Law reviews (also called law journals) are scholarly journals containing articles on legal issues. Articles in law reviews provide the most scholarly and in-depth information on the law. The often extensive footnotes can also serve as useful leads for further research.
Law reviews are edited by students and are published by law schools or bar associations. Most law schools publish a general law review (e.g., Harvard Law Review) dealing with all aspects of the law and usually named after the university, and one or more specialized law reviews (e.g., the Harvard Women’s Law Journal) focusing on a specific area of law. The lead articles are written by professionals such as law professors, lawyers, or judges. Shorter essays, such as case notes analysing the holdings in specific cases, or brief comments on legislation or legal principles, are written by students.
Bar journals are periodicals published by national, state, local, and specialized bar associations. Some bar journals are as scholarly as any law review published by a university, whereas others are more like popular magazines or chatty newsletters. Articles in bar journals tend to be much more practical and focused on the law as it currently exists, whereas articles in law reviews tend more toward the theoretical or idealistic and often discuss options for reform. Articles in bar journals, not being intended for an audience of academics, tend to have much fewer footnotes than those in law reviews.
The most efficient way of locating an article in a law review or bar journal is usually by consulting one of the two specialized indexes currently published for legal literature: the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (formerly the Index to Legal Periodicals) or the Current Law Index. The UNT Libraries subscribe to the former. Both of these publications index the vast majority of law reviews and bar journals published in English by law schools and commercial publishers. They do not index legal newspapers or newsletters.
Some other indexes may be useful for locating older articles that were not indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books.
Once you have identified an article in one of the following indexes, you can search the title of the periodical (not the title of the article) in the Online Catalog to determine whether the UNT Libraries have a subscription and which issues are available. More recent articles can be obtained online in LexisNexis Academic, available to members of the UNT community.
The LexisNexis Academic database contains the full text of hundreds of law reviews.
Searching this database is a little trickier than searching a journal index, because subject searching is not available. You can search every word of an article, not just the title and subject headings as you would in a paper index. This means not only that you can create very specific searches (which can even be limited to specific segments of the article, such as the title or the footnotes), but also that you must create a relatively specific search in order not to generate hundreds of irrelevant results.
The coverage of law review articles in the LexisNexis full-text database is also rather spotty compared to coverage in the major paper indexes, so keep in mind that even if you use LexisNexis, you should also search a paper index. LexisNexis does contain hundreds of legal newspapers, magazines, and newsletters that are not indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books. Each search method offers something the other does not.
To perform a search in LexisNexis Academic:
Annotated codes such as the U.S. Code Annotated and Vernon’s Texas Codes Annotated can provide you with a list of articles that discuss a specific statute.
At the end of each statute, there is a section called LIBRARY REFERENCES. A subsection called Law Review and Journal Commentaries will list any law review articles that have commented on that particular statute.
This resource is usually used to determine the later history of a case or statute, but it can also be used to locate law review articles related to a case, statute, or certain other legal documents. The law review articles always appear at the very end of the results list. See the Shepard's Quick Reference Guide for information on how to Shepardize, how to customize your report, and how to interpret your results.
To find law review articles using Shepard’s in LexisNexis Academic:
Legal news publications and broadcasts provide information on currently developing legal issues. They include magazines, newsletters, television and radio broadcasts, and Web outlets such as podcasts and RSS feeds.
Legal newspapers and broadcasts usually contain brief stories with few, if any, citations. They are not as scholarly as law reviews, and their reliability varies considerably, but because they are often written by journalists rather than lawyers or academics, they tend to be more accessible to the general public and less filled with esoteric legal jargon. They are often the best way to track the latest developments in a specialized subject area.
Legal newsletters provide a forum for attorneys in a particular field or geographic area to share news with each other that may never appear in more official or scholarly sources.
Many general news publications and broadcasts also frequently include stories about current legal issues, and they may contain information such as public policy analyses that are less likely to appear in specifically law-oriented sources.
