8. Finding Legislative History
To find the session law that enacted the ORC section, look at the bottom of
the statute in “History” (Lexis) or “Credits” (Westlaw).
History or Credits
(1983 S 133, eff. 4-1-84)
9. What’s Missing from Lexis and Westlaw?
• Some Ohio legislative history
• Older law reviews
• Some treatises
• Some case law
• Municipal ordinances
10. Hannah
• 1989- present
• Ohio Legislative History
• Current Bill Tracking
• Hannah News Service icon
11. Hannah
• Only source for transcripts of testimony in the Ohio General Assembly.
• Use to show legislative intent.
20. HeinOnline
• Advantages
• Only source for pre-1980 articles
• Nice way to browse whole issues of
law reviews
• Disadvantage
• Keyword searching easier on Lexis/
Westlaw
21.
22. Fastcase – Two Products
• Primary Law
• Free with Columbus Bar
Association Membership
• National Treatises
• Available in Franklin County Law
Library Computer Labs
Even though Lexis has been challenged by lower cost and free sources, it still remains the no. 2 system because of its comprehensiveness and organization. Something to keep in mind is that the Courts and Judges have access to Lexis and the Judge may find something that you didn’t find. Shepardize. Sophisticated Natural Language searching. Uses terms of art, rather than laymen searching on Google. That’s good and bad. Primary Sources, plus some secondary sources, especially those published by Lexis. Very expensive, but available for free at FCLL. Can be overwhelming, but feel free to ask for help from me or Jennifer Jones, who is the other reference librarian. Get a snapshot of your results. Up to date. But doesn’t have historical, local and not all secondary sources.
Even though other online sources are catching up, Westlaw is still top. Screenshot is after doing the search faithless servant doctrine. Employee who steals from Employer. Use Overview as an index. Once you get into the cases, you can search by court, so narrow to Ohio Supreme Court and 10th Dist. Look at your handout. Note the Topics and Key Numbers. Do you remember paper digests? They are on Westlaw. A way to search by legal issue. I use key numbers when I have a case from another state and I want to find an Ohio case on the issue. It’s a narrow use, but sometimes it’s the only way to do it. Keycite. Not a separate step.The “one good case method”. Screenshot of Roberto case.
I like Keycite better than Shepards. Shows that Keycite is not an extra step in Westlaw. Notice that I didn’t mention reporters once in my presentation. They are over. Show the headnotes, taking you back into the Digest System. If you want a case that says “contract of employment implicitly says that employee will not act to the detriment of employer”. We don’t subscribe to trial and appellate court documents. Very expensive.
CLE manuals in the library, also treatises. Pacer. Internet for ordinances. Public Records – we have a “behind the desk” subscription on Lexis. Ask at the Reference Desk if you need an address or other public record search on someone. Not exhaustive. Case Evaluation Manuals and jury verdict reporters (selective).
This is what the article will look like in HeinOnline and I want to show you two nice features that available to you.
First time at the Olympics. Dues vary from $160 for new members to $260 for members admitted to the practice law in 2011 or before. Way of searching content that is already on the internet for free. The product from the CBA does not include secondary sources. Wolters Kluwer and Aspen Publishing. Can click directly to case law mentioned in the footnotes. Not available on Lexis or Westlaw. Our product does not include Ohio Secondary sources. Two products would be pretty good.
Overdrive search results do show up on Google! Can only access our ebooks by putting in your library card number. Disappears from your computer after two weeks. We have a guide on our website explaining how to do it. Website address for OSBA ebooks is on your handout.
Google will certainly find pacer.gov, but until you have an account and login, you won’t be able to search. They will not come up in Google search results. Many cases on Pacer are also not available on Lexis or Westlaw or Casemaker or Fastcase. Access to case information costs $0.10 per page. The cost to access a single document is capped at $3.00, the equivalent of 30 pages. The cap does not apply to name searches, reports that are not case-specific, and transcripts of federal court proceedings. By Judicial Conference policy, if your usage does not exceed $15 in a quarter, fees are waived. At one time, the fees were considered the really bad thing about Pacer, now it’s the fact that Google doesn’t search it that makes it inconvenient. Aaron Swartz tried to make Pacer available for free. He has investigated for Computer Espionage and Theft of State Secrets by the FBI. Committed suicide. Original thinking of Westlaw and Lexis was that these cases on pacer didn’t have precedential value because they weren’t selected for publication by the courts. Now, the thinking is that this cases are valuable for other reasons – have to write good motions in federal court, information about the parties.
Thank you for listening. Please fill out the evaluation forms and note your time leaving for CLE – will be 1:15pm. Also sign up for our future Brown Bag seminars. One in July – Guardianship Board?
The landing page is basically divided up into three sections. Your citation navigator, your search box and browse. Also, from this page you can use the tabs to navigate the left panel, and you also have access to Help, Blog, etc.
Before I show you the various search features, I want to point out the ‘information icon’ at the head of each Journal title in this view. Clicking this icon will give you information about that journal including, the coverage that HeinOnline offers, how often it’s published and the publisher’s website. This title has 12 issues per volume and according to Hein’s contract, Hein must delay publication by one Volume. You can also click Additional information and give you a synopsis of the journal and the topics that it generally covers.
Back to finding articles. The easiest way to find an article in HeinOnline – or anywhere – is to have a citation. You can simply copy and paste the citation here. Or you can type your citation here and Hein will auto suggest a citation, based on blue book citations.
In the Browse feature, you can browse by publication title, state (published in) the country (published in) or by the subject or area of law that the journal covers, for example ‘American Bankruptcy Law Journal’. Alaska has 1 journal and it’s published by Duke Law School.
Then you have your Search Box. This is where you would look up a specific article title. You can also search by author’s, the article’s title. This is also where you would do full text searching of all the journals in HeinOnline. When you get your search results, Hein will highlight the specific text in your search query.
Here’s a search result for oil spill. I don’t know if you can see but I have over 10,000 results. Correction. At this point you probably want to refine your search. Actually, this is the result for oil spill without the quotation marks. With the quotation marks I only got 5,000. Refine Your Search.
There’s a number of reasons why HeinOnline is preferable to other data bases for searching articles.
Two biggest reasons: It’s most comprehensive and
Exact photo image – in pdf (for citing purposes)