Electronic Resources & Services

Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg Law Guidelines

Full-time College of Law Faculty may request Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law IDs for research and instruction purposes.  In addition, Faculty Research Assistants (RAs) are granted full faculty privileges on all systems to facilitate faculty research.  In the Fall semester, RAs are offered a schedule of training opportunities, including sessions focused on traditional research methods.  Part-time and Adjunct College of Law Faculty only have IDs for the semester or semesters in which they are teaching at the College of Law. These passwords should be used for law school-related research only. Policies for visiting faculty and research fellows vary.

Training and Troubleshooting

Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law training and related assistance (downloading, printing, and file management) are normally provided by the respective student representatives.  Their schedules, with contact information, are posted at the beginning of each semester. 

Passwords for students from outside the College of Law

Non-law students registered for COL courses are eligible for temporary Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law IDs, valid for the duration of the course.  To obtain IDs, students should contact the Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law student representatives.

Research Assistance

Law Library Reference Librarians are available to assist faculty with their online research reference needs.  Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law also have staff attorneys available through their customer service e-mail/chat and telephone lines.  Please see their respective websites for contact and other information.

Other Electronic Resources and Notification Services

The Law Library provides additional electronic resources in support of College of Law faculty research and instruction.  This selective list includes brief product descriptions and indicates how faculty members may subscribe to and/or access the resource. Many of them, as well as additional databases, are accessible through the Law Databases tab on the search interface on the Law Library’s homepage, as well as through our Law Databases web page and the online catalog.  Remote access to Law Library databases is available through these links using your valid NetID.  Questions may be directed to your Liaison Librarian or to Robert Weiner, Electronic Services Librarian at rjweiner@law.syr.edu or 443-5424.

CALI

Faculty have access to the CALI collection of hundreds of interactive, electronic lessons covering many legal education subject areas. 

To access the lessons and other services via the web, students and faculty must register on the CALI website.  To register, faculty should navigate to the CALI website and click the Register link on the top right corner.  The registration form should be completed using the faculty authorization code available from Robert Weiner, Electronic Services Librarian.  Once registered, faculty can create lessons, customize existing lessons, link to the lessons from course web pages, and track student usage.

The Law Library subscribes to the Current Index to Legal Periodicals, an electronic index and table of contents service of the University of Washington Law Library.  Generally available weeks before commercial vendors, CILP indexes over 500 legal publications within 100 subject headings.  All citations are in Bluebook form.

Faculty have the option of creating a SmartCILP profile which provides a customized version of CILP containing only those subject areas and/or journal titles of interest.  Subscribers receive a weekly e-mail version of CILP containing only the selected material.   

To Create a SmartCILP User Profile:  

Go to the SmartCILP Profile web page.  Enter your User Information.  For affiliation, enter Syracuse University Law Library. You may request the Authorization Code from Robert Weiner, Electronic Services Librarian.  After entering the authorization code, select the topic headings, subject headings, and journal titles of interest to complete your user profile.

HeinOnline

Hein, one of the leading legal publishers, has digitized a vast amount of legal material in its award-winning HeinOnline.  Its historical collection of law journal content displays text as it appeared in the original source, making citation and footnote examination comparable to print research.  Database searching is available by author, title, or full text.  Browse searching is available by journal title, author, or article title.  The HeinOnline app makes law journal content available on your tablet or other mobile devices for easy reading.  HeinOnline also contains the historic Federal Register and other notable historic legal collections.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

The Law Library has a site license to the following SSRN networks: Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), Economic Research Network (ERN), Financial Economics Network (FEN).  The networks offer journals containing abstracting services that compile current research and publications in various legal and other subject areas.  

To Subscribe to the Journals and Abstracting Services contained in the above networks:  

All SSRN users must register on the SSRN website and have an active user account.  To register or login, Law faculty should go to the SSRN User Login web page.  After logging in, faculty should click Subscriptions in the menu on the left side of the page.  Then click the Join icon to join one of the networks listed above.  Click the Find button to find our institutional site license.  Enter Syracuse University in the search box and click Search.  Find the entry for Syracuse University and select See Departments until you reach the College of Law.  Click on Join and you will be provided with the available network subscriptions.  Make your selections and click Submit.  Follow the remaining instructions to complete the subscription process.