Internet Archive. The very scope of those projects, however, may diminish their utility: a search for “Harvard Law Review” on Google Books yields in excess of 10,000 “hits,” most of which are mere mentions of the Review in otherwise unrelated publications.[1] A search for “United States Reports” on the Internet Archive returns 164 results (far fewer than the actual number of published volumes) arranged seemingly at random; again, the results include mentions of the United States Reports in other publications arrayed indiscriminately alongside actual copies of the Reports themselves.[2]
Digitization initiatives focused specifically on legal materials, although less well developed overall, have already reached significant milestones in coverage and usability.
- Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII)[3] hosts a number of regularly updated federal law resources, including the United States Code[4] and the Code of Federal Regulations.[5] Although LII posts helpful information on each page about how
- ↑ A Google Books search for “Harvard Law Review,” enclosed in quotation marks, returned 10,938 results when performed on November 13, 2009. Most of the top ten results were actual scans of early volumes of the journal, but after that the results quickly veered into unrelated publications—snippets of autobiographies whose authors mentioned their time on the Review, for example. Performing a narrower author search for “Harvard Law Review Association” yielded far fewer hits, but again, the results included a number of publications besides issues of the Review.
- ↑ I performed a search for “United States Reports” limited to “media type: texts” on the Internet Archive on November 13, 2009 and received 164 results, most of which seemed to be scans of fairly recent volumes of the Reports. Again, the results list included many other publications also hosted at the Internet Archive that happened to mention the Reports.
My legal historian and librarian friends will no doubt be quick to remind me that “United States Reports” is a colloquialism of sorts; we now apply that name to a collection of materials that includes many early volumes never published with that title, which understandably might not turn up in a search for “United States Reports.” Nevertheless, given that more than 550 volumes of the Reports have been published (including over 400 since “United States Reports” became the official title of the series), a search that returns fewer than one-third that number of hits (and includes among the total many documents that are not themselves part of the United States Reports) still reveals something about the fragmentary and sporadic coverage of legal materials found in many of the general-purpose digitization projects.
- ↑ The LII’s home page is available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/ (last visited Nov. 17, 2009). See also Gallacher, supra note 38, at 26 (praising LII as “the most visible example” of a law school’s “active[] engage[ment] in making the law accessible to everyone”).
- ↑ LII’s United States Code portal is available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/ (last visited Nov. 17, 2009). Users may jump directly to a particular title and section, search for legislation by popular name, or browse the entire Code by following a hierarchical arrangement of links.
- ↑ LII’s Code of Federal Regulations portal is available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/ (last visited Nov. 17, 2009). Users may jump directly to a particular title and section, or browse the full Code by following a set of links arranged hierarchically.
