HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co. (WSH Co), a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company was founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1961, and is currently based in nearby Getzville, New York. In 2013, WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.
HeinOnline is a source for traditional legal materials (reported cases, statutes, government regulations, academic law reviews, commercially produced law journals and magazines, and classic treatises), historical, governmental, and political documents, legislative debates, legislative and executive branch reports, world constitutions, international treaties, and reports and other documents of international organizations. The database includes more than 192 million pages of materials "in an online, fully searchable, image-based format". Since then HOL has received this award two more times in recognition of new content libraries added to its constantly expanding database. In 2002, HOL was named as a "Best Commercial Website" by the International Association of Law Libraries. In 2007, EContent Magazine listed HOL among the hundred "companies that matter most in the digital content industry". The list "represents the best and the brightest digital content companies". This survey ranked HOL just behind the much larger and more highly capitalized Westlaw and LexisNexis. The author of this article noted that "Academic law libraries quickly embraced HeinOnline in its early years" but expressed "surprise" by "the
popularity of HeinOnline in law firms, at 72%."
HeinOnline has now expanded to include reports and proceedings of federal, state, and local governments and agencies, modern books, non-academic law reviews and journals, current legal periodicals, foreign law reports and statutes, legislative and executive branch reports from foreign governments and NGOs, annual reports of numerous non-legal organizations (such as nineteenth-century antislavery societies, religious organizations, and medical societies), reports from historical international organizations (such as the League of Nations) and modern international organizations (such as the United Nations). HOL has placed online, in word-searchable format, virtually all known historical legal periodicals in English. The Chief Law Librarian at a major Canadian law school referred to this project as "the epic work of HeinOnline".
Collections
Among its collections, HOL has a full run of the complete reports in PDF form of all U.S. federal statutes, all U.S. Supreme Court reports, lower federal court reports, reports of the U.S. Customs Court, Tax Court Memorandum Decisions, and Board of Bankruptcy Courts. and a Foreign and International Law Library. Unlike other Hein products, access to this on-line collection is completely free, and available to anyone in the world simply by registering at: Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law It contains virtually every reported state and federal case on slavery, every state and federal case on slavery, and more than 1,250 books and pamphlets dating from the eighteenth century to the present. Many of the items have introductions by the General Editor of the library, slavery historian Paul Finkelman. Hein continues to add to the library every month. In March, 2017 an article in the official publication of the Association of Independent Information Professionals praised this new collection, noting "Hein also believes in corporate citizenship: In October 2016, it released its collection, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law. Freely available to anyone with Internet access." In this review he also noted the "oft-repeated drawback to Hein is the lack of editorial enhancements like those on LexisNexis and Westlaw" such as its lack of "annotated codes, case law summaries nor formal legal citation services."