Last revised: February 1, 2007

AASP 499R (Chateauvert)

Scope: This guide provides a quick overview for locating the most important information you will need for this class. Email the subject area specialist, Travis Johnson, at travismj@umd.edu or call 301-405-9261 for more information or assistance.

Much of your course reading will be law review articles and case law -- both of which, when you have the full citation, are usually quite easy to find using the library's subscription databases. Both Lexis Nexis Academic and Westlaw Campus Research are available to you -- it is probably wise to try using both, but Westlaw is more user friendly and full-featured for most of your purposes.

Table of Contents

• Case Law
• Law Review Articles

Finding Cases Using Citations

• Finding Case Law:
  Both Lexis Nexis Academic and Westlaw Campus have full editions of US case law (every published opinion in US history). For your purposes, you will probably find Westlaw more useful because of its more advanced features. Westlaw will provide hyperlinks to all cited cases and articles within documents, includes briefs for many cases, and will also provide citation history and currency (KeyCite), none of which are as fully or easily available in our version of Lexis.

  To access a case in Westlaw Campus:

  • Open the database and agree to their terms and conditions.
  • Enter the citation in the appropriate box at the top left. Search by the numbered citation (ie, 347 U.S. 483), not by the title (party names, ie Brown v. Board of Education).
  • That should bring up the full text of the opinion on the right. Links to briefs and related documents are in the sidebar.
  • For KeyCite, the history will be the cases that led up to this one, citing references will be all the cases that have cited and possibly altered this case. Click on either one to see all the relevant cases. Note especially that the flag indicates whether the case in question is still "good law" or has had some "negative treatment" or been overturned.
  • Note that the supplemental material added by the database provider (headnotes, footnotes or annotations) may help to explain the law, but is not part of the legal document.

  Cases can also be accessed in Lexis Nexis Academic if you prefer, by using the "get a case" box to search for the specific citation, but footnotes will not be linked, a more limited history and citation reporter (called Shepards in Lexis) is available, and briefs are generally not easily available.

Finding Known Law Review Articles

• To access a law review article in Westlaw Campus:
  • Type the full title of the article in the big search box.
  • click the box next to "Journals and Law Reviews", and make sure to select "All Journals and Law Reviews" from the pull down menu.
  • Click search.
  • Depending on the words in the title, there may be several items to look through -- you can add other keywords, including author, to your search if necessary.
• To access a law review article in Lexis Nexis Academic:
  • Open Lexis and click on "Legal Research" in the left column.
  • Click on "Law Reviews" (Legal News is professional news for lawyers, like law magazines and newspapers, Law Reviews are scholarly journals of the law).
  • Click on the "Guided Search" tab at the top.
  • Enter the title of the article, and change the scroll box to "title"
  • It should come right up if it's available in the database.

If neither of these sources has the law review article you want, you can check the HeinOnline Law Journal Library -- this is a little bit like JSTOR for Law Reviews, with full historical coverage of many of the most important ones, but it doesn't always have very current coverage and it's a bit cumbersome. Browsing by journal title is the easiest way to go here if you know the citation.