Library Faculty Services
Current Awareness Services

Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP)
SmartCILP Automatic E-Mail Delivery
BNA Highlights E-Mail Alerts
InSITE
KeyCite Alert
Legal Scholarship Network
Lexis Alert & Westlaw WestClip
NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository E-Mail Alerts
New Law Library Acquisitions
News Sources, Blogs, & Listservs
Shepard's Alert
U.S. Supreme Court E-mail Delivery & Alerts
Willamette Law Online E-Mail Delivery

Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP)

CILP is a publication prepared by the law librarians and staff at Marion Gould Gallagher Law Library which provides access, either via Table of Contents or via Subject Headings, to the contents of recent law revies. Over 500 law reviews are indexed. The latest issue of CILP is available every Friday, and is 4-6 days earlier than other commercial legal periodical indexes. It is available in HTML, PDF or Word format. The HTML version allows a direct link to the cited articles in full text on Westlaw and Lexis. CILP also provides a service which alerts you to law reviews published in certain subject areas; see SmartCILP below.



SmartCILP
SmartCILP is the electronic, customizable version of CILP and since SmartCILP is a fee based service, the law library has a subscription for access. SmartCILP allows you to select only those subjects and law review table of contents from CILO in which you are interested in receiving. The citation is autonmatically delivered directly to your email address. This e-mail message is clearly marked as "SmartCILP." The profile can be changed each week, allowing you to tailor the delivery of CILP to your changing research needs.

To subscribe, please first contact Denise Gibson, Assistant Law Librarian for Research Services, or your librarian liaison for the authorization code. Then go to the SmartCILP website at the University of Washington Law Library. Click on the link that reads "Create or change a SmartCILP profile (with proper authorization code only)." Fill in the requested fields: Your name (last name, first name); and your full e-mail address (your username@mercer.edu). The affiliation is Mercer Law. Then check off the topic headings and journals that interest you.


Contents Pages - a free, similar service is the Contents Pages from the University of Texas at Ausstin, Jamail Center for Legal Research, Tarlton Law Library. Over 750 legal journal, both inside and outside of the United States can be searched via keyword at this site. This site provides access to the journals' Table of Contents for the most recent three months.

InSITE

InSITE highlights selected law-related Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database. Two or three times a month, the law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites and provide commentary and subject access to two or three of the more valuable ones. This information can be accessed via a searchable database or by browsing current and archived issues.

To receive InSITE by e-mail, follow the instructions to subscribe.





BNA Highlights E-Mail Alerts

BNA Highlights summarize the latest developments in American law and include the most important current information in your area of interest, and each summary links you directly to the text of the news article, analysis, law or regulation in the publication. E-Mail alerts are available to Mercer Law faculty for the following BNA publications:

ABA/BNA Lawyers Manual on Professional Conduct - Full Service
ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct - Current Reports
Antitrust & Trade Regulation Report (weekly)
Bankruptcy Law Reporter
Criminal Law Reporter (weekly)
Daily Labor Report
Electronic Commerce & Law Report
Employment Discrimination Report
Environment Reporter (weekly)
Family Law Reporter (weekly)
Health Law Reporter
Intellectual Property
Labor Relations Reporter / Labor & Employment Law Library
--- Americans with Disabilities Act Manual
--- Collective Bargaining Negotiations & Contracts
--- EEOC Compliance Manual
Patent, Trademark & Copyright Journal
Securities Regulation and Law Report
U.S. Law Week: Supreme Court Today
U.S. Law Week (weekly)
U.S. Patents Quarterly 2d
White Collar Crime Report

Faculty can sign up for e-mail delivery of BNA Highlights and change or update their preferences when they wish. You can choose the e-mail format in either HTML (recommended) or plain text. You need to sign up on campus because registration is IP authenticated.

To sign up for the first time - Click here and select "BNA news service" link

(Note: if you are signing up for the ABA/BNA Lawyer's Manual on Professional Conduct - Current Reports, or the Labor Relations Reporter / Labor & Employment Law Library, or the US Patents Quarterly Library, select the "BNA reference library" link.)

At the next screen, enter your email address (and it does not have to be a Mercer email address). The following screen will ask you to confirm your email address and enter your name. Next, check off the email highlights you wish to receive.

To add or cancel an email alert - Click here and select "BNA news service" link (Note - for the ABA/BNA Lawyer's Manual on Professional Conduct - Current Reports, or the Labor Relations Reporter / Labor & Employment Law Library, or the US Patents Quarterly, select "BNA reference library"), enter your email address, go to Manage E-Mail and click on the Update button.

Please note: For off-campus access to the full text of items linked in BNA Highlights, you will need a password (unless you have the virtual network, you will not need a password). Please contact Denise Gibson, Assistant Law Librarian for Research Services, or your librarian liaison if you do not have the password.

