There are different types of legal journals and periodicals.
Many law schools publish one or more law reviews and journals, edited by students at the law school. Some law reviews cover a broad range of topics, such as the South Carolina Law Review, while others focus on a specific area within the law, like the South Carolina Journal of International Law & Business and the Journal of Law and Education. These student-published journals solicit articles from law professors and other legal experts and often include notes* and comments written by student members of the editorial staff.
Law review articles usually discuss very specific issues within an area of the law. They are heavily footnoted with cases, statutes, and secondary sources, making them valuable resources for finding primary authorities for a legal issue. Law review articles also serve as helpful resources for understanding a legal topic
because they typically provide background and historical information on the legal issue they discuss. Law review articles often address undeveloped areas of law and propose solutions for resolving those problems, which can help you analyze a question of first impression.
National, state, and local bar associations publish journals and magazines. For example, the American Bar Association publishes ABA Journal and the South Carolina Bar Association publishes SC Lawyer. With many articles written by attorneys and other legal practitioners, bar association publications tend to emphasize the practice of law, rather than providing commentary or criticism of the law. They do, however, comment on recent legislation and court cases. State-specific bar association periodicals are also useful because they address both federal and state law.
To search within a specific law review or journal, from the Westlaw homepage, start typing the journal title in the search box, and select it from the drop-down that appears.
From there, you can use the search bar to search for articles in that law review only, or browse the most recent articles listed below. For some journals, there is a significant delay between the time articles are published and the time they are available on Westlaw. Other journals are uploaded right away. If you can't find an article on Westlaw, it may be available in another database. A librarian can help.
To search Westlaw's entire Law Reviews & Journals database, from the homepage in Westlaw, select Secondary Sources.
Under Secondary Sources By Type, select Law Reviews & Journals.
You may choose to limit your search for law review articles by topic or by state.
To find a specific law review or journal, from the Lexis homepage, start typing the journal title. Click on the full title when it appears next to Sources below the search bar.
Now you can search for articles in that law review only.
If you want to search the entire Law Reviews and Journals database, from the homepage in in Lexis, select Law Reviews & Journals under Secondary Materials in the Content tab of the Explore section of the home page.
You may choose to limit your search by state or by practice area.
If you see a citation to a law journal article or law review article in a case or secondary source, and you want to find the original article, you might search Westlaw and Lexis, and the article might not be there. Where else can you try looking?
HeinOnline's Law Journal Library, accessible through the law library homepage, is the go-to database for law review articles in PDF format, including many older, hard-to-find volumes not available through Westlaw or Lexis.
HeinOnline also offers a Bar Journals database, for journals that are published by state bar associations. To access this database, scroll down on the HeinOnline home page, and select Bar Journals. The search bar at the top will then change to allow a search of the Bar Journals database.
Bar journals are less scholarly and more practical. South Carolina Lawyer is the journal of the South Carolina Bar.
Try searching the law library catalog for the title of the article.
If that does not work, try a Journal Search for the title of the journal.
To access Journal Search, start at the law library homepage, and click on Advanced Search below the law library catalog search bar.
Click on Journal Search.
Enter the journal title in the Journal Search bar.
There are many law reviews and journals that are freely accessible online. You can search the largest collection of free and open law review scholarship and browse by subject, title, and author via the Law Review Commons.
You can also search Google Scholar for law review and journal articles and sort them by relevance and date.
Rules B16 and 16 of The Bluebook cover citation of periodical materials.
For example, the South Carolina Law Review is published four times a year. The South Carolina Lawyer is published six times a year.
You can cite online articles as if they are in print because Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline provide you with the information you need for citation. HeinOnline has the pdf of the print version, which can be helpful for citation purposes in case anything is unclear about how the article appears on Westlaw or Lexis.
Citation format differs depending on whether a periodical is consecutively or nonconsecutively paginated.
A consecutively paginated journal begins numbering an issue where the previous issue left off. For example, in the citation below, the page number 1122 does not mean that an issue of this law journal would be more than 1,000 pages thick. You can see from the table of contents of HeinOnline that Issue 4 began on page 960.
Evelyn Atkinson, Creating the Reasonable Child: Risk, Responsibility, and the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine, 42 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1122 (2017).
Student-written law review articles follow the same format, with the addition of the word "Note", "Comment", or "Case Comment" inserted between the author's name and the title of the article:
Eric R. Tonnsen, Case Comment, Henson v. International Paper Co.: A Step Backward in South Carolina Attractive Nuisance Jurisprudence, 56 S.C. L. Rev. 835 (2005).
For nonconsecutively paginated periodicals, including most bar association journals, each issue starts on page one. Rule 16.5 provides the citation format. For example:
Brian Van Couyghen, Premises Liability: The Attractive Nuisance Doctrine, R.I.B.J., Nov.-Dec. 2007, at 7.
Additional examples of citations to law reviews:
Kenneth J. Withers, Risk Aversion, Risk Management, and the “Overpreservation” Problem in Electronic Discovery, 64 S.C. L. Rev. 537 (2013).
Dennis A. DeMarco, Note, The Price of Porn & Pugilism: Reconciling Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association with Ginsberg v. New York Through a Media-Specific Approach, 19 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 609 (2013).