The University of Alabama School of Law
The University of Alabama School of Law
The Bounds Law Library recommends that students planning to write a law journal note perform a preemption check (a search of existing literature) as part of their initial research. A preemption check will help you identify previous scholarly articles (including other student notes) on the same topic as your initial idea. Journals seek original contributions to legal scholarship, and a preemption check helps you avoid duplication of topics. Students who find law review articles on topics like their own may then choose to investigate an alternative topic, modify their initial idea to address gaps they find in the existing literature, or to advance an alternative thesis on the same topic. Any of these approaches will help you increase the originality of your contribution to legal scholarship.
The sections below provide at least one strategy for finding relevant articles on a given topic: beginning with legal indexes of existing journal articles, full-text searching back issues of law journals, and full-text searching non-law articles in other databases.
After reading this guide, if you have additional questions, please visit the circulation desk to speak with a reference librarian.
HeinOnline is the world’s largest English-language database of legal scholarship and includes thousands of law journal titles. Among other resources, HeinOnline provides access to the Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), a weekly index of recent law review articles arranged by subject or topic. You will find CILP useful for generating new ideas for research topics, avoiding duplicating other scholars’ work, and identifying existing literature on the topic they are researching.
FILR provides an index of foreign and international legal periodicals arranged by subject area.
Similar to CILP, the Legal Resource Index allows users to search articles in Westlaw journals by subject/topic. Access to LRI is provided through Westlaw.
Index of numerous legal periodicals published between 1908 and 1981 in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as annual surveys of jurisdictional laws and federal courts, annual institutes, and annual reviews of work on specific topics.
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a searchable database of open access journals, including law journals.
HeinOnline provides access to full-text searching of all materials in the Law Journal Library, a database of thousands of American and foreign legal periodicals.
Westlaw provides access to full-text searching of their collection of legal periodicals, including many American law reviews.
Lexis provides access to full-text searching of their collection of legal periodicals, including many American law reviews.
Scholarly Commons provides access to abstract searching of legal/scholarly articles written by faculty at hundreds of American law schools.
SSRN provides access to legal scholars' draft articles, working papers, and forthcoming scholarship in a range of subject areas. Users can full-text search the database's content to find articles and notes that have recently been published or will soon be published. It is useful for finding articles that have not yet appeared on HeinOnline, Westlaw, Lexis, or which are subject to embargo.
Academic Search Premier provides access to full-text versions of scholarly articles. It contains indexing and abstracts for news sources and refereed journals in nearly every area of academic study, including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language & linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, ethnic studies, and more.
Business Source Complete indexes business journals throughout the world on various subjects, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance, economics, and more. It also contains financial data, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses. Lastly, it provides access to full text articles from many publishers and links out to full-text options for other articles.
JSTOR provides access to full-text PDF versions of many scholarly titles in a range of subject areas, including literature, biological sciences, economics, finance, and statistics.
Bounds Law Library provides a list of available databases that can be used to search for topics in specialized areas.
Gorgas Library also provides a list of databases to available databases that can be used to search for topics in specialized areas.
Google Scholar provides access to PDF versions of some scholarly literature in many academic areas.
Students may find it helpful to set up database “alerts” notifying them of new scholarship in the topics/subject areas they are researching.
Click the link above for instructions to create many different types of alerts.
Click the link above for instructions to create many different types of alerts.
Click the link above for instructions to create an alert using Google Alerts.
Academic Legal Writing by 
Scholarly Writing for Law Students by