Legal Scholarship Network

Legal Scholarship Network (one of the ten networks of the Social Science Electronic Publishing Network) provides access to the full text of working papers and new and accepted papers from selective journals. LSN will also tell you if the paper has been accepted for publication or not, the last date of revision, and contact information for all authors. You can also register and post your paper. It can be searched via keyword or author. Professional announcements for conferences and available academic positions are also valuable features of LSN.




NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository

The NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository provides a free and persistent point of access for working papers, reports, lecture series, workshop presentations, and other scholarship created by faculty at NELLCO member schools, including Boston College, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, New York University, Vermont and Yale. Over 100 institutions currently belong to this consortium. Powered by Berkeley Electronic Press technology, the aim of the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository is to improve dissemination and visibility of a variety of scholarly materials throughout the academic and legal research communities.

E-Mail Alerts - Faculty can sign up to get alerts of new papers via email from a list of subjects at the Customized E-Mail Alert page.

U.S. Supreme Court E-mail Delivery and Alerts

Two law schools which provide recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are:

1. Cornell Legal Information Institute Bulletin

Cornell's current awareness service, liibulletin, distributes the syllabi of U.S. Supreme Court decisions within hours of release. Subscribers receive an e-mail bulletin containing summaries of U. S. Supreme Court decisions shortly after they have been handed down, along with instructions on how to access those decisions in full text.

Preview of U.S. Supreme Court cases - In 2004, Cornell added a preview service which explores cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. See the Cornell Chronicle article on the new liibulletin project.


2. Willamette Law Online

In addition to summaries and full text Supreme Court decisions, WLO provides summaries at the certiorari granted and oral argument stages. The week prior to oral arguments, WLO also provides an outline of the issues presented to the Court, as argued in the briefs. You may access the information at the Willamette Law Online web page, or you can get instant, emailed case summary updates by clicking on the "Subscribe" button on the web page.

3. Lexis and Westlaw - An alternative method to the above mentioned services for retrieving U.S. Supreme Court cases at the grant certiorari level is to access a U.S. Supreme Court database on either Lexis or Westlaw, type in your search query as grant cert., put in a date restriction, and run an Alert search on Lexis or a Westclip search on Westlaw. See additional information below on using Alert or WestClip.

4. ABA Preview of U.S. Supreme Court cases - The Supreme Court Preview from the American Bar Association includes an analysis of the issues, arguments, background and significance of every case slated for oral argument in the Supreme Court. Also includes briefs for the current term. There is a subscription fee to get all of the cases.

5. Preview - BNA's U.S. Law Week contains a link to Surpeme Court Today, a searchable database with daily updates, allowing users to view the status of and search summaries of certiorari petitions filed since the 1995 October Term. The database also contains the full text of Supreme Court opinions, oral argument schedules, selected oral argument summaries, annual reviews of the Court's decisions, and more.

6. The U.S. Supreme Court hotline for opinion announcements is available at 202-479-3360.

7. LII's Eye on the Courts provides quick access to appellate decisions that are in the news. With the name of the court involved and one or more of the parties you should be able to track down most high profile decisions quite quickly from this point.

Oral Argument Transcripts from 2000 - U.S. Supreme Court website.

Oral Argument Transcripts - Oyez Project - The OYEZ Project contains taped oral arguments in Real Audio or MP3 files of all recorded arguments since 1995. Before 1995, the audio collection is selective. Presented by Northwestern University.

News Sources, Blogs, & Listservs

ABA Journal eReport
AP Wire
AP Wire International
BBC
beSpacific.com
Best Practices for Legal Education Blog
CNN's Law Center
FindLaw's Legal News and Commentary
Global Collection of Newspapers Online
International Herald Tribune
JURIST's The Paper Chase
Law.com
Law Professor Blogs Network
Law School Innovation Blog
Legal Scholarship Blog
Lexis One's Headline Legal News
National Law Journal - begins 10/2/89.
New York Times
NPR Legal Affairs
Reuters
Washington Post
Watching America - foreign-language news translated into English.
U.S. Law Schools News Brief - news releases from law schools nationwide.

For additional general news/wire services, see the Library's Useful Links page.


Listservs

Washburn University's Mailing Lists - The listserv provides access to moderated discussions on topics such as Adoption, Agricultural Law, Bioethics, Civil Procedure, Elder Law, Evidence, Family Law, Land Use, Oil & Ga, Patents, Products Liability, and Securities.

listTool.com - provides access to 186 law related listservs on topic that include Administrative Law, Alternate Dispute Resolution, European Legal Information Exchange, Human Rights, Juvenile Law, Law and Education, Law Teaching, Online Dispute Resolution, Poverty Law, Russian Law, Sports, and the UCC.

Findlaw - arranges its listserv directory by subject (Civil Liberties, Cyberspace, Labor) or region.

