Today in Advanced Legal Research, there was a question as to whether the index for American Law Reports, a very important tool for using the print volumes of ALR, is available online. ALR, of course, is now exclusively available on Westlaw after being removed from LexisNexis last year. While Westlaw now has lots of browsable indices for resources (statutory codes, regional digests, etc.) available directly from a specific database's search page, no index link appears for ALR.
This is unfortunate because, as it turns out, there is an electronic index available on Westlaw. This is clear because individual index entries show up in search results. And as the Harvard Law School Library's website points out, you can "browse" the index simply by running the following citation field search: ci(index).
When you run this search, it returns 10,000 results, the upper system limit imposed by Westlaw on the number of search results that can be retrieved at one time. How far does 10,000 get you? All the way into the D's. "DISCRETIONARY FUNCTION OR DUTY Federal Tort Claims Act warning duty" to be exact. Hardly the entire index, and given that you have to browse in alphabetical order, page by page, even getting to your topic (assuming it falls somewhere alphabetically before "Discretionary") is a slow tedious task.
No need to panic, however, because the only one of these 10,000 results you need is the first one. This document contains an alphabetical list of ALR's main subject headings, and each subject term is a clickable hyperlink that will take you to all the index entries for that subject. Here you'll find links to annotations and to any additional subheadings for your subject.
So Westlaw does have a wonderfully functional ALR index, it's just extremely hard to find.
tom boone dot com
