Goodwin Liu and WestlawNext

The Law School is privileged to have Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court as its Jurist-in-residence beginning tomorrow.  As many of you are aware, Justice Liu was previously a professor at Boalt Hall and has several publications to his name that students may be interested in perusing before his visit.  In writing about this, I thought I’d also take the opportunity to answer a question I’ve been asked with some regularity about using WestlawNext.  While many students like WestlawNext, one of the frustrations I’ve heard regards finding documents by title, author or party name.  For example, the WestlawNext search box can handle a citation, but if you just put Goodwin Liu into the search box you aren’t going to get what you want.  Same goes for the title of one of his articles – type in National citizenship and equality of educational opportunity and you’ll have to dig to find it (even in the Law Reviews and Journals database).

The key is to use a field search.  Here’s an example:

Here I’m using the author field and putting “goodwin liu” in quotes.  This will bring back all 18 articles by Justice Liu and nothing else. The title field search follows a similar pattern:

This will bring back the exact article you need.  The title field also works for party names in cases.  All of this can also be done from the Advanced Search screen from individual databases, but it requires several clicks to get there.  I’ve heard rumors that WestlawNext may add a “search by party name” function, but until that materializes (if it ever does) these field searches may be your best option for getting to something specific without a citation.