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Legal Resources

Search Tip: Choosing a Database

Shasta College does not subscribe to any databases that specifically cover legal issues. Academic Search and MasterFILE both provide coverage of a wide range of topics and are great starting places. The Military & Government database includes law review articles. You can also choose a subject-specific database that relates to your topic. For example, for articles covering the legal aspects of a business topic, you may want to search Business Source Elite. Or, for reports of legal cases in the news, try a newspaper database such as America's News, Newspaper Source or Proquest National Newspapers.   

Visit the Library's databases page for descriptions of what subjects each database covers. 

Search Tip: Choosing Your Search Words

If you are looking for articles that cover the legal aspect of a topic, try combining the words describing your topic with a "legal" word or phrase such as legal, laws, law and legislation, and constitutional law. Here are a couple of tips and some examples:

If you are using a phrase (2 or more words), put them in quotes: "law and legislation"

Use the word AND to combine your topic words and your "legal" words: fluoridation and "law and legislation" ; abortion and "constitutional law"   

"artificial intelligence" and (law or legislation)

"artificial intelligence" and (law or legis*)

    

Search Tip: Finding Laws by Name

We know some laws by name; if you are researching a specific law you can try a phrase search with the name of the law in quotation marks: "patient protection & affordable care act" ; "patriot act".

Note that searching by name can be tricky since we often know law names by nicknames or acronyms (e.g. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act = "Obamacare" ; the Patriot Act is actually the USA PATRIOT Act = Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001)

If you want to look up the official name of a law, try the Table of Popular Names list on the Cornell University Law School's Legal Information Institute site.