How to Research the Legal Literature

When you are writing an essay or thesis during the course of your law degree, or when you are working, you may wish to find a description and analysis of a particular area of law, written by academics and practitioners. The journal literature provides academic commentary on the law; it may cover recent developments in the law; offer a comparative analysis of an aspect of the law; provide historical information; argue from a particular theoretical or jurisprudential viewpoint. All serve to help inform our understanding of the law.

Indexes to the Journal Literature

Tradtitionally, identifying relevant journal articles meant using a journal index. Such indexes provide a topical approach to the law as the articles are indexed and assigned subject (topic) terms to describe the main content of the article. Therefore, as a researcher, you can search for a topic and retrieve articles almost wholly concerned with that subject. This provides a very efficient means of searching.

• Searching online journal indexes.
• The principal Australian and foreign law journal indexes may be accessed from the Journals webpage.

Full-text Journal Literature

Searching for relevant material in the journal literature can now also be done by acessing full-text journal content online. There is an ever-increasing number of law journals becoming available online, so knowing how to find these journals, and to then emply the best ways to search and retrieve relevant articles becomes paramount. Note too, that many index databases enable linking to the full-text of an article where it is available online, so the distinction between index and full-text journal databases is becoming increasingly blurred.

• Online Journals Full-text
• Library catalogue