What Are Law Journals?

Law reviews are periodical publications of law schools, bar associations, or commercial publishers that contain articles providing analysis of legal issues or practical legal information.

Why use law review articles?

Law review articles serve many important purposes for the legal researcher. Often providing both historical perspective and a statement of the current state of the law, they can be an ideal starting place for legal research in a new area. Since law review articles are well documented with footnotes, they provide the researcher with quick access to cases and statutes on point. Finally, as impartial writings, they are often persuasive in convincing judges of a particular interpretation of existing case law and statutes.

Tips for using periodicals indexes effectively: If you need to do a comprehensive search, use more than one index. While you may be led to the same reference more than once, you minimize the chance of missing something very important. Use subject heading lists or thesauri to make sure that you have found the preferred subject headings. Many appear in the indexes themselves. Several thesauri are located at the Reference Desk. Check cross-references, more specific topics, or more general topics that include your subject to find additional articles that discuss your subject. Use information you already have, such as relevant cases or statutes, by looking in the Tables of Cases or Statutes Commented Upon sections found in many indexes. Decipher any abbreviations you don't recognize by checking in the abbreviations listing in the index itself.

How do I find law journal articles?

There are two steps: finding the citations and then finding the journal article itself.

STEP ONE: Finding Citations
Citations to U.S. law review articles can be found using either a print periodical index, Current Law Index or Index to Legal Periodicals, or an electronic index, such as LegalTrac. To find foreign law review articles, you must use the print index Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals. All of these tools only provide citation information (journal title, volume, page number, etc.), not the text of the article, although LegalTrac occasionally includes abstracts of articles. LegalTrac and Current Law Index only include journal articles published from 1980 to the present. For pre-1980 articles, you must use the Index to Legal Periodicals.

A. LegalTrac
All the public access terminals in the library provide access to LegalTrac. To use LegalTrac, select the "LegalTrac" icon and double-click the mouse on it. LegalTrac offers four search modes: subject guide, relevance, keyword, and advanced. All the search modes let you limit the search by date and/or journal titles. In every search mode other than the relevance search, search results will be listed in reverse chronological order (most recent articles first). Your search history (what terms and search mode you used) are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

You may find the subject guide and keyword search particularly useful. Searching the subject guide provides a listing of subjects containing your search term. For example, if you enter the term "smokeless tobacco," this list will appear:

You can then use the computer mouse to click on any of the items listed.

To do a keyword search, enter terms that are relevant to your research, including the name of the case if you desire. You can use connectors such as "and," "or," and "not." If you enter several words without a connector, the default setting is to look for those words within two words of each other in either direction.

The other two search modes available on LegalTrac are relevance search and advanced search. To run a relevance search, enter keywords. The results of your search will be listed in the order of their relevance based on a computer algorithm. The advanced search mode allows you to search certain fields for your key words, such as the title field.

In the citation lists, each article citation has a box beside it. If a citation interests you, click on this box. When you have finished your research on LegalTrac, select "View Mark List," and all the citations you clicked on will appear. You can print this list. Now proceed to step 2 to get the articles themselves.

If you have any questions about using LegalTrac, the database has on-line help which may answer your questions. If not, please do not hesitate to ask for assistance at the Reference Desk.

B. Print Periodical Indexes
Most legal periodicals written in English are covered in two major print indexes, Current Law Index and Index to Legal Periodicals. Both indexes are on the bottom floor of the library. (The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is also located here.) When you exit the stairwell or elevator, turn to your left and proceed to the end of the floor. The periodicals indexes are in the first study carrel on your right.

(1) Current Law Index
Current Law Index (CLI) is the print version of LegalTrac and has nearly the same coverage. However, LegalTrac indexes selected newspapers and contains abstracts of selected periodical articles, whereas CLI does not. CLI is published twelve times per year, with three issues serving as quarterly cumulations; the final issue is a hardbound annual cumulation. As a result, it is often necessary to consult several volumes. For most projects, start with the most recent issues and work back in time. However, articles on some subjects, such as an article on a specific supreme court case, probably appeared in a specific year or two, in which case you should begin with the volumes covering that period. Remember, for pre-1980 articles you must use the Index to Legal Periodicals.

CLI has four divisions: subject, cases, statutes, and author/title. In selecting a subject heading, start with the most specific search terms possible. To find additional subject headings, review the cross-references found at the beginning or end of a topic. The articles are listed by date of publication, with the most recent articles listed first. The table of cases lists articles and case notes that contain analysis of one or more cases. Likewise, the table of statutes division lists articles that focus on specific statutes. The author/title division can be used to locate articles by a particular author.

(2) Index to Legal Periodicals & Books
Index to Legal Periodicals ("ILP;" this index started using the title Index to Legal Periodicals and Books in 1994) does not index quite as many journals as CLI and LegalTrac do, but it covers older material (back to 1908) that CLI and LegalTrac do not.

ILP follows much the same publication and cumulation schedule and organizational format as CLI does. However, the subject division is merged with the author division. ILP uses a system of subject headings, subheadings, and cross-references that are similar to CLI but not necessarily the same. ILP lists articles in alphabetical, rather than reverse chronological, order. ILP also publishes a thesaurus that provides terms that are narrower ("NT") or broader ("BT") than the term you looked up, or that are related to it ("RT"). In the thesaurus the most useful terms are marked with the designation "USE."

(3) Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
The IFLP works the same way as ILP does.

NOTE: An increasing number of law reviews are available in full-text format on the World Wide Web. The web page of the University Law Review Project (www.lawreview.org) provides a list of these journals and allows users to search the full text of online articles. Numerous legal and general news sources are also available over the World Wide Web. One list of such sources is available from Findlaw (www.findlaw.com/15reference).

STEP TWO: Obtaining the articles
The format of the citation varies slightly depending upon which tool you used to obtain the citations (LegalTrac or Index to Legal Periodicals). LegalTrac uses the following format: journal title, date (spring 1999, for example), volume number, issue number (i.2, for example), and page number. CLI and ILP use this format: volume number, journal title, page number, date. If you find a citation to a journal article in a judicial opinion or in a legal text, the citation format will be closer to the ILP/CLI format.

To illustrate the differences, here are LegalTrac and ILP/CLI citations for the same journal article:

Once you have citations for articles that you want to read, consult the on-line catalog to see whether we have the journal title. Generally, recent unbound issues will be on reserve at the Circulation Desk and older bound volumes will be on the second floor in alphabetical order by title.

If a journal you need is not in our collection, check the J.D. Williams Library catalog. If they do not have the title either, consult someone at the Reference Desk.