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:

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.

Keep up to date using the news sections of Lexis and Westlaw. The UIC Library also provides access to New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Find information for registering an account for those papers with your UIC credentials in this guide.

Blogs can also be 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.  

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