Corpus Juris Secundum online: CJS cost, legal encyclopedias and American Jurisprudence 2d access
Corpus Juris Secundum is online on Westlaw and nowhere else. American Jurisprudence 2d is on both Westlaw and Lexis. Neither publisher advertises what the sets cost, so we rendered the Thomson Reuters store pages on 30 August 2026 and read the figures off: C.J.S. is $95,385.00 outright, Am Jur 2d is $72,635.00. Below: which platform carries which encyclopedia, the full published price table, the arithmetic on the monthly plans, and the free routes to the same content that most practitioners never use. If you need the case rather than the commentary, start in the box on the right.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Corpus Juris Secundum is available online through Westlaw only; there is no LexisNexis edition. American Jurisprudence 2d, from the same publisher, is carried on both Westlaw and Lexis, which makes it the only national legal encyclopedia a Lexis subscriber can reach. Both are secondary sources: you use them to understand an area and to collect citations, then you cite the case rather than the entry. On the Thomson Reuters store, read 30 August 2026, the complete C.J.S. hardbound set is $95,385.00 outright or $5,863.00 per month on a 24 month term, and the complete Am Jur 2d set is $72,635.00 outright or $5,461.00 per month. The free route most practitioners overlook is the county law library, which in most US counties is open to the public and often carries both sets in print. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify the citation.
Last updated August 2026
The question behind the search
Which platform actually carries which legal encyclopedia
Look at what Americans type after the words corpus juris secundum and one query keeps surfacing: is corpus juris secundum on lexis. It is the right question, asked by someone whose firm has already made a platform decision and who is trying to find out whether that decision quietly cost them access to a research tool. The answer is short and it is no. Here is the full picture.
| Encyclopedia | Online where | On Lexis? | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corpus Juris Secundum (C.J.S.) | Westlaw only. | No. | This is the answer to the question people ask most. C.J.S. is a Thomson Reuters work and Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw, so it is not licensed to LexisNexis. If your firm is a Lexis shop, there is no seat you can buy that puts C.J.S. on your screen. You need Westlaw access, a law library, or a print set. |
| American Jurisprudence 2d (Am. Jur. 2d) | Westlaw and Lexis. | Yes. | Am Jur 2d is the unusual case: a Thomson Reuters publication that is carried on both major platforms. The Georgetown Law Library secondary sources guide lists it under both. That makes it the practical choice if you are on Lexis and want a national encyclopedia at all, because it is the only one of the two you can reach. |
| State encyclopedias (for example Texas Jurisprudence, Cal Jur) | Usually Westlaw, occasionally Lexis. | Varies by state. | Roughly fifteen states have their own encyclopedia and the platform depends on who publishes it. Where one exists for your state it is normally more useful than either national set, because it is written against your courts rather than against a national average of them. |
| Nolo and the consumer legal encyclopedias | Free on the open web. | Not applicable. | Worth naming so you can rule it out. These are written for non-lawyers and carry no citations to the reported cases, which is the entire reason a practitioner opens an encyclopedia. They are not a substitute for C.J.S. or Am Jur 2d and no research plan should treat them as one. |
There is an ownership fact underneath all of this that explains the whole table. Both national encyclopedias are Thomson Reuters publications, and Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw. Am Jur 2d reaches Lexis for historical reasons rooted in the Lawyers Cooperative Publishing lineage it came from; C.J.S. never did. So the pattern is not that one publisher hoards and the other shares. It is that one title carries a legacy licence and the other does not, and neither publisher has any commercial reason to change that now. The same ownership logic runs through Practical Law, the Thomson Reuters know-how library, which is a separate subscription again and which no Westlaw plan includes.
