Month: October 2020

The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce University-wide access to over 120 full-text ebooks from leading academic publisher Edward Elgar, through the ElgarOnline platform.

The new collection includes electronic versions of 94 titles that the Law Library also owns in print, plus 30 additional open-access titles that are available to all internet users. Books and chapters are viewable online and downloadable in PDF.

The selection includes works on legal, public policy, political, business, and international affairs topics, with several highlights from the W&L Law faculty:

• Mark Drumbl, Research Handbook on Child Soldiers (ed. with Jastine C. Barrett, 2019)
• Lyman Johnson, Corporate Law and the History of Corporate Social Responsibility, in Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law (Harwell Wells ed., 2018)
• Christopher Seaman, Presumption of Validity, in Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law (Ben Depoorter et al. eds, 2019)

Access to ElgarOnline off campus requires log-in with valid WLU credentials. For an extensive list of ebook collections and other legal research platforms available from the W&L Law Library, see our Databases and Online Resources page.

The W&L Law Library is pleased to announce a new online research guide on World Correctional Institutions in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In April 2020, W&L Law professor Nora Demleitner asked the Law Library to begin tracking how COVID-19 is affecting correctional institutions around the world. With the UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project already compiling information on U.S. jails and prisons, Prof. Demleitner, a scholar of international and comparative law, sought to expand data collection to foreign countries.

Franklin Runge, Head of User Services at W&L Law Library, and his team of McThenia Research Assistants were up to the task. They developed a site on the LibGuide platform that is freely available to researchers worldwide.

“Our approach is to start small and slowly add countries in which RAs are fluent in the language and can find and comprehend the data,” says Runge. “The goal is to provide an ‘apples to apples’ comparison between countries. That said, some correctional regimes are radically different and data distribution is not uniform.”

As of October 2020, the guide has resource pages for eight countries: Belarus, Colombia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Ukraine. The pages are updated as new data becomes available, and more countries may be added in the future.

The guide is the most recent in the Library’s collection of LibGuides on researching legal subjects, finding and using materials, and conducting legal research. If you have feedback or questions, or a suggestion for a new LibGuide that the Law Library might offer, please email us at LawRef@wlu.edu.