Cornell Legal Information Institute (http://www.law.cornell.edu) is an excellent source for both primary and secondary legal materials. There are many different ways to access the materials, but the easiest way for the novice researcher to find a topic is to click on "Law about . . ." to get a list of areas of law, including employment, labor, and collective bargaining. A helpful feature of the Cornell site is the one page overview outlining the sources of employment law and how they interrelate. Framed next to the overview is a "Menu of Sources" that includes relevant sections of Title 20 and 42 of the United States Code, Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations and links to recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal on education. Some state statutes and code provisions also are linked and it includes links to other employment-related organizations on the Internet.
Hieros Gamos: The Comprehensive Law and Government Portal (http://www.hg.org) includes a special section on Employment Law that is fairly comprehensive and even includes links to international and foreign employment law. Categories of materials linked include: case law, regulations, agencies and programs, state law (alphabetical by state), and a number of discussion groups.
Findlaw (http://www.findlaw.com)
A "one stop shopping" site for law. Provides links to primary and secondary sources of law in addition to links to other websites. The Labor and Employment Law page (http://www.findlaw.com/01topics/27labor/index.html) includes overviews of specific subjects, and articles submitted by law firms, consultants, government agencies, and several legal publishers. Particularly helpful are its links to federal statutory and administrative law sources and workplace statistics.
Commercial database providers
The two best-known legal database providers have special materials for employment law attorneys:
Lexis-Nexis (fee-based) http://www.lexis.com
. The Labor library contains a comprehensive collection of primary and
secondary materials that includes case law, agency material such as NLRB
decisions and ERISA advisory opinions, Social Security rulings, EEOC Compliance
Manual, BNA Labor Relations Reporter, and workers compensations reporters.
Westlaw (fee-based) http://www.westlaw.com.
The Labor and Employment practice area materials include federal and state
case and administrative law and relevant law journals and periodicals.
Both Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw permit stored searches to be set up, which provide periodic updates (or clipping service) for the researcher who wants to keep up with a particular topic or area of law.
Several new database providers are trying to provide alternatives for online legal research and to compete for subscribers who might not be able to afford Lexis and Westlaw. They are worth watching as they add libraries and offer a lower-cost alternative for legal research. What are some possible problems with some of these cheaper services? Reliability, currency, and comprehensiveness.
Loislaw http://www.loislaw.com At the present time, Loislaw consists of appellate level court opinions, regulations and statutes from the federal government and all 50 states. Loislaw has GlobalCite, which is similar to a citator, but without treatment codes. LOIS also offers a "clipping" service and LOIS NewsFeeds. Ten day free trial is available. Register online.
Versuslaw http://www.versuslaw.com
Versuslaw has only court opinions and a few other publications at present, but
it is an extremely low cost alternative.
National Law Library (NLL) http://www.itislaw.com The NLL, which is based in Houston, is another new service. They currently have federal and state cases and will soon have statutes for all 50 states.
Jurisline http://www.jurisline.comMany legal publishers are moving their publications onto the Web. Some of the benefits are multiple access from any location and elimination of updating (no more filing or installing new software). They are often less expensive to purchase online. Here is just one example:
Law school libraries on the web: two examples
Law school libraries usually provide a web site that links to electronic legal materials of special interest to state practitioners as well as to the faculty and students of that particular institution. It is worthwhile to spend some time examining the web sites of local law school libraries to see what the offerings are. For example, here is a short description to give you some idea of the resources made available by the University of Texas, Tarlton Law Library:
Tarlton law library (http://www.law.utexas.edu) and TALLONS (http://tallons.law.utexas.edu) are two sites maintained by Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law. The Tarlton site includes a good deal of information on the Law Library and its collections and services, with shortcuts made to many frequently used Federal and Texas resources. One can use the Tarlton Law Library web site as a 'launch pad' to web resources: click on 'Research' to find a large number of links to full-text, free legal and general materials available on the Internet. The TALLONS web page is the Law Library's online catalog, which includes more than 1,300 links from the bibliographic record to the full text of materials available on the Internet. If you are in the Law Library using a public computer terminal, you can take advantage of the Law Library's subscriptions to Congressional Universe (Federal legislative materials) and a number of law review indexes: LegalTrac; the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books; and the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, which are linked from the TALLONS home page. These are fee-based services, so the Law Library's subscriptions are not available through your home or office computer.
A unique service provided by the Law Library and available free from the TALLONS home page is access to the Tables of Contents of law reviews. This database, updated every weekday, consists of tables of contents from more than 750 law reviews, which are scanned into the database as soon as they are received by the Law Library. After using conventional periodical indexes like LegalTrac, research can be updated by using this archive, which bridges the gap between the time when a law review is published and when it is indexed (which can take as long as a couple of months). The archive is searchable by keyword. NOTE: The Law Library offers a free subscription email service to this database for email addresses ending in ".org" or ".gov"; or $75 per year to email addresses ending in " .com." For more information, or to subscribe, send an email message to Brian Quigley: bquigley@mail.law.utexas.edu.
Georgetown University law library
The Edward Bennett Williams Law Library of Georgetown University Law Center (http://www.ll.georgetown.edu) has created a free "GU Legal Explorer Guide to the Web" that has an extensive series of links to a variety of materials. Go to the "By topic" category, click on "Employment and Labor Law." There are numerous helpful links to online journals, associations, and primary sources.