![handle is hein.journals/llj108 and id is 1 raw text is:
LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 108:1 [2016-1]
Possible Futures for the Legal Treatise in an Environment
of Wikis, Blogs, and Myriad Online Primary Law Sources*
Peter W. Martin-
Law treatises published in e-book form have begun to appear. The article compares
this latest format to alternatives, print and electronic, and traces the corporate and
technological developments that have brought treatises to their current place and role
among legal research tools. It concludes by reviewing a range of possible futures for
this classic form of legal scholarship.
The Appearance of Law E-books. ....................................7
Law Treatises at the Dawn of Computer-Based Legal Research..............9
Print Treatises and Online Primary Sources............................ 12
Online Sources and Treatises Brought Under Common Ownership ........... 13
Electronic Treatises and Online Primary Sources-Stage 1 .................. 15
Electronic Treatises and Online Primary Sources-Stage 2 .................. 19
Treatises in E-book Format and Online Primary Sources ................... 22
The Open Web as a Possible Environment for Legal Commentary of
Scale and Longevity .. .........................................23
The Necessary Primary Sources Are Now Accessible ...................23
Missing Middleware and Data Structures ........................... 24
A Need for New Kinds of Publishers or Hosts ........................ 26
Existing Institutions Becoming Publishers of Significant Online
Commentary . ............................................ 28
New Forms of Production and Dissemination-Blogs, Wikis, and... .. ..28
Concluding Reflections. ........................................... 31
The Appearance of Law E-books
11 Recently Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis began releasing e-book versions
of some of their treatises and other legal reference works, in the United States and
elsewhere.' Wolters Kluwer has followed suit, publishing numbers of its Aspen
© 9 Peter W. Martin, 2016. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons
.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. The article builds on papers presented at the Law via the Internet Confer-
ence, Montreal, 2007, and at faculty workshops in 2011.
Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Emeritus, and cofounder, Legal Information Institute,
Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York.
1. See Michael Cohn, Thomson Reuters Builds eBook Library, ACCOUNTING TODAY (July 10, 2012),
http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/thomson-reuters-proview-ebook-ereader-tax-accounting
7](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/llj108&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most