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Law

Use this guide to access databases and websites important for legal research and guidance on locating law reports and unreported judgments, Acts of Parliament and delegated legislation, and secondary legal sources.

Journal Databases

The Library holds journals in print and electronic format.

When you find an article you want to read, use the Library Catalogue or the E-journals list to see if we hold a print copy or have access to the electronic copy in full-text. Please note, titles in Lexis Advance Research and Westlaw are not catalogued and are not contained in the E-journal list.

AGIS (Attorney-General's Information Service)

INDEX: AGIS indexes law journals from the Australian, New Zealand and Asia Pacific region from 1975 onwards. Law journals from other countries including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom are selectively indexed for Australian content and interest.

See also: AGIS-ATSIS (Attorney-General's Information Service-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Subset) 

Business Source Ultimate Full text scholarly and trade journals in Business, with many accounting and tax journals. Contains Accounting Review, Corporate Governance, Journal of Accounting Research
Cambridge Journals
CCH An Australian legal database of subject commentaries, cases, legislation and journals.  
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text contains records selected from the most important journals and magazines related to criminal justice and criminology. Unique content.
HeinOnline American scholarly law journals, with some content from selected Commonwealth countries.
JSTOR Multi-disciplinary archive of scholarly material in the social sciences, humanities and the sciences. It includes the full text archival backfile of over 1,000 journals, monographs, newspapers and selected conference proceedings. Collection of digital images.
Lexis Advance Provides online access to Australian legal materials published by LexisNexis Butterworths.
Oxford Journals Online [OUP]
Thomson Reuters Westlaw U.S. and foreign primary and secondary legal materials.
Westlaw AU An extensive collection of Australian legal databases including FirstPoint (a case citator), The Laws of Australia (an encylopaedia), case law, journals and commentaries.
Westlaw UK
Wiley Online Library Multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. It delivers seamless integrated access to over 6 million articles from over 1500 journals, over 19,000 online books, and hundreds of reference works, laboratory protocols and databases.

Free sources

AustLII Journals & Scholarship Library Provides many Australian and New Zealand full text scholarly journals and law reviews, as well as judicial scholarship
Google Scholar A search engine for academic resources including books, journal articles and US case law. Some articles will be available to view (look for a PDF or HTML link).
SSRN The Social Science Research Network contains forthcoming articles and research papers. Free registration is required to access full text articles and papers.

Historical Sources

Pandora Australia's web archive established by the National Library of Australia. It collects historic online publications and webpages relating to Australia and Australians with the aim of keeping the information available for use.
Prosecution Project  A tool that allows searching and analysis of historical prosecution and the criminal trials across Australia from 1850-1960.
Trove National Library of Australia's catalogue searches across Australian libraries, museums, archives and repositories for any holdings of the books, journals, pictures, photos, etc relevant to your research. They also have a range of digital collections such as government gazettesdigitised newspapers and archived websites.
WayBack Machine A not-for-profit internet archive that takes snapshots of websites at particular points in time. If you are unable to locate a report on the 'live' website, try putting the URL into the Way Back Machine to see if it has captured the content of the site at other points in time.
For information on how to search for legal journal articles please see our Legal Skills : Research Guide