Research Guides: Sociology: Law and Society

Databases for Finding Law Review Articles and Related Literature

Use the databases listed on this page in addition to core sociology and criminology databases, depending on your topic.

Law Journal Library
Law Journal Library is a collection of more than 1,250 law and law-related periodicals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes through the most current issue allowed.
Law Library Microform Consortium Digital (LLMC)
Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents while making copies available digitally through its on-line service LLMC-Digital. Users can access scanned copies of newsletters and legal documents.
Legal Source (EBSCO)
Legal Source provides access to an extensive range of full-text legal content. It offers information centered on the discipline of law and legal topics, such as criminal justice, international law, federal law, organized crime, medical law, labor and human resource law, ethics, and the environment. Legal Source includes the Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective and the Index to Legal Periodicals & Books.
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is a multilingual index to articles and book reviews in publications appearing worldwide. The collection provides in-depth coverage of public and private international law, comparative and foreign law, and the law of all jurisdictions other than the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. IFLP also analyzes the contents of individually published collections of legal essays, Festschriften, Mélanges, and congress reports each year. Dates of coverage: 1985 to present.

Databases for Finding Case Laws, Legislation, and Government Documents

HeinOnline
HeinOnline contains the full-text of law review journals and related legal documents, including the Code of Federal Regulations, English Reports (1220-1867), U.S. Presidential Library, U.S. Statutes at Large, and U.S. Supreme Court Library, and World Trials Library, and more.
Law Library Microform Consortium Digital (LLMC)
Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents while making copies available digitally through its on-line service LLMC-Digital. Users can access scanned copies of newsletters and legal documents.
Legislative Insight
Legislative Insight contains access to all of the various publications that become available as as a bill moves through the legislative process on its way to becoming a law. These include the full text of the Public Law itself, all versions of related bills, law-specific Congressional Record excerpts, committee hearings, reports, and prints. Legislative Insight offers a research citation page that not only links to the full text of the associated primary source publications, but also allows the user to search within these documents.
Lexis Advance
Lexis Advance gives you access to more than 60,000 legal, news and public records sources, breaking legal news, and access to the latest federal decisions.
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ProQuest Congressional
ProQuest Congressional allows you to explore Congress in action with the most comprehensive online resource available for congressional publications and legislative research. You can perform in-depth research in public policy, historical, and legal areas of interest.
This resource is not part of the depository library program.
Supreme Court Insight
Supreme Court Insight is a complete online collection of full opinions from Supreme Court argued cases, including per decision, dockets, oral arguments, joint appendices and amicus briefs. Content associated with each case is compiled on a dynamic page organized to facilitate understanding of the judicial process, and is also retrievable on a document by document basis.
Thomson Reuters Westlaw Campus Research
TR Westlaw Campus Research provides access to a comprehensive and widely-used indexing system for caselaw materials to make legal research easier, more accurate, and more relevant.

Background Information

Handbook of Law and Society
The Handbook of Law and Society presents a comprehensive overview of key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological controversies in the field of law and society.
Research Handbook on the Sociology of Law
This unique research handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.
Routledge Handbook of Law and Society
This innovative handbook provides a comprehensive, and truly global, overview of the main approaches and themes within law and society scholarship or social-legal studies. The authors were carefully chosen to achieve a diverse and non-Eurocentric view of socio-legal studies.
Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory
This handbook sets out an innovative approach to the theory of law, reconceptualising it in a material, embodied, socially contextualised and politically radical way. The book brings the law into active discussion with other disciplines, as well as supra-disciplinary debates on the areas of spatiality, temporality, materiality, corporeality and sensorial studies, capturing the most exciting developments in current legal theory, and anticipating future research in the area.
Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods
Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area.

Oxford Bibliographies: Law and Society
Cites a multidisciplinary literature -- while privileging sociological titles -- on the mutual relationship between law and society with its different actors, institutions, and processes.
Oxford Bibliographies: Sociology of Law
Summarizes the evolution of the sociology of law from its early classical writings to its modern theoretical and methodological approaches.

