As with U.S. legal research, it is often easiest to begin international and foreign legal research using secondary sources. Note that treatises and law review articles constitute secondary sources in both the international and national legal systems as displayed in the chart of Sources of Law in the International and Major Legal Systems of the World.
Treatises (not treaties) are books written by legal experts on an entire subject area of law, such as public international law. They constitute scholarly teachings or commentary, as described under Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, as a "subsidiary means" for determining the rules of law. The following are some well-known publications on international law treatises.
Use subject searching, as discussed in the Introduction, to find more titles in the Library catalog or Worldcat. Additional treatise titles may be found in the HeinOnline Legal Classics Library.
There are two ways to find law review articles: indexes or full text. An index contains only records of an article with title, author, and citation. Increasingly, indexes may include links to the full text of the article.
Generally, it is easier to use an index to find articles on one's topic than to search for relevant articles in full text. The search features of an index are similar to those of a catalog. For example, the indexers create "descriptors" (subject headings) which are used to categorize all articles in the pool of indexed journals. Searching by descriptors, the researcher can retrieve groups of articles that are all directly on point. Full-text searching often leads to too many irrelevant search results or results that discuss an issue only in passing unless one constructs one's search query very carefully.
LJI (Legal Journals Index) is a U.K. index that is available via Westlaw Edge (Home > International > United Kingdom > Journals > Legal Journals Index). As a U.K. publication, it is useful for finding articles with a U.K. or EU perspective.
IFLP (Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals) is available via HeinOnline. IFLP provides access to law journal articles published in other countries.
IFLP does not provide links to full text. However, many of the articles can be found in HeinOnline's Kluwer Law International Journal Library.
You may wish to search full-text law reviews online via Westlaw or Lexis for other reasons, i.e., cite-checking. In addition to the citation guides referenced earlier, seeing how others have cited a particular international instrument can be useful when writing your own article or cite-checking another author's article.
Westlaw and Lexis both contain full-text law review articles. You can choose a particular journal to search or search in multiple journals at the same time.
HeinOnline's Law Journal Library is well-known to most researchers. This Library contains digital copies of most U.S. law reviews from inception. In addition, HeinOnline's Kluwer Law International Journal Library contains twelve important international journals, such as and Journal of International Arbitration and Common Market Law Review.
HeinOnline is an excellent digital archive of many law journals. However, the most recent issues of a journal may not be available via HeinOnline per agreement with the journal publisher. In such cases, check Westlaw or Lexis Advance and the tools mentioned below, including the library catalog, A to Z list, and Worldcat.
Google Scholar is a free resource that allows researchers to retrieve articles and cases with simple keyword searches. Filters allow one to sort by date. Google scholar includes non-law as well as law journal articles.
As mentioned under the Custom tab, yearbooks of different countries or IGOs are useful for researching state practice. Many are indexed like other law journal articles and available via HeinOnline's Foreign & International Law Resources Database.
Non-law-related journals are increasingly important to legal scholars who are doing interdisciplinary research. Many international law scholars in the fields of human rights or international trade, for example, may find the need to research materials in the fields of political science or economics.
The Library provides increasing full-text access to such non-law-related journals via EBSCOHost. UIC Law students also have access to the UIC Library's vast collection of article databases, including JSTOR. Browse the databases at the UIC Library Articles home page, select the database you wish to use and log in with your UIC Law ID and password.
If you have an article citation with no link to the full text, use the library catalog and/or the A to Z Journal List and run a search for the journal by title to locate it in the Library's collection of print or electronic resources.
If the Library does not have the journal in question, you can check Worldcat to find other libraries that subscribe to the journal. You can then submit an Interlibrary Loan request to the Library, and we can try to obtain a copy of the article for you via ILL.