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Westlaw is one of the primary online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States and is a part of West. In addition, it provides proprietary database services. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources. Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which allows customers to determine whether cases or statutes are still good law; and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners, and lawyers who specialize in any of over 150 legal topics. Most customers are attorneys or law students, but other individuals can also obtain accounts. ==History== Westlaw was originated by West Publishing, a company whose headquarters have been in Eagan, Minnesota since 1992; West was acquired by The Thomson Corporation in 1996. Several of Thomson's law-related businesses outside the United States have their own Westlaw sites, and Westlaw's international content is available online. For instance, Westlaw Canada from Carswell includes the Canadian Abridgment and KeyCite Canada, and Westlaw UK provides information from Sweet & Maxwell and independent law reports, case analysis and case status icons. More recently, Westlaw China was introduced, with laws and regulations, cases, digests, and status icons (similar to KeyCite flags), for the law of the People's Republic of China. Westlaw Ireland (IE) was established in 2002, covering information found in Round Hall publications as well as legislation, books, cases, current awareness and full-text articles from many of the country's notable legal journals. In total, Westlaw is used in over 68 countries. West's chief competitor in the legal information retrieval market is LexisNexis.〔Jean McKnight, "Wexis versus the Net," ''Illinois Bar Journal'' 85, no. 4 (April 1997): 189-190.〕 Both Westlaw and LexisNexis started in the 1970s as dial-up services with dedicated terminals. The earliest versions used acoustic couplers or key phones; then smaller terminals with internal modems. Westlaw's terminal was known as WALT, for West Automatic Law Terminal.〔() 〕 Around 1989, both started offering programs for personal computers that emulated the terminals, and when Internet access became available, an Internet address (such as westlaw.com) became an alternative that could be selected within the "Communications Setup" option in the client program, instead of a dial-up number. West's program was known as Westmate. It was based on Borland C++ around 1997, and then changed to a program compiled on a Microsoft platform that incorporated portions of Internet Explorer. This was the first program to incorporate HTML; prior to that, Westmate had "jumps" indicated by triangles instead of "links." Shortly after that, both publishers started developing web browser interfaces, with Westlaw's being notable for the use of "web dialogs," emulating the piling of open books on a table. Westmate was discontinued on June 30, 2007. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Westlaw」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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