To ensure that the topic you select has not been preempted by another author, you will need to do a preemption check of the subject matter. The Index to Legal Periodicals is an excellent online tool for this purpose. Other possible sources to check are Hein Online, and the law review databases on Westlaw, Lexis Advance. If you plan to use these tools from home, with the exception of Westlaw and Lexis Advance, you will need to log on using your university network credentials.
Another online source of new and pre-published scholarship is SSRN. Similar to SSRN is BePress, another legal scholarship repository that is free to search. The advantage to searching both SSRN and BePress is that since they provide access to pre-publication articles and "works in progress" they act as useful preemption check services for areas of the law that are constantly changing.
Law Commons is a subset of bepress’s Digital Commons Network, a worldwide repository of open access scholarship. The Law Commons contains over 240,000 works in more than 100 subject categories, including “peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.” There is no charge for browsing, searching or downloading. Content from Scholarship at CUA Law is also included in the Law Commons.
HeinOnline contains digitized and searchable full-text collections of legal journals, texts, cases, statutes, regulations, agency decisions, Congressional documents, legislative histories and treaties, covering U.S. federal and state, U.K, Canada and international law. Majors subsets include: U.S. Code, Statutes at Large, Congressional Record, CFR, Federal Register, state statutes and reports (historical), state session laws (current), Attorney General's opinions, and selected CRS reports and Congressional hearings.
Access via Westlaw. This database is a cumulative index to approximately 1300 legal publications and also includes law related articles from more than 1,000 additional business and general interest periodicals. This database is available only to current CUA Law students, faculty and staff.
Lexis contains legal and law-related documents, including federal and state cases, statutes, regulations, administrative rulings, legislative histories, legal newspapers and journals, and looseleaf services. This database is available only to current CUA Law students, faculty and staff.
Westlaw contains legal and law-related documents, including federal and state cases, statutes, regulations, administrative rulings, legislative histories, legal newspapers and journals, and general news. This database is available only to current CUA Law students, faculty and staff.
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