Foreign Law Guide
The Foreign Law Guide (FLG) offers information on sources of foreign law, including complete bibliographic citations to legislation, the existence of English translations, and selected references to secondary sources in one virtual destination. Broad in content and global in scope, the FLG is an indispensable resource for comparative law research and a fundamental tool for developing a foreign and comparative law collection.

Nonprofit Organizations

Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth
The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY) envisions the United States becoming a society that respects all children’s human rights and nurtures their capacity to become leaders, responding to any harm they cause in ways that are rooted in their dignity and unique potential for change. CFSY seeks a response to the harm caused by children that is conscientious of childhood traumas, restorative and empowering to all parties, and equitable, especially with regard to race and ethnicity.
Center for Children’s Law and Policy
The Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP) is focused on reform of juvenile justice and other systems that affect troubled and at-risk children, and protection of the rights of children in those systems. CCLP is working to create a world where the response to youth who get in trouble with the law is developmentally appropriate, free of racial and ethnic bias, and focused on building strengths that help youth thrive in their own communities.
Coalition for Juvenile Justice
The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) is a nationwide coalition of State Advisory Groups (SAGs) and allies dedicated to preventing children and youth from becoming involved in the courts and upholding the highest standards of care when youth are charged with wrongdoing and enter the justice system.
Equal Justice Initiative
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and bestselling author of Just Mercy, EJI provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons, challenging the death penalty and excessive punishment and providing re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.
The Innocence Project
The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. Its mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.
The Marshall Project
The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. It has an impact on the system through journalism, rendering it more fair, effective, transparent and humane. Although not an advocate, The Marshall Project often spurs change. Its journalism exposes wrongs, bringing them to the attention of officials who can take action. It gives visibility to proposals and critiques from the criminal justice community. And it tries to set an example for other media to cover criminal justice issues fairly and responsibly.
National Center for Juvenile Justice
The National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) is the oldest juvenile justice research group in the United States. NCJJ's mission is effective justice for children and families through research and technical assistance. For four decades, NCJJ has conducted research and provided objective, factual information that professionals and decision makers in the juvenile and family justice system use to increase effectiveness.
National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform
The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) works to reduce incarceration and violence, improve the outcomes of system-involved youth and adults, and increase the capacity and expertise of the organizations that serve these individuals. NICJR provides technical assistance, consulting, research, organizational development, and advocacy in the fields of juvenile and criminal justice, youth development, and violence prevention. NICJR works with an array of organizations, including government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations.
National Juvenile Justice Network
The National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) leads a membership community of 58 state-based organizations and numerous individuals across 42 states and DC. NJJN seeks to shrink our youth justice systems and transform the remainder into systems that treat youth and families with dignity and humanity.
REFORM Alliance
REFORM Alliance aims to transform probation and parole by changing laws, systems and culture to create real pathways to work and wellbeing. A justice system that holds people accountable and redirects back to work and wellbeing leads to stronger families and safer communities. Instead of keeping people trapped in a revolving door from probation/parole to prison — which costs taxpayers billions of dollars — REFORM is working to move people from the justice system into stability.
The Sentencing Project
The Sentencing Project promotes effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice. Its policy priorities envision the full inclusion in society of people with criminal records and an end to extreme punishments. Its aim is to center the leadership, voices, vision, and experience of those directly affected by mass incarceration to make the rationale for systemic change vivid, credible and compelling.
Vera Institute of Justice
The Vera Institute of Justice's mission is to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty to create safe, healthy, empowered communities and a fair, accountable justice system.

Data Sources

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research center at Syracuse University, has developed a web-based data warehouse/data mining application that makes it possible to produce useful information from previously inaccessible data. The TRACFed data warehouse includes among its many offerings transactional data from the US Federal government concerning its enforcement and prosecution activities, staffing, federal expenditures, and more. It focuses on the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, IRS, DEA and the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.