Law review and journal articles can be a great secondary source to kick off your legal research. Articles can provide a summary of an area of law, history of its progression, citations to relevant case law, statutes, and other primary law, analysis of issues, and normative theories. If you're researching an area of law, chances are good someone has written about it before in a law review article. Why not capitalize on their work? It's what any rational actor would do to maximize their time and effort in a cost-benefit analysis.
Law review and journal articles can be searched for and accessed from a growing schmorgesborg of sources these days. Given the mass quanitities of law review articles being published, expert researchers prefer to use indexes which provide more focused results than does keyword searching. Legal Resource Index (LRI) is available on both Westlaw (direct link to database) and Lexis (under Secondary Legal, click on Law Reviews & Journals, then select Legal Resource Index). Note that LRI only indexes articles back to the mid-1980s.
Full-text articles can be searched in the journal databases on Lexis and Westlaw. As is the case with LRI, beware that these databases only carry articles to the mid-1980s. Hard as it may be for some of you to believe, legal scholarship did exist before Lexis and Westlaw launched themselves into cyberspace some 20 years ago. To search and access law review and journal articles prior to the '80s, the most popular choice is HeinOnline, which carries PDFs of all law review and journal articles (plus some other very groovy resources) from their inception to the near present.
But what if you don't have access to Westlaw, Lexis, or HeinOnline; or you want to search for free and/or explore other sources with not-yet-published papers. There are two primary sources now available. The first is Google Scholar. By searching Articles (not patents), Google searches within many major academic journal databases, including HeinOnline. The nice thing about this is that Google tells you if you have access to the article via your institution (based on your computer's IP address) and will prompt you to get full-text access. The other nice thing about this is that you search beyond the law for interdisciplinary results which can provide a richer understanding of an issue. However, Google Scholar doesn't always link you to the freely available version of an article.
The second and most recent addition to the field is the ABA Free Full-Text Online Law Review/Law Journal Search Engine. This google-powered search engine includes "the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals, as well as document repositories hosting academic papers and related publications such as Congressional Research Service reports." Unlike Google Scholar, this engine includes SSRN and BePress, which is very helpful. And it's inclusion of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports is inspired. However, it will only include the dates of publication provided by each journal, which will be spotty coverage compared to HeinOnline.
So that's your legal journal buffet for the moment. Enjoy!
