Free Online Legal Research

After limiting your search to articles (this is the default), enter your terms and search. Use the Advanced Scholar Search option (click the triple-line icon at the top-left portion of the screen) to search by author or publication or to specify a date range. Note that some articles retrieved through a Google Scholar search may not be freely accessible.

"This free search engine searches the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals, as well as document repositories hosting academic papers and related publications such as Congressional Research Service reports." The site uses the Google search engine though the number of articles that can be retrieved from a search is fairly limited.

DOAJ is an index of diverse open access journals from around the world. Articles can be searched by author, title, or keywords and results can be filtered by broad subject area (including "law").

In addition to its subscription services, JSTOR offers independent researchers not affiliated with a subscribing institution access to a limited amount of JSTOR content, either by registering for a personal account or by searching on JSTOR's Open Content page (see options under the "Free Access to JSTOR" heading).

Provides access to a large body of working papers, conference papers, and other preprints (pre-publication versions of articles). Covers a variety of disciplines, including law.

Provides access to articles published in over 300 open access law reviews. One can also select the "Digital Commons Network" option (under the "search terms" box) to search the scholarly articles and other publications posted on the digital repositories of a large number of law schools and other academic institutions.

This site serves as the institutional digital repository for the 10 University of California (UC) campuses. One can search the repository or just the publications from a specific UC campus. The site also includes a number of e-publications published by UC-affiliated scholars and research units.

Lists law-related books (under Library of Congress call number K) available online.

The "Law Reviews & Journals" page of this guide lists several databases for locating law journal articles through UCLA's electronic subscriptions.