LEXIS introduced, 1973 LEXIS, the first commercial, full-text legal information service, was introduced in 1973. LEXIS’ mission was to help legal practitioners research the law more efficiently. The system improved upon traditional research tools in two ways: it increased the speed with which researchers could discover relevant documents and, through its full-text Key Word in Context (KWIC) approach, freed researchers from pre-established legal index headings and enabled them to formulate unique search requests. The LEXIS system originally consisted of several "libraries," most notably, all United States Supreme Court cases dating from 1938. The company began as the Data Corporation in 1966, was purchased by The Mead Corporation in 1968, and acquired by Reed Elsevier in late 1994. Despite the purchase by Reed Elsevier, a Dutch-British publishing company, LEXIS’ headquarters continue to be located in Dayton, Ohio. Today, the company's mission is to be the preferred provider of decision support information and services to professionals in legal, business, and government markets. The combined databases now contain 2.8 billion searchable documents from 24,871 sources (18,871 news and business and 6,000 legal). Each week 8.7 million documents are added. There are approximately 2.1 million subscribers who perform more than 700,000 searches per day. The early journal articles discussing the role of computerized legal information systems in the academic curriculum started appearing around 1979-1980. Typically, they warned that the academic world must take seriously the recent progress of these systems and raised concerns about their cost. Since that time LEXIS and its competitor Westlaw have created fee structures that ease the financial burden on law schools. In fact, library collection development policy is now frequently influenced by the legal materials that are available as part of the Lexis and Westlaw packages. There is no question of whether to include these databases in the legal curriculum. They are essential to legal research and any law student graduating without the skill to use them is at a severe disadvantage. The curricular questions today are how to ensure that students are taught the essentials of legal research before they are allowed to jump into these databases, how far into the curriculum the companies will be allowed to insert themselves, and what place the emerging competitors (Loislaw, law.com, etc) will play.
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The World in 1973: Direct American involvement in Vietnam ends with the January declaration of a ceasefire. Bombing of Cambodia continues in an effort to retrieve POWs. U.S. Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigns for tax evasion and is replaced by Senate Minority Leader Gerald Ford. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger becomes Secretary of State. Fierce fighting surrounds the beginning of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur/October War. The United States supplies Israel with military equipment to offset Soviet support of Arab forces. A United Nations resolution sponsored by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. calls for a ceasefire, finally effected in late October. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court rules that women have the unrestricted right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the state has some interest in protecting the fetus. Both East and West Germany are admitted to the United Nations. Billie Jean King, an outspoken proponent of female equality, triumphs over former Wimbledon champ Bobby Riggs in 3 straight sets in a tennis match billed as the "Battle of the Sexes." Chile's Marxist President Salvador Allende is overthrown and dies under suspicious circumstances; he is replaced by right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet. A global energy crisis emerges, and President Nixon encourages conservation of energy, pointing out that the U.S. has six percent of the population but consumes one-third of the world's energy. OPEC exacerbates the energy crunch, cutting back oil production for political reasons. The towering World Trade Center briefly reigns as the tallest building in the world but the Sears Tower tops it the next year. Pablo Picasso dies at age 91. Erica Jong publishes Fear of Flying. Also new is Gravity's Rainbow, one of Thomas Pynchon's best-known works, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by magic realist Italo Calvino. Heavyweight boxer George Foreman gains the world championship by knocking out Joe Frazier.
Source:
Broad, Susan. The Computer in Legal Education--Is It Really Feasible? Law Librarian v11 n2 p41-42. (Aug. 1980).
Rodgers, Raymond S.; Barefield, Paul A. LEXIS: Applications for Research in Communication & Law. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association. (Philadelphia, PA, May 1979).
LEXIS-NEXIS Lexis Publishing
lexis.com New web-based interface to the research system
lexisONE Free case law, forms, links to law-related web sites
Reed Elsevier Current parent company of LEXIS
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