Legal Commentary

Using Google Books, HeinOnline, and Gale?s Making of Modern Law Database for Cite-Checking

By Eugene Volokh

I assume most law review staffers are already doing this, but in case you aren?t, let me suggest it: Many old legal books are available in full text on Google Books, and many more available in HeinOnline?s Legal Classics database and Gale?s Making of Modern Law database. (My sense is that most law schools have HeinOnline and Gale subscriptions.) And since all these services show you photographic images of the book pages, you don?t have to worry about transcription errors, though of course you do need to confirm that you?re looking at the right edition of the book.

Using these services can save you the time and effort of pulling the volumes off the shelf, recalling borrowed volumes, or doing Inter-Library Loans. Plus you can use them when you?re away from your law library, for instance over the summer or winter breaks, or if you?re finishing up a cite-check at home and you realize that you missed some source. And if there?s a page number error, you can search the source to see if you can find the quoted passage elsewhere in the book.

These services are of course important for doing the research in the first place (see this post, which points to other sources as well). But here I wanted to stress their value for cite-checking.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on September 02, 2010 (boomark / email).