The Goodson Blogson

The Duke University community now has access to PLI Plus , a full-text database of publications from the Practising Law Institute. PLI is a leading provider of legal education programs, and their online library includes full-text access to more than 1,500 PLI course handbooks, answer books, form publications, and treatises. (The Duke Law community may recall that PLI titles were previously available electronically via Bloomberg Law , but PLI Plus is now the exclusive online source for these publications.) Some notable PLI titles include the treatises Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander & Related Problems and Soderquist on the Securities Laws , The Pocket MBA: Everything an Attorney Needs to Know About Finance , and the textbook Working with Contracts: What Law School Doesn't Teach You . Titles can be searched or browsed at the PLI Plus site, and chapters are available for online viewing or for download as PDFs. In the coming weeks, records will be added to the Duke Librari...

Earlier this month, the Washington State Bar Association became the second state bar organization in the U.S. to offer its members free access to both Fastcase and Casemaker , two low-cost research services that are frequently offered as a membership benefit by bar associations. Since 2013, the Goodson Law Library has maintained a map of state bar association legal research benefits , which has been updated to reflect this recent change. The landscape has changed dramatically since the first such map was created by 3 Geeks and a Law Blog in 2010 (sadly, their IBM ManyEyes map no longer displays). In those days, New York State Bar Association members had access to a legal research service called Loislaw (acquired by Fastcase in 2015), Pennsylvania used a customized Lexis product called InCite (PA switched to Casemaker in 2014), and several state bar associations offered no legal research service benefit at all. Over the years, Fastcase and Casemaker gained shares of a market that...

"I've been searching case law for a while, and I'm not finding anything helpful!" If that sounds familiar, consider picking up a treatise instead. Secondary sources often provide a better starting place for legal research than searching in case law databases, since they will provide a bigger-picture overview of the legal concepts and terminology, along with footnotes to selected primary law like court opinions and statutes. But how do you decide which treatise to consult? Simply searching the campus libraries' online catalog can present a dizzying array of results, and it isn't obvious there which ones are also available online in Law School-only databases like Westlaw , Lexis Advance , or Bloomberg Law . Below are some recommended resources to find the right treatise for your research topic. Appendix B of Olson's textbook Legal Research in a Nutshell (on Course Reserve) contains a brief list of selected legal treatises by subject, with information ...