Category: Westlaw

A few points of difference between Westlaw Next and regular Westlaw, with respect to New Jersey materials (based on examination the week of May 17, 2010).

• The unannotated version of the statutes found in Westlaw as NJ-ST is not found in Westlaw Next, where the specific content “New Jersey Statutes & Court Rules” includes annotations. But you can easily avoid searching the annotations by using the TE field in the main search box, or the “Statutory Text” field on the Advanced Search template.
• Westlaw Next provides the content of the New Jersey Register, but only in the form furnished by NetScan, without any N.J.R. volume and page citations, so nothing is retrievable by N.J.R. citation. (Regular Westlaw has the N.J.R. as such, in the database NJ-ADR.)
• In WestLaw Next’s New Jersey content options, besides the inclusive “New Jersey State Cases,” there are various subsets of specific content offered, evidently intended to allow you to limit a search to the highest court, or one of the lower levels of court, or the Tax Court. However , the scopes of these subsets are somewhat illogical and not clearly explained. For example, the subset “New Jersey Supreme Court Court” besides including, as it should, the modern Supreme Court and the older Court of Errors and Appeals, also includes, for 1790 through 1848 only, the former Supreme Court, which was not then the highest court. The 1849 to September 1948 cases of the former Supreme Court are included in the subset “New Jersey Superior Court.” The subset “New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division” happens to include Prerogative Court cases from 1830 to 1948. Moreover, the subsets collectively do not cover all the cases found in the inclusive set “New Jersey State Cases”: the Court of Chancery cases and County Court cases are found only in the inclusive set. (I submitted feedback to West about these subsets on May 19th.)
• While many cases can be retrieved in Westlaw Next by entering their volume-and-page citations in the regular search box, this is not true for the New Jersey Law Reports. For those you need to use the citation field in the Advanced Search template, and put the citation in quotation marks. Omitting the quotation marks, or entering the citation in the regular search box on the home page, is likely to lead to a large result set in which the desired document will be hard to find. For example, try 100 N.J.L. 75.