Legal scholarship can come in a variety of formats:
1. Law review articles. These may be written by academics, law students (student notes/comments), or practicing attorneys.
2. Books. Frequently authored by academics, these provide in-depth analyses of particular issues.
3. Current awareness/analysis. These are usually authored by practitioners and may appear in current awareness publications, but may also appear in blogs or online supplements offered by law reviews.
4. Unpublished scholarship/working papers.
Below are some links to help you find these different resources. Always consider which formats may be most popular for your topic.
There are many different ways to locate relevant articles related to your subject. You can do full text searching in Lexis, Westlaw, Google Scholar, the library catalogs, or a number of other databases (for useful non-legal databases, see the Non-Legal tab).
Unless the language is very specialized and narrow, full-text searching is not recommended. Instead try field searches, or better yet, searching indexes. See below.
You might also be able to more efficiently locate material by searching specific fields in an advanced search. This will allow you to search for articles with specific words in the title or summary, or by a certain author.
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INDEXES
Legal periodical indexes are highly recommended as they typically provide fewer false hits. There are a few, each with different strengths. Search by subject or keyword, to locate articles with your topic.
To locate books/monographs, just search the library catalog! If you are looking beyond the library, the library catalog can still help you. See details below or check out one of the other resources listed.
Often, current awareness scholarship will be indexed and findable via the legal periodical indexes listed elsewhere on this page.
