Interlibrary Loan Borrowing & Document Delivery

The law library will make every effort to borrow books or acquire photocopies or digital images of articles and other documents from other libraries.

As a general matter, however, law review cite checkers must understand two things: 1) authors rely heavily on digital materials, whether from Lexis, Westlaw, or other sources, and 2) the purpose of cite checking is to verify that the citation is correct. The cite checker, then, can fairly rely on digital sources if he or she believes that the author used that source in writing the article. Furthermore, the cite checker should not "check" sub-sources within a citation; you only need to verify the accuracy of the citation, not sources cited within that citation. (For example, if the author cited a quote within case A, and the quote included citation to other cases, a statute, or any other source, you do not check those other sources).


Materials the Law Library Will Not Request:
  1. The law library will not request from other libraries - for cite checking or for any other purpose - news articles that are available on Lexis, Westlaw, or the publishing organization's website. This includes articles from general newspapers (e.g., The Philadephia Inquirer or The Richmond-Times Dispatch), legal newspapers (National Law Journal), and other specialty newspapers (MediaWeek).
  2. The law library will not request from other libraries newsletter articles that are available on Lexis, Westlaw, or the publishing organization's website.
  3. The library will not request from other libraries primary source materials that appear on the organization's website or which are designated as official or authentic by the issuing organization, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY/R).
  4. The library will not request a document from another library unless we are given a specific and accurate citation to the print resource. It is the law journal members' responsibility to provide that citation.
  5. The library cannot request journal articles that appear only in electronic format (i.e., there is no print version).
  6. The law library will not request from another library a document that is available in print or in microformat here or at another W&M library.