Finding Open Access Legal Scholarship
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 06 |
DEPARTMENT | LEGAL RESEARCH CORNER
Finding Open Access Legal Scholarship
BY MARLA MORRIS
Legal scholarship has undergone a major shift over the past 14 years. Once primarily behind subscription paywalls, most law reviews are now openly accessible online.[1] This article aims to help attorneys navigate this shift by offering practical tips for locating free and accessible law review articles. It begins with an overview of the open access movement in law and its advantages for the legal profession, particularly in terms of legal research.
Overview
Law review articles remain a vital component of the legal research toolkit. Most attorneys are trained to consult law review articles as valuable secondary sources. While many in the profession perceive a divide between the practice of law and legal scholarship,[2] the opposite is also true. As an academic law librarian, I commonly receive requests from law school alumni seeking access to scholarly articles.
Until 14 years ago, law review articles were available either in print, at a law library, or through Lexis, Westlaw, or HeinOnline. Then in 2009, law library directors from the nation's top law schools met and wrote the Durham Statement, where they agreed to work toward ending the reliance on print subscriptions and making legal scholarship immediately available upon publication in an open and accessible digital format.[3] Since then, academic law libraries have steadily canceled their print subscriptions and shifted those resources toward building institutional repositories. Institutional repositories store scholarly works and make them freely accessible online.[4]
The open access movement in law has steadily progressed. By 2018, nearly half of all law schools accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) had institutional repositories.[5] According to a 2019 study, 88% of law journals had a recent volume available for free online.[6] More than half had their entire runs online. Though recently published, the 2019 study under-represents the amount of free legal scholarship available. Law schools are still building their institutional repositories. In 2019, only 3% of the Denver Law Review was available online. Four years later, the University of Denver Sturm College of Law's institutional repository now contains complete runs of five Denver law journals, including 100 years of the Denver Law Review. [7] By investing staff time and money into these projects, law schools demonstrate a painstaking commitment to sharing knowledge across wider reaches of the legal profession.
Increased access to legal scholarship could not be coming at a better time. Legal research is being discussed as a topic for the NextGen bar exam, with at least one author proposing a sample question that explicitly asks bar exam takers to find a law review article relevant to the proposed fact pattern. [8] The conventional wisdom for using law review articles for legal research is to comprehend a narrow issue in great detail and find substantial citations. Most law review articles have a uniform structure well-suited for understanding a complex topic. Written for the general and law-educated audience, the typical article has four parts: introduction, background, analysis, and conclusion. In addition to critically evaluating existing approaches to a legal problem, the background and analysis sections offer comprehensive references to primary and secondary authorities.
Searching for Open Access Law Review Articles by Keyword
With the growing availability of open access law review articles, it's important for attorneys to understand how to effectively search the various digital repositories. A successful search often begins in one of two ways: searching by keyword or searching by citation.
Searching by keyword is generally the more difficult approach. A successful search may require visiting one or more of these sites: (1) Google Scholar, (2) Law Review Commons, and (3) the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Google Scholar
Law schools host their institutional repositories on many different platforms.[9] Two major platforms are the commercial provider Digital Commons and the open-source platform DSpace. To search within this decentralized system, Google...
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