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Since the early days of the Age of Reason, books and libraries have been the hallmarks of the legal profession. The reality of conducting legal research has changed dramatically from this long-established model since the dawn of the Information Age. While paper publications are still important, there has been a growing reliance on electronic resources over the past several decades. Two early pioneers have dominated the field of electronic retrieval of legal materials: Lexis and Westlaw. One product offered by Lexis, LexisNexis Academic is the legal research tool most commonly used by universities that do not have law schools (law schools tend to subscribe to the more extensive Law School version).
A major advantage of modern electronic searches of legal materials is that it does not suffer from the constraints of using indexes and digests. It was once argued that the professional editorial content found in bound volumes kept them from becoming obsolete, but this content has made its way into the electronic databases. Perhaps the only thing keeping the bound volumes in print is a sense of tradition; they seem to have become obsolete in a practical sense.
Modification History File Created: 08/04/2018 Last Modified: 08/10/2018
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