64. Traditional forum for scholarly publishing

The oldest American legal journals are "law reviews". These are published by student boards within the many law schools. Each law school tends to have one journal devoted to the law generally. Many law school have additional journals devoted to narrow areas of the law. They tend to have two sections, a front part with articles by scholars and practitioners and a second part with shorter student-authored essays. Many new ideas in the law first appeared as a provocative article in a law review. Another large group of journals are aimed at practitioners and are designed to keep them abreast of the latest developments in their field. These tend to be more expensive and glossy.

Most of the major academic law journals are now also published in computer form through Lexis and Westlaw, with access starting around 1980 to 1985. Most also have some sort of web presence on their parent law school website, but not that many have risked their concept of their economic future by putting the content on line. There is a useful law review links section on the Jurist website, which is dedicated to law schools and legal education. A relatively new system, called Hein Online is using imaging and OCR technology to create a full historical database of law reviews, but it is not yet comprehensive.

65. Indexing of legal journals

There are two major indices for law reviews: The Index to Legal Periodicals and Books, which covers 787 periodical titles, and the Current Law Index. They both cover selected journals from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and new Zealand as well. These are both available in paper versions, as CD-ROM's, and as databases on Westlawand Lexis. They are not available as free websites.

66. The Legal Scholarship Network

The Legal Scholarship Network is a venue for distributing abstracts of working papers and articles accepted for publication. It is part of the larger Social Science Research Network. The main product of the network is an e-mailing of new information on a wide range of legal matters, they also maintain a website of the abstacts and working papers. It is a good source to get a sense of what the latest scholarship in a particular field is like, but it is not at all comprehensive.