Legal Research

This year we're excited to watch the University of San Francisco Law Review move toward an entirely paperless editing cycle. Led by Editor-in-Chief Robin Bennett, the USF Law Review Board is pursuing this goal by aggregating digital article drafts, sources cited, and other information on a SharePoint site accessible to all editors and staff.

As part of this initiative, the Zief Library is advising the Law Review on finding the most stable, reliable digital documents for source collection. This has meant wrestling with the Bluebook and its insistence on official sources and its bias in favor of print.

Our approach includes creating a Google Notebook on Law Review Source Collection with links to the most authoritative and most stable PDF sources for the sorts of documents (law review articles, cases, statutes, regulations, Congressional documents) commonly cited in law review articles ? and then training all Law Review staff in tips and techniques for using the top sites, like HeinOnline and GPO Access. There are still times when the Law Review has to pull and scan paper sources, but they're well on the way toward paperless production of their journal.