On August 21, 2013, Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress) announced the creation of a new open-access portal for legal scholarship — the Law Review Commons. The new commons which “contains both current issues and archival content spanning over 100 years” from 200 law reviews and journals participating in Bepress’ Digital Commons is both searchable and browseable from the network page: http://network.bepress.com/law/.

Of interest to researchers, the new site allows users to browse by category (sub-discipline), by most popular, or to conduct a keyword search (keyword searches can also be limited topically when within certain subdiscipline).  By clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the searchbox, users can access more filtering options here and sort by discipline, institution, keyword, publication year, publication name, publication type, and/or file type.

One of the nicest features of the site is that it offeres users the opportunity to follow or suscribe to different sub-disciplines.  Another added benefit is that the site may be more current than the major legal databases on account of the fact that articles appear as soon as participating journals upload them.