LEGALST R1B: Equal Rights in a Changing Society

Legal Studies focuses on the study of law and justice, including legal institutions and the legal process, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The courses in this undergraduate major deal with a wide variety of subjects, including philosophy, American legal history, foreign legal traditions, political science, public policy, business and economics, social sciences, environmental studies, bioethics, ethnic and gender studies, and the criminal justice process.

The UC Berkeley Library maintains a research-level collection in many fields. The collection supports the legal studies department's teaching programs, as well as other disciplines, interdisciplinary programs, and professional schools. Many of the Library's social science, science, and humanities collections also inform legal studies researchers.

The Legal Studies collection (Library of Congress Call # range K-KZ) is housed in the Gardner (Main) Stacks. The undergraduate Moffitt Library also maintains a collection of core, high-use English language materials of particular relevance to the undergraduate curriculum. The Reference Center and North Reading Room on the 2nd floor of Doe houses a permanent reference collection in social sciences and government documents. Several subject speciality libraries including Social Welfare, Public Health, Education & Psychology, Ethnic Studies, Institute for Governmental Studies, and Business also possess collections highly relevant to legal studies.

The Law Library collects primary and secondary materials related to law and has strict access and circulation policies for non-UCB Law students.

For a comprehensive search for relevant information on a legal studies topic, researchers may need to use many of UCB's licensed databases. This guide links to databases that point to books, articles, government documents, and news sources for use in building a knowledge base.

Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books. Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book? Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.

Why use Google Books?

Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.). Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information. Try it now:

Books.
Search the UC Libraries' catalogs to find both e-books and books in print.

Oskicat catalog searches UC Berkeley's online and print collection.

Melvyl searches the UC-wide online and print collections.

UCB's e-book collections link to books only online. Each e-book vendor has its own search engine. Most e-book collections are multi-disciplinary. Melvyl also searches the e-book collections.

Gutenberg-ebooks. A collection of electronic books freely accessible on the web.

LawCat searches the catalog of UC Berkeley's Law School.

WorldCat searches books held by libraries all over the United States. UC may or may not own a book. Use UC's excellent Interlibrary Loan service for anything you can't find.

Google Scholar and Google Books also discover titles. Look for the UC-elinks icon to connect back to the UC-wide libraries' collections to see if we own or license it.

ILL. Use UC's excellent Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service for anything you can't find.

Articles in academic journals and law reviews are excellent sources for finding analyses and commentaries on legal issues. Some of the following resources are specific to the law; others are multi-disciplinary or discipline-specific.

See also the Law Library's Online Research webpage for additonal materials.

Making of Modern Law, Primary Sources 1620-1926; 1763-1970
Fully searchable digital archive containing constitutional conventions and compilations (reports, journals, proceedings, debates, manuals, rules of order, and information for the use of delegates); city charters (the texts of enacted and proposed charters and ordinances in American jurisdictions); law dictionaries; and early U.S. state codes. Primary Sources will also include colonial records from the Primary Source Microfilm collection Published Records of the American Colonies

Academic Search Complete
A multidisciplinary index to articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
CQ Electronic Library
A reference source on American politics and government that includes the following modules: CQ Congress Collection, CQ Political Handbook of the World, CQ Researcher Plus Archive, CQ Supreme Court, CQ Voting and Elections, CQ Washington Information Directory, CQ Weekly. Access individual modules or search across all CQ collections.
ProQuest Social Sciences
An interdisciplinary metasearch through 22 of the the social sciences indexes on the ProQuest platform. Includes EconLit, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, PAIS, PsycInfo, Sociological Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and more.
Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Knowledge)
Indexes over 1,700 journals spanning 50 disciplines, as well as covering individually selected items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals, and provides searching of footnoted citations. Use the link above, then under Current Limits, specify Social Sciences Citation Index. For more guidance on using this database see the following tutorials: Creating Alerts and Creating an RSS Feed.
Sociological Abstracts
Indexes over 1,900 journals, books, dissertations, and reviews in the social sciences on sociological topics as well as selected anthropology, criminology, demography, law, social psychology, and urban development.
PsycINFO
Indexes over 1300 journals, conference proceedings, books, reports, and dissertations in psychology and enriched with literature from psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work.
Hein Online
Provides full text to the early issues of many legal journals and law reviews, the Federal Register (1936-six months ago), US Supreme Court Library (1754-present) and treaties and agreements.
Index to Legal Periodicals and Books/Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective
Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (1981 - present) indexes approximately 1000 legal journals, yearbooks, institutes, bar association journals, university publications and law reviews, and government publications from the United States, Puerto Rico, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Also indexes some 1,400 monographs per year. Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective (1918-1981) indexes over 500 legal periodicals back to 1918.
LegalTrac
Indexes journals, law reviews, and magazines related to legal research and commentary on case studies, government regulations, the practice of law, statutes, taxation, and international law.
LexisNexis Academic
Includes over 6,000 individual titles of international, national and local newspapers and wire services; radio and television transcripts; and business, medical, industry, and legislative magazines, journals, and newsletters. Wide geographic coverage and translations from foreign-language sources, as well as news services like the Associated Press, Agence France Press, El Pais and Xinhua (New China) News Agency.
America: History and Life
Indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide on the history of the US and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes all key English-language historical journals; selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals; and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Oxford Reference Online - Law
Access to a number of reference sources published by Oxford University Press on the topic the law including American and international law, legal history and the Supreme Court. Search sources collectively or search within an individual title.
Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926
A collection of 19th and 20th century legal treatises, casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, pamphlets, letters, speeches, and other historical legal works, covering a wide range of topics of US and British law. Includes approximately 10 million pages and over 21,000 works.
GenderWatch
Includes magazines, academic journals, newspapers, newsletters, books, pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government reports that focus on the impact of gender across a broad spectrum of subject areas.
GLBT Historical Society
GLBT Historical Society maintains one of the world's largest collections of primary source material about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history. Their collection includes archives and manuscripts, ephemera and oral histories. Look up their periodical, journal, magazine and 'zine holdings using CatalogQ.
Lesbian Herstory Archives
The largest and oldest Lesbian archive in the world. The archive houses over 20,000 volumes, 12,000 photographs, 1,600 periodical titles, along with artifacts and memorabilia.
LGBT Life
Indexes more than 120 Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender (GLBT)-specific core periodicals and over 200 GLBT-specific core books and reference works. The product also contains data mined from over 40 priority periodicals and over 1,400 select titles. Also provides references to grey literature, newsletters, case studies, speeches, etc. Disciplines covered include civil liberties, culture, employment, family, history, politics, psychology, religion, sociology and more. Will soon contain all relevant data from NISC's Sexual Diversity Studies.

