Electronic Resources for Legal Research

This section provides some information about how UK and EU case law and legislation is structured in legal databases such as Lexis Library and Westlaw, and how to use search terms and connectors to find the law in these resources. This structural information is very useful for understanding how to use legal databases. There is also information about how to use the online journal directories and databases available in the Oxford Libraries.

There are hands-on tutorials for many of the databases on the Bodleian Law Library's Legal Databases page.

Interesting articles etc

Ronald D Wheeler, 'Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything: The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research' http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1773767  This paper looks at how searches across all Westlaw International databases work, the use of 'crowdsourcing' as a factor in search results, and the effects of pricing. While it is specifically about a new version of Westlaw in the US, the general structure of source seems similar to the new versions of Westlaw and Lexis in the UK, which encouage search across all databases simultaneously.