Where You Have Been
The average student spends
including the Research Lab
in importance for exam preparation
11.3
Interactive Study | Legal Periodicals
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INTRODUCTION
To be honest, periodical research is frustrating. It's not that it is difficult, it's just that each major research source has its own issues.
Researching periodicals on Westlaw is decent, but not great. If you follow the recommendations in the manual, you will find what seems like a pretty good list of periodicals. However, it is actually quite limited. There are hundreds of legal periodicals, but most are not on Westlaw or Lexis.
Lexis doesn't do much better than Westlaw. Once you arrive at the Law Review and Legal Periodical database, you aren't really given a choice of which periodical you want to search. Thus, there is really no way to know which periodicals are included in the database. In any case, at best the number of periodicals published on Lexis is probably similar to Westlaw.
Legal Periodicals may be the one area of research in which the Law Library still has an advantage over online research sources. Any major law library will have more periodicals than you will find on Westlaw and Lexis combined. The problem with researching periodicals in the law library is that there are so many periodicals that it is impossible to look in each and every one. Not only that, the individual periodicals don't have indexes! So, how do you research them? Well, there are two tools: The Index to Legal Periodicals, and the Current Law Index. As you will see in the Law Library exercise, once you know how to use them, it isn't hard. But it's not as easy as "point-and-click!"
Law Library Lab . . .
We recommend that you use the Law Library Labs for Current Law Index (CLI) and the Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP) both before starting the law library exercises and after you have completed the exercises (for review).
CLICK HERE for the Current Law Index Lab (Non-Flash)
CLICK HERE for the Index to Legal Periodicals Lab (Flash Required)
CLICK HERE for the Index to Legal Periodicals Lab (Non-Flash)
Troubleshooting:
If you have problems viewing the Law Library Lab in Internet Explorer, try the following:
1. Click on Tools
2. Click on Compatibility View
In some versions of Internet Explorer, you can simple click on the green Compatibility View icon to the right of the address bar. It has the appearance of a broken page.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Time Sheets
You are required to keep track of your billable hours when working on legal research and writing assignments and to turn them in with your written assignments. Click on the examples of Time Sheets below to zoom in and compare. Yours should look like the Good example.
