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Welcome to the Subject Guide for Law

Law is a challenging subject, touching on many other disciplines and covering many jurisdictions. This is reflected in the range and complexity of information resources that are relevant to you. As law students and researchers, you need to be able to search quickly but wisely, confident that you are getting the best and most up-to-date information. In this guide we'll direct you to the most useful tools, and show you how to make best use of them.

Don't forget that whether you're a student or a member of staff, you're very welcome to contact the subject librarian for Law for further guidance.

Key Databases

If you're looking for law reports, legislation or journal articles, these are some of the key databases you'll need. You can see the full list of databases in our Law Databases page.

Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
Use the Cardiff Index to find out what a law report or journal title abbreviation stands for, or use it to find out the preferred way of abbreviating publications in your own work.

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"This database allows you to search for the meaning of abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering international and comparative law.

A wide selection of major foreign language law publications is also included. Publications from over 295 jurisdictions are featured in the Index."
JustCite
JustCite, part of the Justis group, describes itself as a “legal reference search engine”, providing information about cases, legislation and articles and their interdependent relationships. It provides references and, where possible, links directly to full text from Justis and/or from other online services. N.B. those links will only work where we have a subscription also to the linked service.
Westlaw
This holds a wide range of reports, legislation, journals and other publications. It is produced by Sweet & Maxwell, so often contains documents not found in LexisLibrary (from LexisNexis). Westlaw offers various research tools, including ‘case analysis’ which shows the history and subsequent treatment of individual UK cases. Note that for international materials you will need to click on the (rather small) ‘Services’ link toward the top of the screen, then on ‘Westlaw International’.

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To set up your own 'My Westlaw UK Profile', first create an account. This allows you to register for alerts on topics of interest and to keep a research trail.
LexisLibrary
This is a multi-source service containing a wide range of legal materials from numerous jurisdictions. In addition to reports and legislation there are some journals, and the full-text of Halsbury’s Statutes and Halsbury’s Laws. In addition to the main LexisLibrary collection, we also subscribe to the Lexis Tax Reference Library, which contains a collection of specialist reports, journals and other materials. Access this via Lexis Library ‘Practice Areas’ tab.

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It is produced by LexisNexis, which means that it often contains documents not covered by Westlaw (which is produced by Sweet and Maxwell). Tip: There are A-Z lists by country under the 'Sources' tab, or use 'Find a Source' on the home page if you are looking for a particular publication. 'Find a Source' is particularly helpful when looking for the non-UK materials, as these are numerous and most do not appear on TDNet.
i-law
This specialist resource from Informa covers commercial and maritime law subjects. It contains law reports series which are not available via other services, including Lloyd's Law Reports, Lloyd's Law Reports: Professional Negligence and Lloyd's Law Reports: Insurance and Reinsurance. Our i-Law package also includes some books and journals from Informa.

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As each user logs in with their own e-mail address this allows for additional services. Everybody can set up their own search and publication alerts, save items to their personal folders within i-law.com and see their Research Trail.

A Caveat regarding Delphis and Law

A very important note for law students regarding Delphis. Delphis is our ‘access and discovery’ system, designed to search across most of the library’s resources using one easy common interface. It cannot be relied upon to search law content, for a number of reasons. Its greatest value for law students will be in finding and accessing materials beyond your usual resources, so if looking, e.g. for political, medical or financial materials to support your work, try Delphis. If looking for cases and up-to-date legislation, Delphis is NOT the place to be! JustCite performs a similar function for what is within the major law resources, including linking to cases, so you might try that first?

JustCite
JustCite, part of the Justis group, describes itself as a “legal reference search engine”, providing information about cases, legislation and articles and their interdependent relationships. It provides references and, where possible, links directly to full text from Justis and/or from other online services. N.B. those links will only work where we have a subscription also to the linked service.