Whither the Index?: Electronic Legal Resources Missing Features Found in Print Counterparts

Law librarians have long grappled with what is lost when legal information is presented electronically and separated or wholly divorced from its print origins and structures. That discussion seems more important as generative AI tools become fully entrenched in legal research platforms and students’ exposure to print material withers. In that vein, I encourage you to consider Elizabeth Outler’s 2015 entreaty that we identify the “essential contributions of librarianship to the information society,” which in her view includes protecting, promoting, and developing “the world made possible by books and bibliographic tools.”[1] 

Taking up that call, I will do my part by doing what I do best: complaining (and asking others to complain with me). You see, not long ago I was looking at an electronic copy of a certain treatise and I noticed that it lacked a table of authorities, a table of cases, and an index, all of which were part of the print-version of the treatise.

So doing what I do, I complained to the publisher asking why these features, which exist and are updated in the print version, were missing from the electronic version. A representative quickly and kindly forwarded my message to a party knowledgeable in the matter, who explained that for some products with low print usage, print-centric features like tables and indices are eliminated as part of the ongoing digital migration. The knowledgeable party explained that the provision of a search bar “negates the need for such features.” My sputtering knew no bounds.

Brighter minds and clearer voices than mine have long-since dispensed with the fallacy that keyword searching is equivalent to or supersedes bibliographic features like tables and indices.[2] However, that message seems to have not reached all corners of the legal publishing world. Now, publishers may be able to point to internal metrics showing low usage of tables and indices in contrast to search bar queries. Yet, savvy readers of Outler will know that such statistics should carry little weight and are certainly buoyed by primacy of the search bar and the “threat of the available,” which Karl N. Llewellyn first articulated in 1931 and Richard A. Danner further developed in 2003.[3]

Lest you think that this screed is just about the disappearance of bibliographic features from a single publication, I put out a call to AALL’s RIPS-SIS forum members on My Communities seeking examples of other online publications that lack or have lost features like indices, tables, or other navigational features. Thank you to all of the respondents who shared examples:

This is not all doom and gloom. Publishers have on occasion reinstated an index or other bibliographic feature. For instance, the 20th and 21st editions of the Bluebook Online provided the same content as the print version, absent the index. A new feature prominently featured in the marketing for the 22nd edition is the inclusion of a searchable index. Similarly, a 2014 legislative proposal to change requirements around the creation and publication of the Code of Federal Regulations removed language that specifically requires the Government Publishing Office to prepare an index.[4] However, that bill was not passed. Congress eventually amended the CFR publication process in 2025 but still required the creation and distribution of indexes to the CFR.[5]

Where does that leave us then in terms of the future of the index in our electronic age? Well, many before me, including on this very blog, have already laid a solid and supported foundation about the importance of bibliographic tools within the legal information universe.[6] If like me you are not prepared to undertake “developing textbooks for the new legal paradigm”[7] but want to retain “achieved values of print culture” and make “visible our information architecture,”[8] we can at the very least impress upon publishers and vendors the value that these tools provide. We can teach our students that provision of a search bar does not negate the need to consult these finding aids and consider results within the context of the law and the print “framework”[9] from which they originated. We can continue to complain (and ask others to complain with us).

[1] Elizabeth Outler, Mapping the Achieved Values of Legal Reference Books onto the Digital Future, 34 Legal Reference Services Q. 177, 193 (2015). See also Barbara Bintliff, Context and Legal Research Symposium: Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Robert C. Berring, 99 Law Libr. J. 249, 263, 266 (2007), urging law librarians “to guide the development of new tools for new paradigms” and preserve the shared context of the law.

[2] See Mari Cheney & Heather J. E. Simmons, A Body Without a Soul: Why Print Still Matters in Legal Research, 42 Legal Reference Services Quarterly 2 (2023).

[3] See Outler, supra note 1 at 181 (citing Richard A. Danner, Contemporaryand Future Directions in American Legal Research:  Responding to the Threat of the Available, 31 Int’l J. Legal Info. 179, 182 (2003) and Karl N. Llewellyn, Legal Tradition and Social Science Method A Realist’s Critique, in Essays on Research in the Social Sciences 89, 95-96 (1931), reprinted in Karl N. Llewellyn, Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice 77, 82 (University of Chicago Press, 1962)).

[4] See H.R. Rep. No. 113-515, at 11-12 (2014) (reproducing the text of the bill The Federal Register Modernization Act, H.R. 113-4195, which required only “codifications, supplements, collations, and user aids,” dropping indexes from the list of required features).

[5] 44 U.S.C. § 1510(d). For what it is worth, the 2025 amendment did change the statutory text from “indexes” to “indices.”

[6] See Cheney & Simmons, supra note 2; Outler, supra note 2; Bintliff, supra note 1

[7] Bintliff, supra note 1 at 263.

[8] Outler, supra note 1 at 195.

[9] Cheney & Simmons, supra note 2 at 4.