Researching for Journal Notes, Comments, and Paper Courses: Selecting a Topic

A good place to begin the topic selection process is to identify current developments in your area of law. Check the resources on this page, or consult these additional guides on topic selection:

Bloomberg Law: Law Review Resources (resources and videos for law reviews, including tools for topic selection)

Lexis+: Law School – Law Review & Journal Practice Center (collection of resources for journals, including tools for topic selection)

Westlaw: Guide to Law Review Research (pdf guide)

Choose a topic that interests you because you will be spending a lot of time working on this. Don't bore yourself.

Pick a timely topic, but not so timely that the issue will be resolved before your paper is finished.

Develop an original thesis. Remember you should be analyzing a subject, commenting on a problem or potential solution, or identifying a significant trend, not just reciting what the law is on your topic.

Current Awareness Services are a great way to find new and noteworthy topics. The following are some of the services available to you:

Bloomberg Law's United States Law Week: Summarizes the most significant federal, state, and administrative cases every week. Cases which split the circuits, establish new legal precedent, address new statutes or contribute to emerging legal doctrines.

Bloomberg Law News: Provides summaries of the latest legal developments across practice areas. Includes access to daily reports such as Daily Labor Report and Daily Tax Report.

Blogs are a great place to find information about developments in the law that are so new that nothing has been published yet in traditional legal publications like law reviews and journals. Blog posts are not subject to the same editorial review process as journals, so be sure to consider their credibility. You wouldn't want to cite blog posts in your paper, but they are extremely useful in the beginning stages of your research.

To find a blog about your area of law, check these legal blog directories:

A great strategy for selecting a topic is to look for an area of law where the courts have ruled differently on an issue.  

Bloomberg Law's United States Law Week includes a monthly feature called Circuit Splits.

Lexis or Westlaw: You can also search in caselaw databases on Lexis or Westlaw using a search such as court or circuit /s split.