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.)
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.
Here’s an overview of the Law Library’s presentation during Clinic Orientation, held Friday August 19, 2011.
A guide to clinical resources from the Law Library is at http://libguides.law.uci.edu/clinics. The guide is organized by tab, with one tab for each core clinic, a home tab with helpful resources for all clinics, and a tab with information about passwords and using the VPN. Highlighted resources include deskbooks in the Clinic Office, practice guides, treatises, specialized databases, call number ranges for specific topics, and news feeds. New resources will be added throughout the semester, so continue to check back for updated content.
When using ANTPAC to locate resources in the Law Library, there are 3 important locations to know aside from “Law Library Clinic Collection” (Clinic Office):
Law Library Reserves – the area behind the Service Counter (2 hour check-out)
Law Library Reading Room – the Main Level open shelving (some may circulate)
Law Library – the Lower Level compact shelving (some may circulate)
For additional guidance, see our updated floor plan.
Clinical students are welcome to visit or email the Reference Desk to discuss research strategies, or for assistance locating or using any of the Law Library resources. Students should be careful not to divulge any confidential information about their cases or clients.
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:
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)
The Office of the Law Revision Counsel has announced their beta site for the United States Code.
The new site has a “Cite Checker,” which shows
a quick overview of a section, including the heading,
the citation for the public law(s) that added or amended the section,
editorial notes,
and citations to enrolled legislation that hasn’t yet been codified. (As opposed to citations to proposed legislation that would amend or repeal the section, if the legislation passes.)
I was glad to see that Chapters show the corresponding sections in a Table of Contents view. So I can quickly see that Chapter 77 of Title 42 is where I need to go for a citation to “42 U.S.C. 6201.”
The US GPO also allows you to search and browse the US Code. But if you’re looking for the free federal Popular Name Tool, or more information about the Code, uscode.house.gov is the site to use.
The Law Library recently purchased a new product: ProQuest Legislative Insight. It gathers all major legislative history documents for enacted legislation going back to the 1960s, with more on the way. It also provides an easy-to-use search interface, with color-coded results. It’s not cutting-edge visualization, but it’s a helpful cue when you are sorting through a long list of legislative history documents.
Legislative Insight also aims to provide a broader context for legislative history research. It has general background information, including the “historical context” for each Congress. And it provides a “Legislative Process” view that shows you a graphical map of the legislative process on the side, so that you can see where each document was produced as a bill wound its way through Congress. To get to that view, click the “Legislative Process” link at the top of a Legislative History result.
Legislative Process - link at the top of a result
Note that the “Legislative Process” view hides some related legislative history documents (like CRS reports and committee prints), perhaps because those documents are not explicitly linked to a particular bill.
Reminder to cite-checkers: you can log into HathiTrust to download the scanned versions of entire books and other documents. Use your UCInetID and password (not your LawNetID). To login to HathiTrust:
WestlawNext is a tremendously powerful research product, with an attractive, up-to-date interface that law students love. Like all research tools, though, WestlawNext has some peculiarities that can trip you up in certain situations. In working with students and other researchers, the librarians at UCI Law have found two small things about searching cases–specifically, the Document Preview in case search results–that you might want to be aware of:
When you see a word highlighted in your search results, it does not necessarily mean that word was used in the search.
When you see a phrase that looks very much like a West “Topic” in your search results, it’s not necessarily from West’s Key Number System.
… or other mobile device will soon be a little easier. Search for Law Library books and other resources in the spiffy new mobile version of Melvyl (uci.worldcat.org.) The beta site is at uci.worldcat.org/awsm. After a few weeks of testing–in June–the updates will move to the regular mobile site at uci.worldcat.org/m.
The Melvyl website is one of many projects from CDL (California Digital Library) in collaboration with University of California campus libraries and affiliated institutions. CDL and its partners are working to give researchers “reliable and seamless access to books and articles.” Give the new mobile site a try and let them know how they’re doing!
. . . or other mobile device will get easier this summer. You can search for books (and other resources) available on campus in the spiffy new mobile version of uci.worldcat.org.
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.
