Comm 422: Courts & Law Reviews

Here are several resources to locate court cases:

Finding U.S. and Supreme Court Cases:

LexisNexis Academic

• Includes full text of federal and state codes, regulations, court decisions, and law review articles.  The most complete resource for finding full text decisions and for shepardizing case law.

Finding Supreme Court Cases:

• U.S. Supreme Court
  
  • Official U.S. Supreme Court web site. Includes the docket, calendar, court rules, opinions, orders and other information about the Court.  Most useful for cases from the previous two years.

• Cornell Legal Information Institute site for Supreme Court Decisions
  • The LII collection of historic decisions of the US Supreme Court contains over 300 of the court's most important decisions through the whole period of its existence.  Contains full text for 1990+, but has abstracts and citations for historical cases.  This is a great place to start, if you're looking for cases on a certain topic!!
  • On the lower portion of the screen, under Archive of Decisions you can browse by topic from 1990 - present, or by historic cases.  

• Oyez Project
  • The Oyez Project is a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. The Project also provides authoritative information on all justices and offers a virtual reality 'tour' of portions of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of some of the justices.

(Courtesy of Chris Granatino, UCSB)

THOMAS -- provides access to federal legislative information including Bills, Resolutions, floor activity in Congress, Congressional Record, schedules and calendars, links to committee information, Presidential nominations, treaties, and miscellaneous government resources.

FedLaw -- provides references of use to individuals doing Federal legal research and which can be accessed directly through "point and click" hypertext connections. It is a good general legal research site covering federal statutes, regulations, and Executive Orders, the federal judiciary, the legislative branch, state and territorial laws, arbitration and mediation information, general research and reference, professional associations and organizations, and how-to legal-related sites.

The Patent Lens -- this system can be used to search the full-text of over eight million patents and patent applications. The site also integrates INPADOC (International Patent Documentation Center) legal status and patent family information from over sixty countries directly into the search results. This data can help to give an idea whether a patent application related to one of interest was filed in other countries, and possibly whether patents are in force or applications are still pending. Updated weekly.

Law review articles can be a great resource when you are trying to find relavent case law on a particular subject area or topic.  Typically, a law review article will contain numerous foot notes and citations to relavent cases, giving you the opportunity to learn a little more about the history of a particular subject in case law as well as finding the citations to historically important cases. (Text courtesy of Chris Granatino, UCSB)

Here are several sources to locate Law Review Journals:

LexisNexis

Once in the database, we can follow these steps to find some law review articles.

1. Click on the blue US Legal tab on the left hand side of the screen, and then click on Law Reviews.
2. The database will then provide us with several search boxes, and a number of ways to limit our search results.  Typically, it is a good idea to use the limits at the bottom of the screen to make sure that the results you get back are in the relavent subject area.
3. Using a combination of keywords, and the Lexis Nexis connectors you can pull back a number of law review articles, that can then be sorted by journal.
4. When looking at your results, on the left hand side of the screen you will see the titles of the journals that have relavent articles.  You can click on any of these journals to just see the results for that particular journal.  If you have an overwhelming number of results, try to see if one journal has published a high number of articles on this particular subject.  You can also limit to just the largest Universities, like Harvard, Columbia, or Yale.