Research Links for Constitutional Law
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You may find the following links useful in searching for primary and some secondary legal research materials. Examine them carefully, and be sure you have a good idea of what you are looking for when you start selecting items that are available at any of these. You may need to type in each URL or cut and paste it.
http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/toc.html
This
URL may be invaluable to you. It is a link to the U.S. Senate Document
that provides the text of the Constitution plus a tremendous amount of
annotation, including court cases and interpretations of the provisions.
You can also search the Constitution for words and phrases at this site.
Thus, if you want to know what the Constitution provides in connection with a
term, a phrase, or a word, you can at least locate where that item appears in
the document itself.
Furthermore, the extensive
annotation this document contains allows the student to identify and explore
supporting cases (Court decisions and interpretations) and secondary discussion
about provisions in the Constitution. This will be quite useful in
connection with undertaking the Class Project for this course.
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe
This is the general URL that will provide a wide variety of access ti legal and public documents. It contains both federal and state materials, including statutory and case law. It an excellent way to look up a case, any case, as well as other legal materials. This site may not be particularly current, so the Supreme Court decisions you read about in the New York Times today, may not be at this web site right away. However, it has a very extensive set of legal materials, state as well as federal, court opinions and statutory. It also contains a good deal of secondary literature -- journal articles and the like relating to legal materials.
This web site provides a general set of contacts with various legal materials. These range from Supreme Court opinions to practice forms, statutes, law school and law student resources, law reviews, and the like. It is a very useful site and students are encouraged to consult it frequently and often in the course of doing research for this course, preparing for class, and completing class assignments.
There are a variety of subsites within this one that are more specialized and therefore they may be more useful for specific searches.
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/
http://www.findlaw.com/lawreviews/
The following are a variety of additional sites that students might find useful. These should b explored during the course.
http://www.law.cornell.edu:80/uscode/
This subsite from Cornell provides a direct link to the United States Code. If you know the title and section of the federal law you can find it immediately. Otherwise, you can search the code for key phrases or particular subjects. If you have the name of the statute, you can also find it at this site.
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/
This is the . It is quite useable for a variety of purposes relating to past and present Court work -- cases, justices, court structure, rules, procedures, and opinions.
This is a web page for the federal courts. It provides a wide variety of general information about the organization and operation of the federal courts. It is good, general background.
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/frontpage
This site provides a link to a number of interesting and useful aspects of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the current docket, recent Court decisions, and recorded and transcribed oral argument of cases presented to the Supreme Court for decision.
http://www.lib.purdue.edu/govd/subjguides.html
The HSSE Library at Purdue provides this link which you might find useful and interesting. It contains extensive, subject matter connections to many different government documents and sources of information and data. Most of them are not related to Constitutional Law, but some connect to sources on environmental policy and law.