Although much government information can be found via open access government portals online (such as USA.gov and the State of California) the UCB Library has purchased additonal resources for more in-depth and historical research. In addition to the following databases, be sure to check these two Library collections:

Government Information

Government Studies Library

CQ Researcher Plus Archive
A weekly publication covering the most current and controversial issues and topics. Includes complete summaries and bibliographies. Part of the CQ Electronic Library collection.
American Factfinder (U.S. Census Bureau)
Interactive, searchable database used to find population, housing, industry and business statistics from the U.S. Census. Data collected in Census 2000, the 1990 Census of Population and Housing, the American Community Survey and the 1997 Economic Census. Allows users to compile census data into tables, maps and downloadable files, which can be viewed or printed.
American Presidency Project
Contains all major publications of the U.S. Office of the President, including: Public Papers of the President, Inaugural Addresses, Executive Orders, Signing Statements, and other information such as radio addresses, party platforms, videos of debates, and popularity polling data. This project was developed by two political science professors at UCSB.
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Provides time series data for national and state income accounts and international trade and investment. Also includes U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by industry and input-output tables for select years.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Presents up-to-date U.S. economic statistical information in areas such as 'Inflation and Spending' and 'International Statistics.' Also available are the latest numbers for the Consumer Price Index, unemployment rate, and the Producer Price. Provides past and current statistics for the U.S. economy as a whole; regional economic data can be obtained by clicking the state on a color-coded map.
California Ballot Propositions Database
Database of California ballot measures from 1911 to the present.
California Statistical Abstract
Compilation of data on social, economic, and physical aspects of the State. The contributor for each table is given at the bottom of the table and may be contacted for more details or an explanation of the data.
U.S. Congressional Serial Set
A full-text database of key publications of the United States Congress. Also includes publications of the executive departments relating to important public issues. The Serial Set is a critical resource for the study of all aspects of American history including international relations, explorations, commerce and industrial development, genealogy, and political, social, cultural, military and ethnic history. When complete, the database will offer approximately 13,800 volumes and over 12 million pages in searchable full-text. (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)

Here are some general news and newsmedia databases. For a full listing of the Library's news resources, check this list.

World News Connection
Want to know what is being said in languages you don't read? WNC provides the news in translation from nearly every country in the world. Designed to serve information needs of US government agencies, so especially strong in the fields of politics, economics, military affairs, environment, and social issues. Reports from 1975-1996 can be found in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Electronic Index.
LexisNexis Academic
Thousands of international, national and local newspapers and wire services. Wide geographic coverage and translations from foreign-language sources, as well as news services like the Associated Press, Agence France Press, El Pais and Xinhua (New China) News Agency.
ProQuest Newspapers
Indexes the New York Times (1999-present), Los Angeles Times (1985-present), Wall Street Journal (1982-present).
Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
Indexes articles from Chicago Defender (1905-1975), Chicago Tribune (1849-1986), Los Angeles Times (1881-1986), New York Times (1851-2004), San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), Wall Street Journal (1889-1990), and Washington Post (1877-1991).

Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!

Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
EndNote: may be purchased from UC Berkeley's Software Central.

It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

Sometimes the database you search doesn't link to the fulltext -- it only gives the citation. Click the UC e-links button to see if Berkeley has it online, and if not, it will check for a print version. And if we don't have it at all, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.

What if there isn't a UC e-links button??? Sometimes you find an article in a bibliography, a book or a footnote -- and you want to see if we have it. The Citation Linker searches through our online databases to see if it's available fulltext. If not, it sets up a search for the paper journal in Melvyl. And if we don't have it at Berkeley, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.