February 2, 2012

Product Review: New Digital Library on American Indian Law

The National Indian Law Library recently test drove a new Indian law digital library being published by William S. Hein & Co., a long-standing legal publisher. The new “American Indian Law Collection” is a fee-based electronic service available through HeinOnline.
While you won’t find access to much current law such as cases and current tribal codes, this collection provides access to a great wealth of historical Indian law information of relevance to the legal researcher and scholar.  Some of the titles in this collection are available for free on the Internet or from other fee-based services such as Westlaw and LexisNexis, but here are a few of the titles we were excited to discover on HeinOnline:
  • Final Reports of the American Indian Policy Review Commission;
  • Landmark Indian Law Cases;
  • Thirteen legislative histories of U.S. Acts impacting Native Americans, including legislative documents of the Indian Reorganization Act;
  • American State Papers: Indian Affairs, Vols. 1-2 (1789-1827);
  • Complete CFR Title 25, 1938 to date and complete USC Title 25, 1925 to date;
  • Access to law review articles related to Native American law (separate subscription needed, except for Indian Law Review and Tribal Law Journal); and
  • Digital access to historical documents and titles not found elsewhere in electronic format.
Our researchers also appreciated the following features of the HeinOnline service:
  • Economical subscription price, and
  • Full-text searching and user-friendly indexing.
For more information or for free trial access, see the HeinOnline announcement  or contact Richard Spinelli at rspinelli@wshein.com.