Federal Courts and Jurisdiction

A research guide on the federal courts and their jurisdiction.

Legal Indexes

Legal index searching allows you to be more comprehensive in your searching, and also provides subject terms that call pull up information even if specific search terms are not used in the article.

Databases

Heinonline is one of the best places to get law review articles in electronic format.  You also have access to other regulatory information.

Proquest Congressional has reports and hearings from Congress and also inclused the papers from the Congressional Research Service.

LexisNexis and Westlaw have law reviews and other periodicals along with the primary materials you may need for your research.  Start my doing a topical search to find all the databases available for Communications Law.

Articles and papers on the internet

The interent has depositories of articles and papers that can be more timely than materials already published, or published in hard copy.  The three most popular places to go for scholarly articles are:

SSRN 

bepress – The Berkeley Electronic Press 

Google Scholar

Ongoing Searches and Current Awareness

There are various options available to get information to you on a regular basis.  This can include SmartCILP, the electronic version of the Current Index to Legal Periodicals, or scheduled searches on Lexis and Westlaw using their Alert services.

Instructions for SmartCILP:
Point your browser to: http://lib.law.washington.edu/cilp/scilp.html 
Then, click on: Create or change a SmartCILP profile (with proper authorization code only) 

You will need to fill out and submit the form. Our school authorization code is available at the information services desk.

Heafey Law Library Research Team