LOCATING PERIODICAL ARTICLES BY STATUTE CITATIONS

Print periodical indexes (Index to Legal Periodicals and Current Index to Legal Periodicals) offer tables of statutes that can be helpful for locating articles dealing with a specific statute. Such articles often appear near the time the statute passed so it is important to include an appropriate time frame in the search.

Using statute citations in terms and connectors searches poses substantial challenges because of the many possible ways that statute cites may appear. An example used in the Lexis-Nexis for Law Students (Emanuel Law Outlines 3d ed. 1997) illustrates the problems. On page 9-24, the following sample search is provided:

(americans disabilities act) or (42 w/5 @12101 or 12101)
or
101-336 or (104 pre/5 328)

Running the above search retrieves too many documents to be useful other than to illustrate the considerations that are involved in composing statute searches:

• the reference is often to the popular name of the act

• the cite may be in a footnote rather than in the text of the article

• in Westlaw quotation marks would have to be included around the name of the Act to avoid having “or” inserted automatically between each word

• the cite could be to the code version, the public law number or to the Statutes at Large citation

• section signs may be considered as part of the word if there is no space between the § symbol and the cite.