8.3 Legal Periodicals

• Library: A Guide to Legal Research in Virginia (Virginia CLE) (2017 Ed.)

8.3 LEGAL PERIODICALS

8.301 Introduction.

A. In General. The law review is the dominant form of publication for the legal scholar and a repository of contemporary legal scholarship. Unique from the peer-review practice in other academic disciplines, the law review is student-edited. Law journal articles are valuable to researchers because they offer depth of analysis and critique of specific topics, in addition to numerous footnotes with references to other sources. Journal articles take varied perspectives on subjects ranging from elementary to complex policy arguments concerning developing or changing areas of law. Significantly, journal articles also keep researchers informed of developments in specialized areas of the law. There are five general classifications of law journals: (i) law reviews or journals published by law schools; (ii) bar association periodicals; (iii) subject, special interest, or interdisciplinary journals; (iv) legal newspapers; and (v) legal newsletters.

Virginia's eight law schools publish multiple law reviews and journals—some with long and distinguished histories and traditions of legal scholarship and other newer specialty titles that focus on narrower and cutting edge topics at the state, local, and national levels. Since the 1990s, the number of specialty law reviews has increased exponentially.

B. Format. Articles about legal topics are available both online and in print. Many law journals are easily accessible from digital repositories provided by the school's law library, in web-based archives available at the journal's website, in pre-publication

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format at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), or simply through a keyword search on Google.

SSRN is an online platform "devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research . . . composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences." ¹ The law network on SSRN is highly developed with many experts posting abstracts and papers in addition to various paper series maintained by many law schools. SSRN is divided into two parts, an abstract database containing abstracts on 733,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an electronic paper collection currently containing over 617,500 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

The rise of the institutional repository in the early 2000s is in direct response to the "open access" movement beginning in the 1990s. Many institutions maintain their own institutional, or digital, repositories, managing and storing the scholarly work of their institution. That content is often "Google optimized" making it easy to find through a simple Google search.

Law review online companions are the most recent addition to the scholarly conversation in the legal community. Articles are available exclusively online and typically average 3,500 words or fifteen pages. They are timely and carry the benefit of immediacy of publication. The goal of the online companion journal is to provide a forum for thoughtful responses to articles published in the traditional law review and a dialogue on cutting-edge legal issues. The online articles are typically archived in institutional repositories, at the journal's website, and selectively archived in Lexis and Westlaw. At the time of publication, the University of Richmond, the University of Virginia, and the Washington and Lee University law reviews have online companions.

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Journals contain different types of articles. The most common types are:

1.	The lead article—authored by an expert scholar on a topic containing an exhaustive analysis of the topic;
2.	A note or comment—sometimes unsigned and often a student piece that is typically a short, critical analysis of a specific area of the law or a specific case, usually a recent decision, and typically not cited as authority in support of an argument;
3.	The book review—a comment on a new or recent publication regarding the legal profession of interest to lawyers;
4.	A symposia article—an issue of a law review composed exclusively of articles that focus on a narrow subject of law and feature the remarks of participants on that topic at a recent symposia hosted by the journal;
5.	Special feature article—an issue of a law review composed exclusively of articles that focus on recent developments in an area, narrow or broad, of law

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