A large number of legal periodicals (usually called "law reviews") are published by student editorial boards at the various law schools throughout the United States and other nations of the common law world. These law reviews contain articles by recognized experts in the field (usually law professors). The various bar associations also put out legal periodicals, while others are published by commercial companies. Legal newspapers are a type of law periodical and contain material of interest both to researchers and the practising bar.
In addition to articles by recognized experts, legal periodicals contain comments on recent legal developments (especially recent cases), reviews of recently published books, and other information of interest. Abundant footnoting in the articles will lead researchers to statutes, cases, and other types of law that support the statements made by the authors.
Periodical articles are viewed as "secondary" rather than "primary" legal authority. To illustrate: statutes, regulations, and court opinions are called "primary sources of the law" or "primary legal authority", because the words contained therein are the actual words or language of the law itself. Periodical articles, on the other hand, do not provide the actual words of the law but rather contain material about the law; that is, material that discusses the law. This latter type of material is considered a "secondary source of the law" or "secondary legal authority".
The law has a specific method for indicating the location ("citation" or "cite") of legal materials. For example: Fuller, Marriage Law in India, 27 Amer. J. Comp. L. 365 (1972) indicates one can find the article in volume 27 of the American Journal of Comparative Law at page 365. Any decent index will have a table of abbreviations, usually at the front of each volume. For other assistance with "citation work", ask at the circulation desk for the Harvard Blue Book.
Below, you will find a list of basic indexes for legal periodicals. More specialized indexes are discussed in other pathfinders. All of these indexes are located on the INDEX TABLES near the front of the library. If you need to know whether a particular periodical title is included in an index, check the listing of titles covered at the beginning of any volume.
Index to Legal Periodicals, 1908 to date. Volumes published prior to 1983 have separate author and subject sections, but the author sections merely cross-reference the reader to the subject section where full information is given. Since 1983, authors and subjects are indexed in one alphabet and full citation is given under either type of entry. The ILP also has a case-name index, a statutes index, and a book review index.
Legaltrac, 1980 to date, is the CD-ROM player in the Law Library lobby. Instructions on its use are simple and are located next to Legaltrac or on its TV screen. Legaltrac contains an author/title index, a subject index, indexes for cases and statutes on which commentary has been published, and a book review index.
Current Law Index, 1980 to date, is, with some exceptions, the hard copy form of Legaltrac. Please note that Legaltrac indexes more titles than CLI, such as important legal newspapers and newsletters of the American Bar Association and some state bar associations.
Criminal Justice Periodical Index. Located at IUPUI University Library.
Index to Periodical Articles Related to Law, 1958 to date, covers all articles of a legal nature that are of research value and appear in periodicals not covered by the law indexing tools mentioned above. This tool contains subject and author indexes.
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, 1960 to date, covers legal periodicals dealing with public international law, private international law (called "conflicts of law" in the U.S.), comparative law, and the law applied in all nations of the world outside our own Anglo-American "common law" system. While many of these periodicals are in English, a large number of them are in foreign languages. NOTE, however, that many foreign language titles often carry English-language articles, while others will provide an English-language summary at the end of the article.
Index to Canadian Legal Periodical Literature, 1963 to date.
One of the units of Shepard's Citations is Shepard's Law Review Citations, and another is Federal Law Citations in Selected Law Reviews. Moreover, each state unit of Shepard's provides citations to law review articles which cite cases and statutes (SEE Pathfinder Shepard's Citations for more details).
