for books, journals, and other resources at libraries all over the world
For off-campus access to anything on the web that the library pays for, you usually need to connect to a Virtual Private Network (VPN.) During the school year, we encourage you to use the UCI Law VPN. Check the VPN Instructions from UCI Law IT.
Lexis and Westlaw account questions can be directed to student representatives.
Hours on the Law Library website are updated daily. There’s also a google calendar. UCI Law Library – Hours.
Course materials and related resources are available. Check out:
Professors can choose to put books “on reserve” in the Law Library. Course reserve books usually include the required texts, and sometimes a professor may also include study aids. Important notes about course reserves:
List of books. To see what’s on reserve for your class, search by Professor or by Course Name in ANTPAC.
Course Names in ANTPAC for law school classes follow this pattern: LAW ### – [Description].
2-hour checkout. You can check out course reserve books for 2 hours at a time, and ANTPAC will tell you if a book’s available.
Library-use only. Course reserve books stay in the Law Library.
Come to the service counter with the call number of a reserve book to check it out.
SCOCAL provides free access to opinions, annotations, and related documents from the Supreme Court of California. It’s a joint project between Stanford Law School and Justia. SCOCAL’s interface is clean and easy-to-use. I encourage you to give it a try if you’re doing California legal research!
One especially interesting note about the SCOCAL system (for legal research aficionados) is its editorial staff. SCOCAL takes a novel approach to creating the kind of editorial enhancements that are usually only found in expensive commercial resources. In SCOCAL’s system, annotations are written by SLS students who take Advanced Legal Research. From the the Spring 2011 Stanford Lawyer:
The most interesting part for me was realizing that all the resources we use are created by people who invest time and effort in researching and analyzing cases, statutes, and other materials. It’s so easy to just go online and think that things appear there by magic. But in creating some annotations myself, I realized that every link, every insight, every connection is put there by a researcher,” says Amy Burns ’12, who took the class. (emphasis added)
Now you can use HeinOnline to search for articles and book reviews in a collection of over 500 foreign and international legal journals, from 1985 to date. The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals “provides in-depth coverage of public and private international law, comparative and foreign law, and the law of all jurisdictions other than the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia.” There’s even an archive that allows you to search across a scanned print version of the index for articles from 1960 – 1984.
Law students: did you know that you can ask us reference questions anytime, from anywhere? The Law Library recently set up an email address for students to use when they have research questions but can’t get to the reference desk:
