by Jim Cahoy, Thomson West Academic Group

Did you know that one of today's respected authorities on pleading is Charles Clark's 1928 Handbook of the Law of Code Pleading, cited in at least 10 law review articles in the last decade? Or that the 1891 edition of Black's Law Dictionary® has been cited in at least six published federal and state cases since 2000 (as recently as last December)?

They may be old, but they're hardly past their prime. Many of the law library's oldest publications are still essential sources of authority, analysis, and legal history.

That's why the Rise of American Law (ROAL), a collection of a wide range of time-honored legal titles newly released on Westlaw® and DVD, is such a major addition to online research. This collection contains more than 400 treatises, dictionaries, practice guides, and other materials published by West and other publishers that have aligned with West over the years, including Lawyers Cooperative, Bancroft-Whitney, Banks-Baldwin, Clark Boardman Callaghan, and Witkin. The collection consists of materials published between 1843 and 1970, largely from the first half of the 20th century. More than 400 titles—with almost 1700 volumes and more than 1.5 million pages—are included.

With the field of historical legal research becoming a hot specialty in academia, ROAL is tailored to the needs of anyone wanting to research law from the 19th and 20th centuries. Beyond law schools, ROAL should appeal to any research institution, including courts and law firms.

ROAL includes the first editions of American Jurisprudence, Corpus Juris, Lawyers' Reports Annotated (the predecessor to American Law Reports), California Jurisprudence, and New York Jurisprudence—resources previously unavailable electronically. In addition, the collection features such seminal treatises as Pound's Jurisprudence, Williston on Sales, and Pomeroy's Equity and Jurisprudence. Ninety percent of ROAL content has never before been available electronically.

A Westlaw subscription allows you to access the content in HTML or through PDF images you can access via Westlaw. (ROAL documents on the DVD are available in PDF only.) Full Westlaw searching is available for each publication, with links to cited cases and secondary materials provided, where available. You can search all ROAL databases simultaneously in Rise of American Law–Multibase (ROAL-ALL) or in a database devoted to an individual publication type, e.g., Rise of American Law–Practice Guides (ROAL-PRACGD). The Table of Contents service is available for browsing the contents of any ROAL database.

For more information, contact your West librarian relations manager or your West account manager.