Poli322: American Constitutional Law

Some Useful Information Sources

I. BOOKS

Library catalogs:

EZRA - The Wittenberg University catalog
OhioLINK - Combined catalog of more than 80 Ohio libraries
World Cat Open Access - Combined catalog of thousands of libraries worldwide
(If you can't get it from OhioLINK, fill out the Interlibrary Loan: Book Request Form)

Some helpful books:

In the Reference section:
West's Encyclopedia of American Law. 13 volumes. Ref. KF 154 .W47 2005
Black's Law Dictionary. 7th ed. Ref. KF156 .B53 2014
In the Main Stacks:
The U.S. Constitution A to Z. Main KF 4548 .M33 2002
The Constitution and Its Amendments. 4 volumes. Main KF 4557 .C66 1999

II. PERIODICALS

Article databases for Political Science Research

International Political Science Abstracts	Produced by the International Political Science Association, this database includes current indexing and abstracts of the world's leading journals in political science published from 1989 to the present.
Nexis Uni	Contains legal news and reviews, case law, codes and regulations, and more. Use "Get A Doc Assistance" link to lookup case law. Use the "All Nexis Uni" button to the left of the search box to Narrow by Content Collection to Law Reviews and Journals.
Legal Collection	Full text and indexing of law journals.
Women's Studies International	Indexes multidisciplinary scholarship in feminist research.
Academic Search Complete	Contains full text for more than 3,600 scholarly publications, plus article summaries for 900 more journals.
JSTOR	Covers a wide variety of subjects areas. Journals start with the first (oldest) issue, although the most recent few years are not included.
New York Times - Historical	Full text of the New York Times from its inception in 1851 through 2014. More recent full text at nytimes.com (to create a free account, visit http://www.nytimes.com/grouppass).
America: History and Life	U.S and Canadian history, pre-history to present. Has article summaries but no full text.

Or - look at the full list of All Databases.

III. LOCATING JOURNALS

At Wittenberg: use Journals the Library Has to search for the name of the journal in which your article was published.
If Wittenberg doesn't have the journal: use Interlibrary Loan: Article Request Form

Note: Locating journals can be tricky, difficult, and generally exasperating. If you run into trouble, a reference librarian will be glad to assist you.

IV. INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES

Each search engine searches a different set of web pages, so the same search query may produce a different result list in each of the following:

Google

Yahoo

Google Scholar -
Caution! This provides references to scholarly articles, but finding the actual article may be difficult and costly. Also, journal coverage is incomplete and not current. Subscription databases are almost always better.

Criteria for Evaluating your Sources

V. RECOMMENDED WEB SITES

Primary Sources

The Constitution of the United States (via the Library of Congress)
Text of U.S. Constitution with references to cases, books, articles, and additional commentary from The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation - also called The Annotated Constitution.

U.S. Government Sites

United States Supreme Court -

Findlaw

FindLaw resources on Constitutional Law - Besides links to laws, and Supreme Court cases, this site has links to message boards and discussion groups, journal articles, newsletters, hot topics, and more.
Findlaw State Government - State Constitutions
FindLaw US Supreme Court Center - Here you will find biographies of justices, court rules, recent decisions, the court docket, and more.

Guides from other Universities

Guide to the United States Supreme Court "Law news and legal research in real-time, reported and edited by law students and faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law." (via JURIST: The Law Professors' Network)
Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project (cooperative effort of the University of Oklahoma Law Center, the National Indian Law Library (NILL), and Native American tribes to provide access to the Constitutions, Tribal Codes, and other legal documents)
Legal Information Institute at the Cornell University Law School - Has sections on Constitutions and Codes, Court Opinions, Introduction to Basic Legal Citation, Law Events in the News, and more. LII also has an online legal dictionary, Wex, and a Facebook page.
Constitional Law - en excellent compendium of resources at Northwestern's Pritzker Legal Research Center (Wittenberg does not have subscriptions to some of the databases mentioned here, but we do have access to LexisNexis Academic - a version of Lexis meant for undergraduate institutions).

VI. FOR DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES:

American Political Science Association (APSA) Style Sheet
or, Chicago Manual of Style

VII. PEOPLE RESOURCES:

For help, contact Kristen Peters, who is library liaison with the Political Science Department.
Or contact the research help desk.

Compiled by Regina Entorf, Wittenberg University Library
Last updated 1-26-15/KGP