A few minor improvements to the Current Law Journal Content database ( http://law.wlu.edu/library/CLJC ):
A link has been added to "newly included journals" which lists journal titles in reverse chronological order of their inclusion in the CLJC database. For example, the most recent few at the moment are:
War Crimes, Genocide & Crimes Against Humanity
International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law
Juridica International (Estonia)
Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law
Utrecht Law Review (Netherlands)
By clicking on the "TOC" link next to the journal you can see the recent contents pages. This sorted listing might be useful for anyone trying to keep up with adding electronic journals to their library catalog. If you look at a TOC for the journal it will say "full-text" if it's freely available online in full-text (all of the 5 listed above are).
The effort to indicate "full-text" is recent. If anyone comes upon any journals that are open access, and which I haven't so indicated in a TOC page, please let me know.
I've recently begun adding DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), which are something like '10.1163/157181205775093847' to article records whenever I find them supplied by the publisher (they are hidden, but show up in openURL links). These will usually be for journals published by large publishers the like of Cambridge, Oxford, and Springer. They are useful when included in openURL links as the resolver can direct you to the publisher's web site for specific information about that article. So, e.g. try one of the openURL links (W&L logo) next to an article in this TOC listing:
http://law.wlu.edu/library/CLJC/index.asp?issue=yes&mainid=546&issuedate=2005-12-22
and then click on the 'try the DOI link' that the resolver presents you with.
Al Brophy has a working paper "The Relationship Between Law Review Citations and Law School Rankings" at SSRN. Brophy has posted a blog entry about his paper at http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2005/12/law_review_cita_1.html.
His chief finding is a high correlation between first-tier law schools and citations to their journals, and progressively lower correlations for law schools in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th-tier. Brophy suggests that "law reviews are schools' ambassadors to the rest of the legal academy. Much of what people at other schools know about a school's academic orientation may come from the articles and notes published in the school's law journals. Thus, those schools seeking to advance in reputation may want to pay attention to their law reviews." One interesting suggestion offered by Brophy is that reputational assessments of 3rd and 4th-tier law schools as recorded by U.S. News may simply be inaccurate, and that the more objective measurement of citations to the law reviews of those schools could be used to correct for peer-assessment fuzziness.
It does seem likely that manipulation of law school journal rankings is an (as yet) under-explored component of the ongoing effort by law schools to influence their position in the U.S. News rankings.