Read off the vendor store, not estimated
What Corpus Juris Secundum and Am Jur 2d actually cost
Almost nothing written about these two sets contains a price, and the reason is mechanical rather than secretive. Thomson Reuters renders the figures on its store client-side, so an ordinary page fetch returns the product listing with no numbers in it at all. We rendered both product pages in a real browser on 30 August 2026 and read the prices off the screen. These are list prices for the complete hardbound sets, in US dollars, before any negotiated discount.
| Set | Monthly subscription (24 month term) | One-time purchase | Availability | How updates arrive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corpus Juris Secundum, complete hardbound set | $5,863.00 per month | $95,385.00 | Partial stock | Supplemental pamphlets, issued as changes in the law dictate |
| American Jurisprudence 2d, complete hardbound set | $5,461.00 per month | $72,635.00 | Pre-sale | Pocket parts, updated annually |
Figures read from store.legal.thomsonreuters.com product listings for Corpus Juris Secundum and American Jurisprudence 2D on 30 August 2026. Thomson Reuters also offers a third option on both, branded Smart Saver, at the same headline figure per year with future updates at a stated 20 to 30 percent loyalty discount. List prices change without notice; confirm with the publisher before raising a purchase order.
The monthly plan is labelled best value. The arithmetic disagrees.
Thomson Reuters marks the monthly subscription as Best Value on both listings, and on both listings it is the option pre-selected for you. Multiply it out over the stated 24 month term and the picture changes. C.J.S. at $5,863.00 a month runs to $140,712.00 across the two years, against $95,385.00 to buy the set outright, a difference of $45,327.00. Am Jur 2d at $5,461.00 a month reaches $131,064.00, against $72,635.00 outright, a difference of $58,429.00.
That gap is not a trick, and it is worth stating what you get for it. The monthly plan includes every update issued during the term, where the outright purchase covers the edition on the day it ships and nothing after. Supplementation on a set this size is genuinely expensive, so some of the difference is real value rather than financing cost. What the listing does not do is show you the number, which means nobody comparing the two options is comparing them on price. If you are weighing this, ask the publisher for the standalone cost of two years of supplementation and put it beside the $45,327.00 or the $58,429.00. That single question turns a marketing label back into a decision.
Two terms in the small print are worth reading before anyone signs. Monthly subscriptions run on a continuous subscription agreement and renew automatically in one month terms unless you tell Thomson Reuters otherwise, with at least ten days notice of a price change. Cancellation has to be in writing and has to land at least thirty days before an automatic renewal term begins. For a purchase at this scale, put the cancellation date in a calendar the day the contract is signed. The same discipline applies across the vendor's line, which is why we track published legal research pricing across every major vendor rather than trusting a renewal quote to be comparable to the one before it.
Opposite premises, not better and worse
Corpus Juris Secundum against American Jurisprudence 2d
These two sets are frequently described as interchangeable, and they are not. They were built to do different things, and once you see the design difference the choice between them stops being a coin toss. C.J.S. chases completeness. Am Jur 2d chases readability. Everything else follows from that.
| Corpus Juris Secundum | American Jurisprudence 2d | |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial premise | Completeness. C.J.S. sets out to give you every relevant citation on a point, which is why some pages carry more footnote than text. | Selectivity. Am Jur 2d picks the cases it considers leading and reads more like a narrative statement of the rule. |
| What that means at the desk | Better when you need to be sure you have not missed a line of authority, and when you are going to read everything it points at anyway. | Better when you need the shape of an unfamiliar area quickly and will run your own search for authority afterwards. |
| Article length | Longer and more granular. Sections subdivide further. | Shorter and more readable. Easier to get through in one sitting. |
| Update mechanism | Supplemental pamphlets issued as the law changes, per the Thomson Reuters store listing. | Annual pocket parts, per the Thomson Reuters store listing. |
| Online reach | Westlaw only. There is no Lexis edition. | Westlaw and Lexis both. |
| Print set list price | $95,385.00 outright. | $72,635.00 outright. |
If you only get one and you are on Lexis, the decision is made for you: Am Jur 2d, because C.J.S. is not available to you at any price. If you are on Westlaw and you do litigation in a settled area, C.J.S. earns its place, because the exhaustive footnoting is precisely what you want when the risk is missing a line of authority. If you are on Westlaw and you keep landing in unfamiliar practice areas, Am Jur 2d gets you oriented faster and you will do the authority hunt yourself anyway.
Where the marketing and the librarians disagree
What a legal encyclopedia is not
There is a tension here that anyone spending five figures on these sets deserves to see stated plainly, because the two sides of it are published in public and they do not agree with each other.
