Law and Criminal Justice Resources
Start Here
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
- 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