Law students around the world will be able to bolster their arguments by citing Dartmouth students many years their junior after an online law review website decided to include the Dartmouth College Undergraduate Journal of Law in its database. The journal is the first and only undergraduate law review to be included in the online law library -- a considerable feat for a publication only three years old.
The award-winning web site, HeinOnline, provides access to 15.9 million pages from over 900 law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal and the Stanford Law Review.
"It's an incredible honor," said Cortelyou Kenney '05, head of the journal. "We are only one of a handful of undergraduate law journals in the nation, and being chosen by Hein puts us in even more selective company."
The inclusion of the journal will also be a revenue source: every time a user views one of its articles, the DCUJL will receive 15 percent of the royalties.
Submissions from legally-minded undergraduates are accepted to the DCUJL on a continual basis and are reviewed by a 16-person committee through a rigorous process. The members then revise the selected articles, which are authored by students from Dartmouth and other colleges in the United States and Canada.
According to its website, the journal is "an exclusively student-run publication devoted to the discussion and celebration of the Law and related subjects."
Kenney said she thought the high quality of the journal was responsible for its selection.
"We have interesting, scholarly articles on timely topics that have been exhaustively researched," Kenney said. "We also have a rigorous double-blind selection process, which distinguishes us from many undergraduate journals."
While articles must be from a legal perspective, they may relate to philosophy, economics, sociology, history or political science. Recent article topics have included the legality of car searches, ambiguities of property law, inadequacies of the Chinese legal system, interpretation of affirmative action laws, liability of internet service providers and legal solutions to environmental pollution.
Kenney said she hopes the journal will be included on more websites.
"We'd like to secure entrance to LexisNexis and Westlaw," she said, referring to two other popular online legal web databases. "We'd also like to expand the number of articles we print each term and continue to receive high volumes of submissions from other schools."
Founded in 2003 by two interns of the Daniel Webster Legal Society, Meg Thering '05 and Joshua Marcuse '04, the DCUJL has since published five issues. It is sponsored by the government department, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the John Sloan Dickey Center and the Rockefeller Center.
