Legal/Paralegal Resources
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- Research on crime, its causes and impacts, legal and social implications, as well as litigation and crime trends.
- Ashworth’s best source for criminal justice.
- Includes:
- Scholarly Journals
- Law Enforcement Trade Publications
- Crime Reports
- Free to Ashworth Students!
Additional Resources
Best General Web Sources
Other Databases
Websites for Legal Research 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
Digital Commons Network- Law Commons
- An open source institutional repository which makes the scholarly output of several universities and institutions freely available
- In total the Law subject area contains over 150,000 full-text articles from almost 200 institutions
- A tutorial on using the Digital Commons Network can be found here.
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.”
- Provides links to nearly 200 open access journals in several languages, covering both American and international research, with full-text articles focusing on the subject of law
- Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature
- 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
- To find free full-text articles, look for items that have a PDF link on the right hand side of the page.
Websites for Legal Research Resources
Cornell Legal Information Institute
- Contains information on Federal Law, Federal Rules, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), and U.S. Code (USC), and more
- Includes the Constitution, commentary, Uniform and Model Laws, and more
- Also contains topical sections, blogs, and other content.
Cornell LII’s State Information Page
- This page from the Cornell LII gives state-specific judicial and legislative resources.
- “Published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.”
- Can also be accessed and downloaded via XML.
- Though patent law is narrow focus in legal practice, for those needing accessible information on the subject, Google Patents is a good starting point
- Created through a grant from the National Science Foundation
- Tracks the cases and developments of the U.S. Supreme Court
- Includes case summaries, transcripts, and other multimedia materials.
- Non-profit site which works with Internet Archive and Princeton to make public documents and court records widely available
- Provides access to a huge amount of public documents and resources and sub-sites contain resources such as streaming media access to the House of Representatives