|
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page, and/or replace this tag with a more specific message. Editing help is available.
This article or section has been tagged since December 2005.
 Westlaw (http://www.westlaw.com) one of two major online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States. Westlaw gives subscribers unique search technologies and tools that help them find, understand and apply the law and legal concepts in the service of their clients. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 20,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources. Most customers are attorneys or law students but individuals can also obtain accounts. A credit card site (http://www.creditcard.westlaw.com) allows anyone with a credit card to retrieve primary law documents by citation. Image File history File links Nuvola_apps_browser. ...
Image File history File links The logo of the Westlaw service. ...
Case law (precedential law) is the body of judge-made law and legal decisions that interprets prior case law, statutes and other legal authority -- including doctrinal writings by legal scholars such as the Corpus Juris Secundum, Halsburys Laws of England or the doctinal writings found in the Recueil Dalloz...
Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports Natural Language and Boolean searches. Other Westlaw signficant features include KeyCite, a citation checking service which provides the ability to determine if cases or statutes are still good law; and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers’ bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics. The examples and perspective in this article do not represent a worldwide view. ...
Westlaw is a product of Thomson West, part of the Thomson Legal & Regulatory division of The Thomson Corporation. Thomson has businesses in more than 21 countries. In recent years, several of Thomson's law-related businesses have launched Westlaw franchises. In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries. As the largest market group within The Thomson Corporation, Thomson Legal & Regulatory is a leading information solutions provider for legal, tax, accounting, intellectual property, business and government professionals around the world. ...
The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC) (TSX: TOC) is a publishing company founded by Roy Herbert Thomson. ...
Because of the prominence of Westlaw within Thomson West's product offerings, many Thomson West customers use the name "Westlaw" to refer to the entire West organization. West’s chief competitor in the legal market is LexisNexis. Because of the fact that West and LexisNexis are so pervasive in the legal research marketplace, some customers have jokingly imagined an organization called Wexis. LexisNexis is a popular searchable archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed sources. ...
Wexis is a humorous term used to refer to the two academic publishing conglomerates which dominate the legal information services industry, namely Westlaw and LexisNexis. ...
Features
KeyCite KeyCite is a citation-checking service available on Westlaw. // Case citation is the system used in common law countries such as the United States, England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand Australia and India to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ...
The United States judiciary operates under the principle of stare decisis – a system of legal precedents – to ensure the courts deliver consistent rulings on similar legal issues, regardless of the political or social status of the parties involved. As such, legal professionals must be certain that the legal citations they use to reinforce their arguments are accurate and still “good law.” KeyCite leverages Westlaw technologies, West’s attorney-authored case law headnotes and the West Key Number System to determine and immediately alert legal professionals that case law they are reviewing has been either overturned, or may have history which deems the presidential value of the opinion invalid. Stare decisis (Latin:, Anglicisation:, to stand by things decided) is a Latin legal term, used in common law to express the notion that prior court decisions must be recognized as precedents, according to case law. ...
The examples and perspective in this article do not represent a worldwide view. ...
KeyCite was introduced to Westlaw in 1997 and was the first service to seriously challenge the Sheppard’s citation-checking service that legal professionals relied on for generations. Sheppard’s had become such a necessary part of legal research, that citation checking is still informally referred to as “Sheppardizing.”
In 2004, KeyCite was determined to be the most-used citation checking service in an annual survey of law firm technology use conducted by the American Bar Association. American Bar Associations Washington, DC office The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary bar association of lawyers which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. ...
Key Number System The West Key Number System is a master classification system of U.S. law, and is claimed to be "the only recognized legal taxonomy." The West Key Number System was created by West Publishing Company and can be described as a highly detailed index of over 110,000 legal topics and sub-topics. The index serves as the backbone for legal information published by West, which appears in the company’s print publications, and now on Westlaw. Taxonomy (from Greek verb tassein = to classify and nomos = law, science, cf economy) may refer to: the science of classification (see alpha taxonomy) a classification Initially taxonomy was only the science of classifying living organisms, but later the word was applied in a wider sense, and may also refer to...
West’s publications are pervasive in law firms, and lawyers generally consider them necessary to legal research. The West Key Number System helped to give West’s publications this stature by giving legal researchers a unique starting point from which to quickly find the most on-point statutes, court opinions or other legal information from the collection of hundreds of millions of documents of American jurisprudence. The law of the United States is derived from the common law of England, which was in force at the time of the Revolutionary War. ...
Identity Theft In February 2005, after the ChoicePoint identity theft incidents became public, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) publicized the fact that Westlaw has a database containing a large amount of private information on practically all living Americans. Besides widely-available information such as addresses and phone numbers, Westlaw also includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), previous addresses, dates of birth, and other information lawyers use to do background checks on behalf of their clients. While there is no known case of identify theft involving Westlaw, the company responded to the controversy by announcing it had eliminated access to full SSNs for 85 percent of its clients who previously could retrieve this information, mostly lawyers and government agencies. 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
ChoicePoint (NYSE: CPS) is a corporation based in Alpharetta, near Atlanta, Georgia, USA, which claims to be the nations leading supplier of identification and credential verification services. Overview ChoicePoint (NYSE: CPS) helps businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations make better decisions through information and technology solutions. ...
Identity theft (or identity fraud) is the deliberate assumption of another persons identity, usually to gain access to their finances or frame them for a crime. ...
Charles Ellis Chuck Schumer (born November 23, 1950) is an American politician. ...
This article needs cleanup. ...
A background check is a process in which the specifics of an individuals past are revealed for the purposes of employment, obtaining access to classified information, or obtaining restricted items. ...
Related History In the mid 1980s, Westlaw sued LexisNexis over copyright infringement (West Pub. Co. v. Mead Data Cent., Inc., 616 F. Supp. 1571 (D. Minn. 1985), aff'd, 799 F.2d 1219 (8th Circ.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1070 (1986)). LexisNexis's "star pagination" system, a feature which allowed users of either research system to find the printed page of a case without looking to the actual book, was found to infringe West's copyrights by the Minnesota District Court. After Lexis' appeals were turned down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the company entered into a secret agreement with West to pay them $50,000 per year to license West's pagination and text corrections. No other publisher was offered similar terms. The 1980s, in its most obvious sense, was the decade between 1980 and 1989. ...
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in a manner that violates one of the copyright owners exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works that build upon it. ...
// Case citation is the system used in common law countries such as the United States, England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand Australia and India to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ...
The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota is the Federal district court whose jurisdiction is comprised of the state of Minnesota. ...
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the following United States district courts: Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas Northern and Southern Districts of Iowa District of Minnesota Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri District of Nebraska District of...
In the mid 1990s, Alan Sugarman, who runs HyperLaw, sued West and won. The District Court in New York and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that West did not have copyright on the corrections it made on opinions or on the internal pagnation. It was during discovery in this trial that Hyperlaw found out about West's and Lexis' agreement. West did not seek further appeal. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts: District of Connecticut Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Districts of New York District of Vermont The Second Circuit hears argument at the Thurgood Marshall U...
See also Blacks Law Dictionary, 7th edition Blacks Law Dictionary has traditionally been regarded as the definitive legal dictionary for the law of the United States. ...
External links |
Feeds |
Contact