New Law Professors from AALS - AALS moderates a listserv for new professors.

Jurist, the Law Professor's Network - provides access to a listserv that is described as a "monthly email newsletter for JURIST: the Law Professor's Network."



News Sources: Blogs and Podcasts

Leiter's Law School Reports
The Volokh Conspiracy
Prawfsblawg
Opinio Juris
Concurring Opinion
Law Professors Network


Podcasting News
Podcast Legal Directory

Legal Talk Network
Top 10 Legal Podcasts - article describing and rating the top legal podcasts for 2005.


American Association of Law School Podcasts of 2007 Annual Meeting
American Association of Law School Podcasts of 2006 Annual Meeting Sessions

In collaboration with CALI, the AALS has posted the recordings of faculty presentations at AALS which involve cutting edge issues in legal scholarship. Faculty may find these materials useful in their upper-level seminar courses.





LEXIS Alert™and WESTLAW WestClip You can arrange daily, weekly or monthly "clips" or "alerts" on WESTLAW and LEXIS. A "clip" or an "alert" is an automatic periodic search, on a particular subject, maintained on your account with the selected computer service. It is used to keep abreast of congressional activity, cases decided recently, coverage in the popular press, tracking proposed regulations, and monitoring law reviews and journals for current articles of interest to you.For example, you may want to be alerted to any new law review articles that cite a particular author or you may want a list of the articles in a particular journal when the journal is first published or you may want new journal articles on a specific topic. If so, you may wish to set up a search using the database "Legal Resources Index" on Lexis.com. Go to Search>Sources>Legal>Secondary>View More Sources>Annotations and Indexes>Legal Resources Index. On Westlaw, "Legal Resource Index" is in the LRI database. Please note that these services only work with a Terms and Connector search and not a Natural Language search.You can choose for the results to be automatically e-mailed to you, or you can choose to be notified of new results when you sign on to your Lexis or Westlaw account.



LEXIS Alert

On Lexis, the service is known as Alert™. After you select a database and run a search, click on the "Save as Alert" link at the top of the screen. Next, fill in the name of the Alert. Select the frequency, delivery method, and other settings. Click "Save." To view a list of all of your Alerts, click on the "Alerts" tab and then select the "LexisNexis Alerts" sub-folder.

Click here for an overview of Lexis Alert.


Shepard's Alert

Use the Shepard's Alert service to run regularly scheduled Shepard's reports on Lexis to obtain updates about changes to citing references and case history. To create a new Shepard's Alert:

1. Click the Alerts tab at the top of any Lexis page.
2. Click the Shepard's Alert tab.
3. Enter a citation in the Create a New Shepard's Alert form.

Click here to learn more about Shepard's Alert service.
Click here for a multimedia tour about Shepard's Alert for cases.


WESTLAW WestClip

On Westlaw, the service is known as WestClip. To create a WestClip query, sign on to Westlaw and select Alert Center from the top of any Westlaw page. Then, click on the Create Entry link to the right of WestClip. You will need to select a database, type in a search query, and specify the time interval you would like this search to run. You can also set up a WestClip query from a search result. Once you have selected a database and ran a search query, you would then simply click the WestClip link that appears above your search result screen.

Click here for an overview of WestClip.
Click here for FAQ about WestClip.

WESTLAW KeyCite Alert

The KeyCite Alert service on Westlaw automatically monitors changes in the status of federal and state cases, statutes, and administrative sources. To create a new KeyCite Alert:

1. Select Alert Center from the top of any Westlaw page.
2. Click on the "Create Entry" link to the right of KeyCite Alert.
3. Enter the citation for the statute, case, or other document you wish to monitor. Click on Go button.
4. On the Setup page, click on the Edit link in the upper right hand corner next to Delivery Settings, choose the delivery destination, and click on Save button.

Please contact Denise Gibson, Assistant Law Librarian for Research Services, if you would like additional instructions on how to set up Lexis Alert, Westlaw WestClip or Westlaw KeyCite Alert, or to arrange for your librarian liaison to maintain an alert service for you.

New Law Library Acquisitions

New Law Library Acquisitions - To provide faculty with an opportunity to browse through our current acquisitions, an alphabetical list of newly acquired treatises, law reviews, journals, audio cassettes, video cassettes and microform are available online through LawCat. This list is also sent to faculty by e-mail each month with the Word document attached. This is especially convenient for those who would like to use the list to request items. You can print it (or print selections) and circle the items you would like checked out to you.

In addition, newly received treatises are placed on a book truck in the library's main reading area for a short time before they are shelved in the main collection. Books that circulate may be checked out from this book truck in the normal manner.

For questions or suggestions regarding the Mercer Furman Smith Law Library Website, please contact Denise M. Gibson

rev. 4/30/08