What the publisher says
The Thomson Reuters store describes C.J.S. as "Cited and quoted as an authority in courtrooms across the country", a national legal encyclopedia covering state and federal topics from A to Z, with general rules of law summarized in blackletter headings and expanded in the text. Am Jur 2d is described as providing "an unparalleled breadth of coverage of all fields of American law".
What the law librarians say
The Georgetown Law Library secondary sources guide states that the legal encyclopedias "are not intended to be used as authoritative sources on the law in any area, and thus are not cited in briefs, memoranda, or scholarly papers". They are introductory and research tools whose value is orienting you and handing you citations worth reading.
Both statements are defensible and they are describing different things. Courts really have quoted C.J.S., usually for an uncontroversial statement of a general rule that nobody was fighting about. That is a long way from the proposition that an encyclopedia entry is authority you can build an argument on. The working rule every law school teaches has not changed: an encyclopedia is where research starts and never where it ends. You read the entry, you follow the footnote, you open the case, you confirm it is still good law, and the citation that goes in the brief is the case.
That last step is where a lot of expensive research goes wrong, and the evidence is now hard to ignore. The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin recorded 1,983 court decisions dealing with fabricated or unverifiable citations as of 30 August 2026, up from around 200 in mid-2025. Not one of those decisions punished a lawyer for using a research tool. They punished filings where nobody opened the authority before signing. An encyclopedia will not save you from that and was never designed to; what saves you is reading the case. If you want the failure modes in detail, we collected them in the AI hallucination legal cases writeup, and the verification workflow itself sits on the case citation checker.
Five routes, honestly assessed
Getting to the content without a five figure purchase order
A solo practitioner is not going to spend $95,385.00 on a print set, and does not have to in order to read what is in it. Here are the routes that genuinely work, each with the thing that limits it, because a route described without its catch is not advice.
A county law library
Most US counties of any size run a public law library, and a large share of them carry one or both encyclopedias in print, often with a Westlaw or Lexis terminal alongside. Access is typically free to walk-ins including members of the public. This is the single most underused route on this list.
The catch: You have to physically go, and terminal licences usually forbid emailing results to yourself.
Your state bar member benefit
A large number of state bars include a legal research package in the annual dues. Coverage varies and the encyclopedias are not always in it, so check the specific title list rather than assuming.
The catch: Bar packages lean toward primary law. Encyclopedias and other publisher-owned secondary sources are frequently the first thing excluded.
Law school alumni access
Some law schools keep a limited research entitlement for graduates, occasionally on-site only. Worth one email to the library rather than an assumption either way.
The catch: Increasingly rare, and the publisher licences usually bar practice use.
A Westlaw subscription
The straightforward answer for C.J.S. specifically. Thomson Reuters does not publish which Westlaw plans include the encyclopedia, so make the title list an explicit line in the quote before you sign.
The catch: Secondary source libraries are routinely a separate entitlement from primary law. Get it in writing.
Used and superseded print sets
Complete sets turn up on the used law book market well below list. For settled doctrine in an area that has not moved, a superseded set is not worthless.
The catch: An encyclopedia without current supplementation is a snapshot of the law on the day it was printed. Never cite from one without checking the authority is still good.
Worth saying clearly where we stand, since this is our page and you should be able to weigh what you read on it. We are not a legal encyclopedia and we are not trying to replace one. Cases is case law search: ask a legal question in plain English and get on-point US federal and state precedents back with the holding and a citation you can check, for 29 dollars per user per month with the price on the page. If what you need is an editor-written overview of an unfamiliar field with a curated reading list, an encyclopedia does something we do not do, and no amount of search will substitute for it. If what you need is the controlling authority on a concrete question, buying a hundred thousand dollar print set to get there is a very expensive route to a citation. Most practices need a bit of both and only ever budget for one.
Asked verbatim in US search
Corpus Juris Secundum questions, answered
Is Corpus Juris Secundum on Lexis?
No. Corpus Juris Secundum is a Thomson Reuters publication and is available online through Westlaw only. There is no LexisNexis edition and no seat you can add to a Lexis subscription that will produce it. If you are on Lexis and want a national legal encyclopedia, American Jurisprudence 2d is the one you can actually reach, because it is carried on both platforms.
