Legal Encyclopedias On-Line
Many legal encyclopedias are available on-line. Westlaw has both C.J.S. and Am. Jur. 2d, while Lexis has Am. Jur. 2d, but also has the full text of some state legal encyclopedias. (Bloomberg Law, the other third major online legal research service, has a lot of very useful materials, including many subject-specific treatises, but no general legal encyclopedias for either all American law or the law of any specific states.)
Specific strategies and techniques for effectively using Westlaw and Lexis are beyond the scope of this CALI lesson, but this section will briefly cover some ways these on-line legal research services can be used to access legal encyclopedias.
Here is the Westlaw welcome screen. You can browse for the legal encyclopedias that Westlaw has, by first clicking on Secondary Sources.
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Then, from the Secondary Sources screen, click on “Texts and Treatises”.
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Then, here, at the top of the “Texts and Treatises” screen on Westlaw, are both Am. Jur. 2d and C.J.S., along with two other Am. Jur. sets and the online version of some other large multi-volume print sets.
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So, after clicking on the link on the previous screen for C.J.S., we get to its search screen, shown here. Note that it lists all the titles in C.J.S. By clicking on any of the links for those titles you can browse or read their full text. Also, by selecting the "Specify content to search" option, Westlaw gives you the option of only searching those titles that you select. But to search all of C.J.S., just enter your query in the blank search field at the top of the page. We could try something like: validity of loitering statute And see what that finds. |
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This search returned almost 10,000 results on C.J.S., but luckily Westlaw ranks them by relevancy and the first results, “§ 14 Validity”, from the topic "Vagrancy and Related Offenses", sound promising. (The second result, “§ 2 Validity of statutes”, also from that topic, could be useful as well - we'll keep that in mind.) Lets click on the hyper link for the first result and see what it says.
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Here is § 14 of the C.J.S. Title "Vagrancy and Related Offenses" on Westlaw, with the same text ("Broadly worded criminal loitering laws ...") that we found in the print copy of C.J.S.
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Scrolling down further, we see the footnotes with the case citation for this section. One benefit of using C.J.S. on Westlaw is that new cases are integrated with the main text soon in a more timely manner than in print.
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Now that we've looked at Westlaw, let's look at legal encyclopedias on Lexis. This is the Lexis front page - if you know the terms you want to search, or the source you want to use, you can type it in the main search field here. But if you don’t KNOW what resources Lexis has and want to look only in a particular source, you can use the drop-down “Browse” menus at the top of the page.
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The Browse menu expands into several levels. Select "By Category", "Secondary Materials" and then click on "Jurisprudence": that's the category of secondary resources that includes the legal encyclopedias on Lexis.
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After clicking on "Jurisprudence" from the pull-down Browse menu on the Lexis front page, this is the screen that comes up.
Notice that "American Jurisprudence 2d (AMJUR)" is the first resource listed, followed by several state-specific legal encyclopedias (as well as American Law Reports). For the encyclopedias, there is a link that will let you browse its table of contents. Or, by clicking on the name of a particular resource, you'll be given several options. Let's click on "American Jurisprudence 2d (AMJUR)" and see what the options are. (Note that hovering the cursor over the title of the encyclopedias highlights it in gray.)
After clicking on "American Jurisprudence 2d (AMJUR)" these are the three options that come up. If you select "Get documents" you can retrieve a specific part of Am. Jur. 2d if you already have a citation. If you select "Create a publication alert" you can set up an automatic search in this title. But to search all of Am. Jur. 2d now, click "Add source as a search filter."
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After clicking "Add source as a search filter" Lexis returns you to the list of "Jurisprudence" sources, but at the top, next to the main search field, you see that "1 filter" is in place. It doesn't tell you what the filter is from this view, but to verify that we are now ready to search only in Am. Jur., the "1 filter" in the search field is a button, so click it.
Clicking on the "1 filter" button expands it to show that, yes, the query you type in the main search field at the top of the screen will now be "Narrowed" to only Am. Jur 2d.
Back at the search screen, with the "filter" in place, we can see what Am. Jur. says about libel and statutes of limitations with a search such as: statute of limitation for libel so type that in and click "search".
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Lexis returns 975 documents from Am. Jur. based on our query, with the most relevant ones shown first and, luckily, section 404 from the topic Libel and Slander, the section we found when working through this hypothetical with the print set of Am. Jur. 2d, is the first result listed.
To view the text of section 404, click on the blue, linked text for that search result.
Here is the beginning of section 404 of the Am. Jur. 2d topic Libel and Slander, with the same text that we saw in the print version.
As mentioned earlier, Bloomberg Law is the third major legal research database that is now a viable competitor to Westlaw and Lexis. But, as of the publication date of this lesson, Bloomberg Law does not have any legal encyclopedias, either about the law of specific states or about American law in general.