Editor’s Note As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”1 The minds of the Editorial Board members have been stretched by so many wonderful and fresh ideas over the past six months, and we know that we will never be the same. Our hope…
DetailsLegal research is one of the analytical processes at the heart of what lawyers do. Few doubt that recent technological developments, including the availability of electronic sources, have brought changes to that process. Recently the conversation among those who research the law and those who teach research to law students most often…
Details“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” T.S. Eliot,The Rock A scan of both the professional literature and recent new stories about legal education would yield a plethora of articles about the ubiquity of technology in legal practice and our students’ need to…
DetailsCome writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won’t come again And don’t speak too soon For the wheel’s still in spin And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’ For the loser now will be later to win For the times they are a-changin’1 …
DetailsMy career began in 1975, so the changes that I have seen in legal research are profound. In 1975, law students lived in a world that consisted almost entirely of casebooks and case reporters. The National Reporter System and the universe of Shepards Citators represented authority. Not that most students really understood how to use…
DetailsI have been teaching legal research for more than 42 years. At times, I long for the easy days of teaching this fascinating subject. The days when you just needed to help students learn about the print tools of the legal trade—primary sources, the great secondary sources, and the helpful finding aids. Today, all of…
DetailsTo understand the impact of technology on legal research, we first need to consider the nature of the legal reasoning process. Unlike issues in some other domains, legal problems are often “ill-structured”: (1) the place to begin to define the problem is usually not clear; (2) there often are many contingencies to take into…
DetailsWe are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in legal research—both how it is done and how it should be taught. For generations of lawyers, the process of legal research remained static, rooted in a bibliographic approach that reflected the print publication of legal materials. However, as legal sources have become digitized…
Details—Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Throughout my thirty years as a professional law librarian, I have been immersed in the impacts of technological change on legal research. My early encounters with electronic legal researchbefore becoming a librarian are quaint recollections—my law firm’s one Lexis terminal, a behemoth console squirreled away…
DetailsIn the past several years, some of the most significant technological advances in legal research have involved non-traditional research tools.For example, Bloomberg Law, Lexis Advance, and WestlawNext now provide much better access to business and financial information. Similarly, the most significant technological advances in the next several years may take place not in…
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