Law & Legal Studies: Getting Started

Nexis Uni is an outstanding source for researching news, business, and legal topics. It contains more than 6,000 sources from all over the world, drawn from print, broadcast, and online media. Use the Easy Search form if you just need a quick answer to a simple query, you're not familiar with advanced searching methods, or you're not sure which sources to use. Enter any terms or phrases, with or without connectors, and Easy Search will determine the best searching method (terms and connectors or natural language) based on what you entered.

Indexing and abstracts are provided for 250 scholarly publications on legal topics. Most titles are full-text, and some titles go back as far as 1965, but most do not. Our other full-text law collections do not have subject headings.

Full-text of the entire historical runs of more than 400 law journals with more being added regularly. Many are current to within the last couple of years. Other historical law sets available are the Federal Register (1936-1981), U.S. Reports (Supreme Court opinions), and United States Treaties sets.

ProQuest Congressional offers information and primary-source documents by and about the United States Congress. It indexes Congressional publications from 1789 to the present and provides access to CIS Legislative Histories for public laws (1970-). Full text is available for many publications including testimony from congressional hearings (1824-Present); committee reports (1817-Present); bill texts and status (1989-); Statutes at Large/U.S. Code (1789-); Congressional Serial Set (1789-2003); Federal Register (1980-); and the Congressional Record, including the Annals of Congress (1789-1997). It also provides information about members and committees.

GovInfo (previously called FDSys) is a service of the US Government Printing Office and offers free U.S. Government information, including free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government. In addition to providing an advanced, metadata-powered search experience, GovInfo also includes a content management system and a standards-compliant preservation repository.