Research for Scholarly Legal Writing

Once you have selected your topic, you will need to expand your research. Your preemption materials are a great starting point since they will contain sources that help build your background understanding of the area you are researching. Make note of the sources they reference and add these to your background research. It is also a good idea to begin generating a list of search terms from these materials to assist you as you begin to broaden your research.

For your background research, you should search in some or all of the following sources:

Books: Use the UDC Law Library catalog to search for books by subject, title, author, or keyword, or check the main UDC library for non-legal or interdisciplinary sources.

Articles: Search for articles using the legal and non-legal journal databases you utilized for preemption checking. Westlaw and Lexis have large collections of law reviews and journals. Depending on your topic, you may also find useful scholarship in the following sources:

• HeinOnline -  PDFs of all published issues of most U.S. law journals and bar publications
• Google Scholar - searches journal articles from all over the world including legal articles
• Digital Commons Legal Repository - offers working papers and pre-publication articles from law schools throughout the country
• Digital Commons - open access academic research from top universities
• SSRN - maintains the Legal Scholarship Network, one of the largest repositories of legal articles with full-text articles and abstracts
• Academic Search Premier (Main Library database) - over 10,000 sources on all scholarly topics
• JSTOR (Main Library database) - includes legal and non-legal articles
• ProQuest Research Library (Main Library database) - more than 4,070 titles from scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers
• ABI/INFORM Complete (Main Library database) - business research database with full-text articles from business journals and newspapers 

Specialized Materials

If you are writing in a highly specialized area of the law, such as Intellectual Property, Tax, or Employment Law, there are other resources you may also want to examine. Consulting academic research guides is a good way to learn about practice area-specific resources - many will be accessible through Westlaw, Lexis, or other subscription databases. Some law schools who have robust collections of topical research guides are:

• Georgetown Law
• GW Law

Feel free to reach out to one of our reference librarians if there are additional sources you need but cannot find - we are always happy to help!