Subject Guides: Mercantile Law: Articles & Journals

International legal databases

For foreign journals in electronic form, there are a number of options:

Westlaw International: A very large, full-text legal information database that is used extensively in the English-speaking world. Westlaw consists of 3 parts: A. Westlaw (UK); B. Westlaw (International) and C. Westlaw (US). It contains many journals and its coverage of case law and legislation is extensive. Access the Westlaw website only from the Law Library. Select Westlaw International.
HeinOnline: This is also a full-text international legal database, but the difference is that it is a retrospective database. It usually holds the full-text of the journals (and other documents) from the first volume. The focus is on journals.

For full-text coverage one can use the following databases, which hold some of SA law journals in full-text:

SAePublications is local and is found in the Sabinet Reference database. Contains full-text access to a number of South African journals. It covers the last 7-10 years only.
HeinOnline is from the USA but contains some South African journals. The coverage is retrospective and usually covers the journal from volume 1 up to a year or two ago. It does not always have the latest volumes.
LexisNexis Butterworth’s has some years of a few law journals online. Click on “Journals” on the left of the screen to see all the journal titles available.
Jutastat for some full text journals – see under “Juta’s Electronic Law Journals”
SAFLII has a number of open access journals on their website.

Available Journal titles
In general, there are about 30 academic law journal titles in South Africa and these are listed below. The hardcopy versions of the journals are kept in the law library, but some are also available in electronic or online format. The 5 databases that offer law journals in full-text, are SA ePublications, Jutastat, LexisNexis, SAFLII and HeinOnline. (Note that none is comprehensive in their coverage.)