Many alumni who do not have access to Lexis and Westlaw are interested in using the Law Library's subscriptions to these services for their legal research. Unfortunately, the library's contracts limit use of these databases to current students, staff and faculty for academic purposes. Both systems, however, provide for limited access as described below:
WestDoc
WestDoc is a service for retrieving documents (e.g., case law, statutes, law review articles) when you know the citation. You can also retrieve a case when you know a party's name or the case's docket number. Each retrieved document costs $10, payable by credit card. If a search results in a list of citations, you are not charged until you click a citation or reference from that list.
LexisNexis Alacarte!
Especially for independent professionals and small- to medium-sized businesses that need answers on the fly, LexisNexis AlaCarte! provides users just the information they need through free searches of premium newspaper and magazine articles, company and industry reports, and legal data. It's free to search the database and view titles and headlines - you only pay for the documents you retrieve.
LexisOne
This is a free database which contains limited case law: U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1790 and selected federal and state cases from January 1, 1996. It also contains more than 6,000 free forms, as well as continuously updated forms from Matthew Bender (available by subscription). Another feature is the Statutory Law Guide providing access to the Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest (up-to-date summaries of the laws in the 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and 80 other countries worldwide). There is also an Internet Legal Guide providing extensive links to thousands of sites, arranged by category. From this site one can also sign on to one of several special offers (for a fee) from Lexis allowing one day or week access to state case law and codes, or a practice area (including case law, codes and secondary sources) or federal and all fifty states case law and codes.
Lexis-Nexis
by Credit Card
This service allows you to do full text searching (terms and connectors or natural language) in federal or state case law, statutes or administrative materials, secondary legal sources, news and some topical areas of law, as well as to get a case by citation or shepardize it. There is no charge to conduct a search or view headlines; users pay only for complete text ($9 for each document, $4.25 per citation in Shepards). In addition, there is an option to purchase Lexis by the day or the week which provides unlimited access to newspapers or business and financial databases at a set price.
Academic Universe
This database is available to members of the current Fordham University community at no charge, either on campus or from your home computer using the Fordham remote access dial-up service which authenticates you as a valid Fordham user. One option on Academic Universe is "legal research" which is a modified version of Lexis. It contains secondary sources (law reviews, legal news, Martindale-Hubbell) as well as federal and state case law, statutes, federal administrative law and several topical areas. A template is provided in which to enter keywords; this makes searching simpler than on Lexis, but it permits use of boolean connectors and wildcard characters.
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