Curious about how casebooks and study aids have treated a particular court opinion or doctrine over time? The Goodson Law Library now has access to a brand-new collection in HeinOnline: the West Academic Casebooks Archive, available to the Duke University community with NetID and password. This collection contains nearly 4,000 historical West casebooks and study aids, including the American and University Casebook series, Hornbooks, and Nutshells. Contents of this collection date from the 1830s to 2018. Hundreds of additional titles will be added in the near future.
However, don't go looking for the latest editions of casebooks and study aids here: The two most recent editions of any series are held back from the collection until a newer one arrives to push the third-oldest title into the archive. (Recent West Academic study aids series can be found in the separate database of West Academic Study Aids, while recent West casebooks assigned in Duke Law courses can be found in the Library’s Course Reserve self-checkout cabinets.)
The collection allows users to browse by series or title, or to search across the archive. Curious to see how a particular court opinion or legal doctrine was treated by various casebooks over time? The search feature provides numerous possibilities. For example, the seminal 1928 New York Court of Appeals case Palsgraf v. Long Island, read by first-year law students across America for nearly a century now, quickly landed into Torts textbooks by 1929, first appearing here in James Barr Ames's A Selection of Cases on the Law of Torts; a search for the case name in quotation marks results in close to 500 hits in the database. While the recent deadly bridge collapse in Baltimore has brought maritime law principles back into the public conversation, the database's Date filter for search results shows a clear spike for the concept of "general average" in the first half of the 20th century, as opposed to other eras. And if you thought that legislative research for your LARW appellate brief was confusing, spare a thought for the law student of the 1940s puzzling through the legislative research chapter in How to Find the Law, 3d edition.
Title-level catalog records for this collection should appear in the Duke Libraries Catalog later this spring. In the meantime, you can access the West Academic Casebooks Archive via HeinOnline or from its own entry in the Legal Databases & Links page. For help with using the new collection, or for locating historical casebooks and study aids in the library collection, be sure to Ask a Librarian.
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