Law Journal Indexes
Below is a list of indexes to journal articles which may be useful for literature searches. The majority of these are abstract only and available to OU members via Oxlip+.
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Legal Journals Index (hosted on Westlaw UK)The Legal Journals Index covers UK published legal articles from 1986. These are abstracts with full publication details but where the article is available full text on Westlaw there will be a link through. It is available to search by title, author, keyword and full text and there are advanced options to narrow down by date.
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Index to Legal PeriodicalsIndex to Legal Periodicals is available to OU members via Oxlip+. It focuses on articles mainly from English Speaking countries (US, UK, Canada etc). There is also the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals.
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Social Science Citation IndexAvailable to OU members through Oxlip+. Contains abstract and citation information. Although not restricted to legal articles this does include law and is especially good for subjects such as human rights. You can search for author, title, subject or full text . There is also a button called "find it at oxford" which will show you where you can find the article in Oxford.
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Google ScholarGoogle Scholar is a free resource which includes full text articles that are freely available on the web, citations, abstracts and also books. There is no list of what resources Google Scholar indexes but the coverage has improved massively over the past 5 years. You can do a basic search over the full text or search by author, title, publication and date.
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ZETOCThe British Library's Electronic Table of Contents of around 20,000 current journals and approximately 16,000 conference proceedings. Covers 1993 to date and includes an email alerting service
Legal Databases
Westlaw is available to OU members via Oxlip+. It contains the Legal Journals Index which is an abstract of UK published law journals from 1986. There are also a large number of online journals available in full text such as Public Law, Law Quarterly Review, Criminal Law Review, Cambridge Law Journal, Oxford journal of Legal Studies and many others. Some journals do not go back before 1986.
Available to OU members via Oxlip+. This database contains some of the main UK Legal Journals going back to the first volumes (many journals on Westlaw do not start until 1986) and so it is worth checking. Unfortunately its licence will not allow the most recent volumes and so it worth searching for the journal on Oxford E Journals to see the date range. HeinOnline is very easy to browse but there is a search option as well.
Available to OU members via Oxlip+. Lexis Library has a number of journals available full text under the journals tab. You can also search from the front screen for articles by title. The journals include the New Law Journal (selected articles only), Law Society Gazette, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Family Law.
Student Law Reviews
Oxford University Undergraduate Law Journal - Started in June 2012, full text available as a PDF
Cambridge Student Law Review - some issues also available on HeinOnline
King's Student Law Review - also available on HeinOnline
UCL Student Jurisprudence Review - this page gives information about the review but the full text of articles is available to OU members via Westlaw.
Portals to free law reviews and journals
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Directory of Open Access journalsLinks to scholarly journals which allow some or all of their content to be accessed by anyone, free of charge.
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New York Law School Law ReviewsThis portal lists about 150 journals where, at minimum, the latest edition is freely available online. There is also a Google powered search box
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American Bar Association portalThis is a portal to free law reviews and journals. There are links through to the journals as well as a Google powered search engine.
UK law journals
The principal collection of UK law journals in LawBod have shelf marks beginning Cw UK 300 and are located on the main floor. These are arranged alphabetically by journal title. New issues for journals are on our new journals display which is on the right as you come into the library. If you are looking for a new issue that does not appear here or on the shelf then ask staff and we will be able to check if this issue has arrived and where it is in the system.
Westlaw UK - The Westlaw UK database (available to holders of an Oxford SSO.) includes the Legal Journal Index which has abstracts of UK legal articles from 1986 onwards. Some of these will be full text but if the article is not available online it may be contained on one of the many other ejournals in Oxford (see Oxford Ejournals for more information). See the box on the left to see a range of different journal indexes that may help.
Oxford E-journals - If you are unsure whether a journal is available electronically then you can check on Oxford ejournals. You can search by the title of the journal and it should link through to let you know where the journal is held. Some journals are held in more than one database and some databases only hold a certain date range. Make sure you check the date range information which appears underneath the database link. The citation boxes within ejournals do not work well with legal journals and so you may find that even if you fill these in it will not take you directly to the article and you will have to use the navigation within that particular database to find your article.
The Bodleian Law Library also has a database of law reports and journals and this can be searched by title or by jurisdiction.
If you have any problems locating an article then do ask the Bodleian Law Library staff.
Finding Articles in UK Legal Journals
Articles in UK legal journals are usually cited in a certain way. Under the standards set down in OSCOLA (4th ed) the format should be:
Author, 'title', [year - if no volume] OR (year if there is a volume), volume - if present, issue if pages start from 1 for each part, journal name or abbreviation, first page of article.
So a couple of examples would be:
Kate Hofmeyr, 'The problem of private entrapment' [2006] Criminal Law Review 319
Barber, ‘Laws and Constitutional Conventions’ (2009) 125 LQR 294
Unfortunately not all journal citations will be complete or will have the correct information but you can usually track down the article with the information you have. See the presentation below to see how to do this.