This guide is designed to help you start your legal and law library research.
Please feel free to email me if you get stuck, have additional research questions, would like to set up an appointment, or have other sources to include in the guide.
Just learning about a topic? Start with secondary sources like books or law review articles. Law review articles are the scholarly journal of the legal world and often contain citations to relevant cases and legislation on the topic at hand. Reading law review articles on your research topic can save you a lot of time.
LexisNexis Academic, Westlaw Campus, and HeinOnline contain the full text of law review articles. They also all have the full text of federal and state case law (court opinions) as well as other research tools including encyclopedias and other reference books.
For lower-level court transcripts, contact the original court for availability and ordering instructions. (Expect to pay a fee.) See newspapers/media coverage for additional information on cases that never made it to the appellate courts or beyond.