Skip to Main Content

Foreign, comparative and international law collections: United States

An overview of print holdings and online resources

Need more help with US research?

Please see IALS Library's United States research guide.  

We'd love to hear your comments about this Research Guide.

Email ials@sas.ac.uk

Introduction

IALS Library has a large collection of US federal primary and secondary materials, in printed and electronic format. For individual US states the library relies, for the most part, on online resources.

A detailed description of the US collection is available in the IALS research guide for the United States.

Primary material

Federal legislation and case law
US federal legislation and cases are on Lexis®Library (see Sources - International Content), Westlaw International Materials and HeinOnline

IALS has extensive holdings of printed federal legislation and cases, including a few current subscriptions, notably United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyer's Edition.

State legislation 
Legislation from all states can be found on Lexis®Library (Sources - International Content) and Westlaw International Materials. Printed codes are held for California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Louisiana, but only the Louisiana titles are current (GP17.E.1).

Uniform laws are held in printed format and are also on Lexis and Westlaw International Materials.Our US Law research guide has further information about uniform laws.

State case law
Cases from US states are on Lexis®Library (Sources - International Content) and Westlaw International Materials. IALS holds all seven of West's regional reporters in printed format up to early 2008 and the Southern Reporter and Northeastern Reporter up to 2010.

Secondary material

Journals
Many hundreds of US law journals are available on online and/or held in hard copy (see Library Catalogue). Please note, however, that at the time of writing the Catalogue does not list the US journals that are only available on Lexis or Westlaw: for these, go to the Law Databases page and select Westlaw International Materials or Lexis®Library, then go to the US law collections.

Books
The library has a substantial collection of printed books on US federal law and a small number of state law titles. S
ome US federal books are at classmark GP1, but many others are kept at classmark SJ.

Thousands of US e-books are available (see Catalogue). However, as yet the Catalogue does not cover the US e-books on Lexis®Library (Sources - International Content - United States), Westlaw International Materials or HeinOnline (Classic Treatises and other modules); access these to three databases is from the Law Databases page.

IALS also has the American Law Institute's Restatements of the Law (in printed format and on Lexis), dictionaries, bibliographies, indexes and more: see Catalogue.

 

Databases

Three vast online collections of US primary and secondary materials are available via the IALS Law Databases page: Lexis®Library (Sources tab - International Content), Westlaw International Materials and HeinOnlineIALS also subscribes to Index to Legal Periodicals, a US journal index.

Many other databases have substantial US content as well: see the Databases Guide for details.