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One of the resources you will use most for this course is LexisNexis Academic. It offers a rich array of legal materials. Included in the Lexis collection are these materials:
Federal & State Cases
Supreme Court Briefs
Federal Statutes, Codes & Regulations
State Statutes, Codes & Regulations
Law Reviews
Legal Reference
If you need to locate a court decision at any level, or a law or regulation, you can easily do so with Lexis. Additionally, you can search law reviews to see what legal scholars have written about a certain issue or case.
In addition to the significant legal resources in Lexis, there is also a vast news archive in Lexis, which is updated daily. You may wish to look at news reports concerning a noteworthy case that pertains to your argument, and Lexis will offer national, regional, and local sources to do that.
You may wish to view materials pertaining to the making of laws in order to try to understand "legislative intent." ProQuest Congressional provides access to an enormous body of Congressional material as well as supplementary resources such as legislative histories.
Should you need to search for legislative resources at the state level, one place to begin is with the listing of state legislature websites maintained on the THOMAS site.
Additional Databases for Legal and Legislative Research
This is a key portion of the CQ Electronic Library. The Congress collection allows for research on members of Congress as well as research on topics Congress deals with in the course of its work.
HeinOnline is the world's largest fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database. It contains comprehensive coverage of both U.S. statutory materials, U.S. Congressional Documents, more than 2,400 scholarly journals, all of the world's constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, and access to the full text of state and federal case law powered by Fastcase. This Government, Politics & Law HeinOnline package offers special collections on Criminal Justice, Religion and the Law, Women and the Law, and others.
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts, and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, is contained in the C-SPAN Archives and immediately accessible through the database and electronic archival systems developed and maintained by the C-SPAN Archives. All programs since 1987 are digital and can be viewed online for free.
Includes addresses, interviews, broadcasts, ceremonies, call-in programs, news conferences, legislative sessions, committee hearings, debates, meetings, public affairs events, etc. The Archives records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text.
"Oyez (pronounced OH-yay)—a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law—is a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is the most complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and full-text Supreme Court opinions (through Justia). Oyez also provides detailed information on every justice throughout the Court’s history and offers a panoramic tour of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of several justices."
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