George Mason Law Library Blog

Lexis has created the ASPIRE Program (Associates Serving Public Interests Research) for 2009 graduates who work in public service during their employment deferral period.  Details are available on their website.

HeinOnline has always been an excellent resource for law journal articles, and over the past few years has expanded its digital library to include a wide array of other secondary legal materials as well as primary domestic and international legal resources. William S. Hein & Co., based in Buffalo and in business for the past 80 years, was already the world’s largest distributor of legal journals. With HeinOnline, they capitalized on that market share by creating a digital archive of virtually every major legal journal in publication. Two things make HeinOnline unique: 1) HeinOnline’s law journal database is an historical archive, so coverage of most journals begins with the very first volume, as opposed to LexisNexis and Westlaw, which only cover the last 20 years or so, and 2) HeinOnline scans the articles directly from the journals in PDF, so that the end-user is looking at an exact copy of the article, with pagination intact. For this reason, most academic law journals around the country will accept a HeinOnline PDF for cite-checking purposes.

In addition to the law journal database, HeinOnline has a comprehensive database of federal primary materials including the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, the Statutes at Large and the United States Code, Supreme Court Decisions, Attorney General Opinions, as well as Agency documents and decisions. HeinOnline also has the session laws of all 50 states. HeinOnline’s international content includes the United Nations Law Collection and the Treaties and International Agreements Library. Foreign materials include the English and Israel Law Reports. Students who compete in moot court will be glad to know that HeinOnline has a comprehensive library of moot court competititons including Jessup International, dating back to 1960. And, HeinOnline’s secondary legal materials include a database of more than 1,300 classic legal treatises on a wide range of topics. HeinOnline can be accessed throught the law library’s database portal, http://www.law.gmu.edu/library/catalog, and our reference librarians will be happy to show you how this or any of our databases can help you find the legal information you need.

The law library has renewed its subscription to the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) database. BNA specializes in reporting federal and state government news, and claims to have “more credentialed reporters covering official Washington than the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal combined.” This makes BNA an excellent resource for legislative tracking. BNA is also a good resource for monitoring federal and state court decisions, as well as regulatory developments. You may be familiar with one of BNA’s most popular publication, U.S. Law Week, which tracks major legislation and important decisions and regulatory developments from federal and state government as well as courts across the country. The BNA–ALL Law School Package purchased by the law library includes over 300 reports on a range of subjects including Antitrust, Banking, Bankruptcy, Corporate, Employment and Labor, Environment, Ethics, Health Care, Homeland Security, Intellectual Property, International, Litigation, Securities, Tax, and Trade and Commerce. The Law School Package also includes an e-mail update feature that will allow you to set up monitoring and notification of developments in a particular jurisdiction and area of the law. The BNA Libraries database may be accessed from the law school’s database portal at http://www.law.gmu.edu/library/catalog. As always, please feel free to ask a reference librarian for assistance with this or any resource the law library makes available to you.

GMU students now have access to a comprehensive collection of legislative history documents from 1789 to the present in a fully-searchable, digitized format. Most of these documents were previously only available in microfiche. In cooperation with the University Libraries, GMU Law Library recently completed acquisition of all available databases within the LexisNexis Congressional library, purchasing all remaining historical archives. The complete LexisNexis Congressional library includes the Serial Set (1789-present), Congressional Hearings (1824-present), and the Congressional Record (1789-present). LexisNexis is still in the process of uploading documents to these collections. The Congressional Record upload should be complete by late 2009 and the Serial Set should be complete in 2010. The Congressional Hearings collection is already complete. LexisNexis Congressional can be accessed from the law library’s database portal (http://www.law.gmu.edu/library/catalog). Please feel free to stop by the reference desk for help using this or any other resource.