Using secondary sources is often the most efficient way to do legal research. They provide analysis by legal scholars and citations to the most important court cases relevant to the point(s) of law you are researching.
Legal encyclopedias provide discussions of legal topics. Annotations included with each entry refer to court case reporters, statutes, and digests of court cases.
"A contemporary statement of American law as derived from reported cases and legislation." Organized into more than 400 topics, arranged alphabetically.
To search select secondary sources this will allow you to search American Law Reports (ALR), American Jurisprudence and other resources from states and subject law materials.. Related content will allow you to search an online version of Blacks Law Dictionary.
Thomson Reuters Westlaw Campus Research - Law is a comprehensive database of resources for researching U.S. Law. It includes primary sources including case law, statutes and regulations at the federal and state levels as well as secondary sources, e.g., American Law Reports, American Jurisprudence, and over 800 law reviews.
- Click on Search by Subject or Topic in the upper right corner of the screen
- Choose just Legal Reference
- Choose Advanced Options Directly below the search box
- Choose American Jurisprudence
Provides access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information. Covers many news sources for 20 years. Court cases and statutes from all federal and state jurisdictions are included. Most resources can be searched in full text.
includes a number of legal encyclopedias and dictionaries, including the Oxford Companion to American Law, Oxford Dictionary of Law, Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions.
Oxford Reference Online consists of a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations found in dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press.