UC Law SF Expands Offering of Digital Law Journals

The UC Law SF Library recently introduced more than 6,000 new items to its digital repository, signaling a major step toward making the law school’s publications and scholarly journals accessible to all.

Eight of the law school’s nine law journals–Hastings Business Law Journal, Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Hastings Environmental Law Journal, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, UC Law SF Journal, Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal, Hastings Science and Technology Law Journal–are now openly and freely available. The Hastings Women’s Law Journal had been made accessible online prior to the Library’s most recent digitization effort.

Between the eight journals, 289 volumes and 959 issues were added to the Library’s digital repository in the past year.

This means articles dating back decades and from the likes of Associate Justice of California Supreme Court Carol A. Corrigan, Supreme Court Justice Wiley Manuel, and Emeritus Professor Joseph R. Grodin are now searchable and downloadable.

“Over the last quarter century, Hastings Environmental Law Journal has published hundreds of impactful and insightful articles tackling some of the most pressing environmental legal issues of our time,” said Kimberly M. Willis, co-editor-in-chief of Hastings Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 25. “We are thrilled that work will be available online for future law students and others to read.”

The initiative, helmed by Digital Initiatives Librarian Angela Fang Wang, spanned a little over a year and was completed in December 2018. In that time, articles from the Environmental Law Journal have been downloaded more than 5,400 times. And in total, the law journal articles have already attracted online visitors from 193 countries and garnered more than 127, 000 downloads over the past year.

“This project was a big endeavor,” Wang said, “but I am thrilled to see that the UC Law SF law journals are now more accessible than ever. I can’t wait to see the future impact of this effort.”

Tom McCarthy, director of the O’Brien Center for Scholarly Publications, the division which oversees the law journals, said the digital initiative represents a significant step into the 21st century.

“More and more, the readership of legal scholarship has demanded downloadable, searchable, and shareable content — and the Scholarly Publications Department as a whole has responded,” McCarthy said.

Commending the Library staff for its hard work, he added: “We could not have done this without the support of our resident geniuses in the Law Library, Dean Camilla Tubbs and Angela Wang. They were the force behind the development and posting of the repository pages that have made the journals online presence professional in appearance and accessible worldwide.”