Spreading the News

Tired of newspaper website paywalls? At Duke, you have access to more popular news sources than you may think! The Goodson Law Library offers current members of the Law School community access to group subscriptions for several outlets, including The New York Times, Financial Times, and the Washington Post; additional titles are available through your NetID or other credentials, such as the Law School Lexis login. Details for major titles are available at the Legal Databases & Links page and highlights are below.

The Law community can set up an individual account with The New York Times by visiting https://nytimesineducation.com/access-nyt/ while connected to the VPN (be sure to choose "Library Resources" option rather than the "Default" when logging in). Once connected, type "Duke" under "Find School" and select "Duke University School of Law." Student accounts last until December of the graduation year; faculty and staff accounts require annual renewals. These accounts provide for use on the website as well as mobile apps. Note that they do not include the premium subscription features, such as Games or Cooking.

The Law community may also join a Financial Times group subscription by registering at http://ft.com/dukelaw with their Duke email address. FT.com accounts under this subscription include unlimited access to stories on the website and mobile.

Law School access to the Washington Post website is unlimited when accessed from a Law School networked computer, the VPN, or by the proxy link here and at Legal Databases & Links. No account is needed to access stories through this link, and individual accounts for students are not covered by this group subscription.

The entire campus community enjoys access to the Wall Street Journal Online thanks to a partnership between the Law Library and the Ford Library at the Fuqua School of Business. To view details and set up an account with your Duke email address, visit https://library.fuqua.duke.edu/dukeonly/wsj-info.htm. Student accounts last for the duration of your enrollment at Duke, including 90 days after graduation.

Legal news sources are also available, such as American Lawyer Media's Law.com and Law360. The web versions are accessible on Law School networked computers, but the full text of these sources are also available to the Duke Law community by entering the email address associated with your Lexis ID into the sign-in prompt on Law360 or Law.com. These sources and stories are also accessible directly in Lexis+’s Legal News section.

The libraries at Duke University maintain access to thousands of other news sources, both current and historical. To locate options for accessing the full text of a particular title, try a search of the E-journals list. (Note that Law School-only resources like Lexis and Westlaw will not appear on this campus-wide list, although inclusion in Nexis Uni is a good sign that a source will also be available in the Law School's version of Lexis.)

For example, although local papers like the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun do not provide a group subscription, Duke community members can read the full text of both papers via the America’s News database. Each is available in an HTML text view back to the early 1990s and a PDF page-image view back to 2018:

• Raleigh News & Observer: text view and PDF view
• Durham Herald-Sun: text view and PDF view

Other campus-wide newspapers of interest include the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Economist. Additional titles can be browsed in BrowZine, accessible from the  E-journals search page. For help with options to access a specific news source, be sure to Ask a Librarian.

Court Records & Briefs Research Guide Updated

The Goodson Law Library research guide to Court Records & Briefs has recently been updated. In addition to corrected web links and updated guidance to free and premium resources like PACER and Bloomberg Law dockets searching, the guide includes a number of new records and briefs compilations that were added since the last update. Some highlights include:

• The Making of Modern Law: Landmark Records and Briefs of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 1891-1980 features selected records and briefs from the U.S. Courts of Appeals dating from the 1890s to 1980. Drawn from a number of source libraries (including the National Archives, the New York City Bar Library, and the University of Iowa), featured cases cover a wide range of subject matter. The database is searchable by case name, citation, and keyword, and a "Topic Finder" feature is also available.
• LLMC Digital has expanded its records and briefs offerings since the last guide update. Its Records and Briefs search tab (available from the Search Collections link on the Home page) now features historical state records and briefs from California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as federal records from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Appellate Case Files of the Supreme Court set of U.S. Supreme Court materials from 1792-1831. Note that party names and/or reporter citations must be entered carefully in this search feature: to view materials for M’Culloch v. Maryland (1818), a party name search for Mculloch or McCulloch would not work, and a citation search omitting the periods in 17 u.s. 316 would also fail.
• Additional state court digitization projects have been linked, including for the Florida Supreme Court and Kentucky Appellate Courts.

Visit the updated Court Records & Briefs research guide to learn more about the available resources for finding filings from various courts, time periods, and formats. For help with locating needed items, be sure to Ask a Librarian.