Legal Research

All currently enrolled USF law students will have access to Westlaw's new research system, WestlawNext, as of January 3, 2011.  All students will continue to have access to the "classic" Westlaw interface that you have used throughout law school.  To access WestlawNext, you must sign on to Westlaw, go to the law school home page, then click on WestlawNext at the top of the screen:

If you haven't heard anything about WestlawNext yet, we think that most law students will be pleased with the new interface.  WestlawNext has one "Google-like" search box on the home page - you can search without using Boolean connectors like w/p, w/s, or AND:

In fact, most of your searches will be quite similar to the searches you run in Google.  For example, if you were searching for information about whether landlords may be held liable for dog bites that occur on rental premises that they own, you could search with the words: landlord liability dog bite premises

You don't have to truncate your terms with an exclamation point or insert connectors between your terms. You can also select the jurisdiction that you wish to search from a simple pull-down menu that appears to the right of the search box.  You can still use a terms and connectors search if you need to, and you can still search a particular source like Witkin or CalJur if you wish to do so.

One of the features that we particularly like is that your search results are categorized for you, so you can easily see how many cases, statutes, secondary sources, or administrative decisions your search retrieved:

When you click on a category like "Cases," you'll see all of the cases that your search retrieved. 

The librarians are happy to instruct students on WestlawNext searching. In addition, Westlaw has developed a number of user guides that can help you become familiar with the new interface and help you learn how to find secondary sources, statutes, cases, regulations, and more.  Finally, the librarians and our Westlaw representative, Mark Cygnet, will schedule training sessions throughout the spring semester.

One BIG caveat:  you cannot print from WestlawNext to the free Westlaw printers at the law school.  If you find items in WestlawNext, you can either store them in a folder, download them to your own computer, or email them.  To print the item, switch over to the "classic" Westlaw system, enter the citation that you are looking for in the "Find by Citation" box, and then print from "classic" Westlaw to one of our Westlaw printers.