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Law & Legal Studies Research Guide

This guide provides a quick and easy access to the most use resources in Legal Studies.

Library Proxy

  • You no longer need to configure a browser to use the Library Proxy.
  • When you click on a resource link found in UC Library Search, Databases A-Z or eJournals (UC eLinks), you will be prompted to authenticate. You may authenticate via CalNet, or via your PIN / Cal 1 card number.
  • When you click on a resource link found via a search engine or a non-UCB Library webpage, you will need to use a bookmarklet to access the licensed resource.

Article Databases for Legal Studies

Finding full text/library locations of articles

Once you've searched an index to find articles, you may need to use Get it at UC Get it at UC icon to link to a PDF or html file if the full text is not immediately available. Each database is a bit different, but a good rule of thumb is:

  • When you see either icon, click on it to view your article access options (ex: full text, call number, Interlibrary Loan request, etc.)

Start Your Law Search

Start your search here to find books, articles and more from the Law Library and a selection of law and related fields.

Forward Citations

If an article is relevant to your topic, you want to look at the research it cited (backward citation). But it can also be very helpful to see who has cited it (forward citation). There are several different ways to do this, and the results will overlap --  no single method is comprehensive.

Google Scholar provides forward citations for some articles. It has a broader range of documents included (not just peer reviewed journals, but reports, pre-prints, etc.) and doesn't eliminate self citation or de-duplicate the results.

Web of Science is a vast, multidisciplinary database, which includes the Social Science Citation Index. This index allows you to do a "Cited Reference" search if you select that tab. This will retrieve other articles (from a prestigious list of peer reviewed journals) which have cited the target article, and it also shows the references for the the original article... both forward and backward citation.