Law and Criminal Justice Resources
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Criminal Justice Database (ProQuest)
- Research on crime, its causes and impacts, legal and social implications, as well as litigation and crime trends from scholarly journals, law enforcement trade publications, crime reports, and more.
- Watch this Introduction to ProQuest Central video to learn the basics of using this database.
- Additional help can be found in the ProQuest Tutorial series
Criminal Justice Subtopics
Additional Resources
Best General Web Sources
Other Databases
Websites
Criminal Justice Statistics
Open Access Journals
Best General Web Sources
- Free search of articles over 300 online law reviews
- Cornell Law’s Free Online law dictionary.
- Search or Browse full legal definitions of thousands of legal terms.
- From University of Pittsburg Law school
- Largest source of free online legal news.
Other Databases
- The BEPress Digital Commons Network is an open source institutional repository which makes the scholarly output of several universities and institutions freely available
- Law subject area contains over 167,000 works from 212 institutions
- A tutorial on using the Digital Commons Network can be found here
Digital Public Library of America
- Brings together free resources from America’s archives libraries, archives, and museums
- Striving to contain the full breadth of human expression, this portal currently provide access to over 5,000,000 resources
- Use the bookshelf tab or the search bar to navigate to the search interface or find resources on a particular topic
Directory of Open-Access Journals
- “The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact”
- Thousands of open access journals with full text articles
- “Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.”
- Since not all resources on Google Scholar are free, look for items that have a PDF link on the right hand side of the page, which indicate they are available for free immediate viewing
Websites
American Bar Association – Criminal Justice
- The ABA is one of the world’s largest voluntary professional organizations dedicated to serving its members, improving the legal profession, and advancing the rule of law
- News, events and products related to criminal justice
American Civil Liberties Union
- Works to preserve liberties, specifically those protected by the first amendment, equal protection under the law, due process and privacy
- Focuses on a legal and legislative approach and provides information, resources, tools and reports
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications
- Finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those available online
- Can search by authoring agency, title, subject, keyword or more
- A subsidiary of the NIJ and DoJ
- Focuses on research to inform practitioners and policy makers about what works in “criminal justice, juvenile justice, and crime victim services”
- Easy access to datasets generated and held by the federal government
- Provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal government
- Search, browse, access and download official publications
- Federated search engine that searches millions of U.S. Federal government databases
- Research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice
- Provides overviews of key topics, access to NIJ publications and podcasts, events and much more
Congressional Research Service Reports
- Reports from the Congressional Research Service, a federal legislative branch agency located within the Library of Congress
- Provides access to CRS reports already in the public domain
U.S. Government Accountability Office
- GAO is an independent and non-partisan agency that works for congress to investigate how the federal government spends taxpayer money
Criminal Justice Statistics
- A component of the Office of Justice Programs in the U.S. Department of Justice
- The US’s primary source for criminal justice statistics
International Justice Statistics
- Collects criminal justice data from international resources including the UN as well as country specific information
National Archive for Criminal Justice Data
- Provides free, downloadable access to hundreds of data collections for research and instruction in criminal justice
Sourcebook for Criminal Justice
- Data on all aspects of crime gathered from approximately 200 public and private sources
Open Access Journals