Law and Technology Writing Seminar — Fall 2004 Getting Started

Print entire guide

LawCat

The Boalt Online Catalog — http://lawcat.berkeley.edu/
This is the first place to start to locate books and journals on a particular topic.
Example: Keyword search for privacy and encryption

Note the subject headings assigned to the resulting titles:

Data encryption --
Data protection --
Privacy, Right of --

A list of possible subject headings and major loose-leaf services and treatises can be found at:

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/classes/technology/2004/technology.html

Access to Law Reviews: LegalTrac, HeinOnline, and Full-Text Databases

Searching a legal index such as LegalTrac or Legal Resources Index (available through Lexis and Westlaw) is an excellent way of finding law review articles that will give you background information to a particular topic. The advantage of using an index is that there is a controlled vocabulary that allows you to perform more precise and effective searching.

LegalTrac on the web is superior to the print Current Law Index (and to LRI, CLI's electronic version) because it includes cross-indexing to related subject terms.

Example: Keyword or Subject guide search for reverse and engineer* and software
Example: Keyword search using the name of a case — grokster

Westlaw's Journals and Law Reviews (JLR) database
Example: reverse /s engineer! /s software

Compare Westlaw's Legal Resources Index (LRI) database
Example: reverse /s engineer! /s software

Law Reviews in Lexis
Legal > Secondary Legal > US Law Reviews and Journals, Combined
Example: reverse /s engineer! /s software

Legal Resources Index in Lexis
Legal > Secondary Legal > Annotations & Indexes > Legal Resource Index

HeinOnline — http://heinonline.org/HOL/Welcome
Provides the full-text to many legal journals, with coverage extending back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries for many of these journals. Hein is continually enhancing the database to include more recent volumes and more journals. There are also links to all journals in HeinOnline from their catalog records in LawCat.

Kathleen Vanden Heuvel, kvandenh@law.berkeley.edu , Room 216 Boalt Hall
Michael Levy, mlevy@law.berkeley.edu , Room 217 Boalt Hall