Is Corpus Juris Secundum a primary source?
No, it is a secondary source. Primary authority means the law itself: cases, statutes, regulations and constitutions. C.J.S. is a commentary that summarizes those rules and points you to the decisions behind them. That distinction matters in practice, because a court is bound by the case an encyclopedia cites and is bound by nothing at all in the encyclopedia entry itself.
Is Corpus Juris Secundum a secondary source?
Yes. It sits in the same category as a treatise, a practice guide or a law review article. The Georgetown Law Library secondary sources guide puts legal encyclopedias squarely there and states that they are not intended as authoritative sources and are not cited in briefs, memoranda or scholarly papers. Their job is to orient you and to hand you citations worth reading.
Is Corpus Juris Secundum a legal encyclopedia?
Yes, and it is one of the two national ones for American law, alongside American Jurisprudence 2d. It covers state and federal topics alphabetically from A to Z, states general rules of law in blackletter headings and expands on them in the text. Thomson Reuters publishes it. The other national set, Am Jur 2d, comes from the same publisher.
How much does Corpus Juris Secundum cost?
The complete hardbound set is $95,385.00 outright on the Thomson Reuters store, or $5,863.00 per month on a 24 month subscription that includes all updates for the term. American Jurisprudence 2d is $72,635.00 outright or $5,461.00 per month on the same structure. Prices read directly from the vendor store on 30 August 2026 and subject to change.
Can I get Corpus Juris Secundum online free?
Not legitimately from the publisher, and there is no free web edition. C.J.S. is in copyright and under active supplementation. The realistic no-cost route is a county law library, which in most US counties is open to the public and frequently carries the set in print with a research terminal beside it. PDF copies circulating online are both unlawful and unsupplemented, which makes them unsafe to rely on.
What is the difference between Corpus Juris Secundum and American Jurisprudence 2d?
They are built on opposite premises. C.J.S. aims at completeness and tries to give every relevant citation, so entries run longer and carry heavy footnotes. Am Jur 2d is selective, picking the cases it treats as leading and reading more like a narrative statement of the rule. C.J.S. is Westlaw only; Am Jur 2d is on Westlaw and Lexis.
Is American Jurisprudence 2d a secondary source?
Yes, exactly as C.J.S. is. Am Jur 2d is an encyclopedia: a summary of American law across state and federal, civil and criminal, substantive and procedural fields. Use it to learn the shape of an unfamiliar area and to collect citations. Then open those cases, confirm they are still good law, and cite the case rather than the encyclopedia.
Can you cite Corpus Juris Secundum in a brief?
You can, but in most circumstances you should not. Law library research guides are direct about this: encyclopedias are not intended as authoritative sources and are not cited in briefs or memoranda. Cite the case, statute or regulation the entry points you to, after reading it. An encyclopedia citation in a brief signals to the court that nobody opened the underlying authority.
How many volumes is Corpus Juris Secundum?
It is a large multi-volume set running to well over a hundred bound volumes plus a general index and supplementation, which is why the outright price is a five figure number and the listing shows partial stock rather than a shelf-ready set. Volume counts drift as topics are revised and reissued, so treat any specific figure as approximate and confirm with the publisher before ordering.
Is Corpus Juris Secundum still updated?
Yes. The Thomson Reuters store lists its update format as supplemental pamphlets issued as changes in the law dictate, rather than on a fixed annual cycle. American Jurisprudence 2d by contrast is listed as updated annually through pocket parts. If you are buying used or working from a library copy, check the supplementation date before you rely on anything in it.
Do I need a legal encyclopedia if I have AI legal research?
They do different jobs. An encyclopedia gives you a curated, editor-written overview of a settled area and a reading list. AI research answers a specific question against the case law and hands you the citation. If your bottleneck is finding the controlling authority on a concrete question, the encyclopedia is an expensive way to solve it. If it is understanding an unfamiliar field from scratch, the encyclopedia still earns its keep.
Keep researching
The citation, not the commentary about it
Ask in plain English and get on-point US federal and state precedents with the holding and a real citation. 29 dollars per month, stated openly, no quote and no purchase order. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.