Journals and Indexes
The Law Library has an extensive collection of legal and nonlegal journals, including all academic law reviews published in the United States and many from other countries; numerous bar journals; and scholarly journals in related disciplines. Most of the journals are shelved on the first floor of the library. The major exceptions are those focusing on comparative law (Second Floor F .381) and international law (Third Floor Int 98). If in doubt, check Virgo to determine a journal’s call number and location.
Articles in law reviews and other legal periodicals can be found in several ways: through online full-text databases, electronic indexes, and traditional print indexes. LexisNexis and Westlaw are restricted to use by Law School faculty, staff and students, but the other electronic resources are available to all Law Library patrons and can be used by UVA faculty and students from home from home through UVA Anywhere or the proxy server.
Washington and Lee's excellent Librarian John Doyle's web page, Law Journals: Submissions and Rankings, is a great way "to allow authors to find law journals by subject, country, or journal rank (where available), to display journal editorial information, and to facilitate an author's article submission to those journals."
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Full-Text Sources
LexisNexis and Westlaw provide full-text access to several hundred law reviews and other legal periodicals, with coverage in most instances beginning in the mid 1980s or early 1990s. These databases are limited to use by Law School faculty, staff, and students, but Lexis’s coverage of recent law reviews is available to any UVA library user through LexisNexis Academic .
HeinOnline has retrospective full-text coverage for more than 600 law reviews and other legal periodicals. Articles can be found by citation or by searching by author, title, or keyword. The documents retrieved mirror the original printed pages and can be printed using Adobe Acrobat or HeinOnline’s HPrint software.
JSTOR, the interdisciplinary retrospective full-text source, includes coverage of more than two dozen major legal journals (including the Virginia Law Review), as well as numerous economics, history and political science journals useful in legal research. Like HeinOnline, JSTOR permits full-text keyword searching and displays articles in their original printed format. Both are available to the entire UVA community.
Legal Periodicals Full Text provides articles from more than 200 journals beginning in the late 1990s and page-image PDFs for most of these titles 2001-date.
Electronic Indexes
While coverage of law reviews in the full-text databases is extensive, periodical indexes can find articles not online in full text or can help focus a search through the use of descriptors and subject headings.
Find@UVa can be used to locate full-text documents in e-journals and e-newspapers. Use this page to find journal, magazine, and newspaper articles about your topic or by a particular author. Choose a database that specializes in your subject or try one of the big general databases like InfoTrac OneFile or Web of Science. Get a list of articles you want, then use Find@UVa to locate them. If they're on the Web and the UVa Libraries have access to them, you'll go to the article. If they're available only on paper, you'll have a link to the Virgo Library Catalog to look for the journals. Also on this page are links to journal finder and citation finder. Journal Finder Use this to find journals, magazines and newspapers that are available on the Web for UVa. Use the Library Catalog for paper versions. Citation Finder Use this to get to an article that you already know about. You must have at least the title of the journal or newspaper, and information about the article: a date or a volume number and, if possible, the issue. Some journals require the number of the first page in the article; others can locate it using the article title or the name of the author the article title or the name of the author.
The most extensive legal indexes are Legal Periodicals Full Text and Legal Periodicals Retro, together providing coverage of more than 850 journals back to 1918. Another major index, LegalTrac (1980-date), covers almost all English-language law reviews and indexing more than 800 titles. Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (1985-date) covers more than 500 legal periodicals dealing with international law, comparative law, and municipal law. These index databases are available to any UVA library patrons.
For Law School faculty and students, LexisNexis and Westlaw provide access to the Legal Resource Index, another name (with identical coverage) for LegalTrac. Westlaw also includes the Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), a weekly index covering articles too current for inclusion in LegalTrac or Legal Periodicals & Books. CILP also provides the tables of contents of recent journal issues.
Two more general electronic periodical indexes available to UVA patrons include extensive coverage of legal literature. Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) provides retrospective coverage of more than 250 U.S. and foreign legal and law-related journals and ISI Web of Knowledge includes coverage of nearly 200 law reviews as part of its Social Sciences Citation Index component (which is also available through Westlaw as the Socscisrch database).
A few websites provide free indexing of legal periodicals, available regardless of a patron's location or UVA affiliation. Ingenta is an interdisciplinary index covering thousands of journals; keyword searching is free, and copies of articles are available for a fee. Contents Pages from Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals provides keyword access to tables of contents received at the University of Texas in the past three months.
Print Indexes
Print indexes to periodicals are shelved on index tables near the reference desk on the second floor of the Law Library. The major indexes are Current Law Index (CLI) (1980-date) (the printed counterpart to LegalTrac and the Legal Resource Index) and Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (ILPB) (1926-date). Both indexes are published in annual volumes, supplemented by monthly pamphlets. CLI is divided into separate subject and author/title indexes, while ILPB contains one alphabetical index with both subject and author entries. Both include coverage of book reviews, CLI in its author/title index and ILPB in a separate book review index; and both also include tables of statutes and cases discussed in articles. Following the ILPB volumes is a binder containing recent weekly issues of Current Index to Legal Periodicals.
On an adjacent index table is the print version of Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (1960-date), quarterly with annual cumulations. It is divided into four sections: Subject Index, Geographical Index, Book Review Index, and Author Index.