This website is designed to give you information on legal resources you'll find useful for this class. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me:
Court Cases | Background Info | Journal Articles
Court Cases - Federal and State
Use LexisNexis Academic - Click on Legal Research on the right hand side to access federal and state court cases, law review articles, and other legal materials.
Click on Get a Case to find court cases by name or citation. For the names you were given as suggested cases, you'll have to spell out "united states" or "new york times," etc. You may pull up more than one, depending on how unique the names are, so look at the date. You may get opinions of the same case at different levels (district court, court of appeals, and Supreme Court), or you may get totally unrelated ones.
If you know the citation for the case, such as 283 U.S. 697, then definitely use that rather than party name. The citation is a unique number for a particular case.
Once you have found the case you want, to follow the history of the case, click the Shepards link in the upper left hand corner. This will give you the citations to the prior cases, as well as citations to cases that used that case as part of the decision-making process. (If you get too many hits here, and you only want to view certain kinds of cases, click on Custom Restrictions and check the boxes for what types of citing references you want to see, such as only Supreme Court cases. You can also use this to find law review articles and other analysis that discuss the case.)
Background Information
If you need a general overview (few paragraphs to a few pages) of a case or issue, try:
- Encyclopedia of the American Constitution [REF KF4548 .E53 2000, 6 vol.] -- encyclopedia offers short to medium length entries on issues and specific cases relating to constitutional law, such as free press
- West's Encyclopedia of American Law [REF KF154 .W47 2005, 13 vols.] -- encyclopedia offering entries on all aspects of American law, with short lists of suggested readings; will have some entries on specific cases
For more detailed analysis aimed at lawyers, try American Law Reports (ALR), REF KF 132.6. You can get specific citations from the Shepard's within LexisNexis Academic.
Journal Articles
Here you have several options, depending on what kind of search you want to do.
I want some recent articles on my topic.
Try:
Academic Search Premier -- full text articles from
around 4,500 magazines and journals and indexing for around
8,000 periodicals total; check the box to limit to scholarly journals [help with database]
Expanded Academic ASAP -- full text articles from around 1,000 magazines and journals, with citations from another 500 sources; check the box to limit to scholarly journals [help with database]
I want to search a large, cross-section of law reviews for legal analysis.
Try:
LexisNexis Academic -- Use the Shepard's link to get citation, or you can do a keyword search within all the full text law reviews. Click on Legal Research on the right hand side, then choose Law Reviews to access scholarly law review articles from hundreds of law reviews. If you are keyword searching from scratch, I would suggest clicking on the Guided Search tab to be able to do a more focused keyword search. You can limit to finding your terms within the title of the article (by choosing Title instead of the defaulted Full Text).
I want to do a search for articles from the media literature.
Try:
Communication & Mass Media -- full text articles from around 200 magazines and journals, and indexing from another 300 titles for all communication, journalism, and mass media subjects
Once you have a citation to an article...
Go to the Journals @ UIS. Type in the name of the journal in the box. This directory will tell you if the library has a physical print subscription to the journal, or has access to it in one of our full text databases.
If it's a print subscription, note the call number and the format for the year you need. (If it doesn't indicate a format, then it's in print, versus microfilm.)
If it's full text in a database, click on the Find Title link to browse a list of issues (or you may be given a search box limiting to searching within that journal). Clicking on the name of the database just takes you to the database itself, and you will have to perform a keyword search to locate your specific article. I would suggest typing in unique words from the title of the article.
If we do not own/have access to the article you want, fill out the Interlibrary Loan form and we'll mail you a copy of the article. Please allow 1-3 weeks.
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