Research Links for Constitutional Law
Last updated 1 July 2003
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 will need to type
in each URL or cut and paste it. They are NOT linked from this web
page.

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.
http://www.findlaw.com/
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://lawcrawler.com/
http://www.findlaw.com/lawreviews/
http://legalnews.findlaw.com/
http://www.legalminds.org/
The following are a variety of additional sites that students
might find useful. These should b explored during the course.
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.
http://www.uscourts.gov/
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
transcripted 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.
