Research Databases

The Massey Law Library provides access to many research databases to support the research needs of the Law School's faculty and students. Most of these databases may be accessed remotely with a valid Vanderbilt University ID and password.

Additional Research Resources

The following key explains access restrictions to the databases below:

Vanderbilt Community:

Law School Only:

Open to All (Free):

DATABASE	DESCRIPTION	ACCESS
AccessUN	AccessUN indexes United Nations publications, including official records, sales publications, masthead (formerly called mimeographed) documents, and limited and restricted documents. It also includes publications issued by the six main bodies, sessional and standing committees, functional commissions, conferences, and regional bodies. It provides full text of General Assembly, Security Council, and Economic and Social Council resolutions. Selected full-text Minutes and Summary Records (SR) containing voting records were included in 1997.
BePress Publications	Various publications from the Berkeley Electronic Press (BePress) Asian Journal of Comparative Law Muslim World Journal of Human Rights The Economists' Voice Global Jurist International Commentary on Evidence Issues in Legal Scholarship The Journal of Tort Law Review of Law & Economics Studies in Ethics, Law and Technology
Bloomberg Law	Bloomberg Law integrates legal content, company and market information, and proprietary news all in one place. It is also an excellent place to conduct docket research, providing, essentially, free access to PACER. Bloomberg Law is available for Vanderbilt Law School faculty and students. A login and password are required to access Bloomberg Law. Please complete a request for law school access, using your Vanderbilt University email address.
BNA (Bloomberg BNA)	Bloomberg BNA (Bureau of National Affairs) publishes 350+ news services covering legal, legislative, regulatory, and economic developments. Speciality areas include corporate law, employment & labor law, environmental law, tax & accounting, and more. Research guides are available. Bloomberg BNA titles can be browsed by title or by subject.
CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction)	CALI is a collection of interactive lessons to accompany almost every class offered in law school. They provide a question-and-answer format to discrete topics, and provide immediate feedback. Registration is required using an authorization code. Please contact Jason Sowards for more information.
CasemakerX	CasemakerX is the law student version of a low-cost legal research system made available to members of select state bar associations. Requires registration with a valid vanderbilt.edu email address.
Congressional Quarterly (CQ) Resources	CQ provides access to the following resources: CQ Electronic Library: Provides access to CQ's Politics in America, CQ Vital Statistics on American Politics, CQ Political Handbook of the World, CQ Congress and the Nation, CQ Supreme Court Yearbook, CQ Public Affairs Collection, CQ Congress Collection, CQ Historic Document Series, CQ Researcher, CQ Voting and Elections Collection, CQ Washington Information Directory, CQ Researcher and CQ Weekly. Look at individual title entries for descriptions and access. CQ Global Researcher: In-depth single-themed, 12,000-word reports that cover global affairs. Provides an introductory overview; background and assessment of the current situation; pro/con statements from representatives of opposing positions; chronology on the topic, followed by short features for extensive context; a sampling of related international perspectives; maps and graphs; and a bibliography of key sources. CQ Political Reference Suite: CQ's Political Reference Suite provides access to the online editions of Congress and the Nation (1945-, except most recent Presidential term), Historic Documents (1972-), Political Handbook of the World (current edition), Politics in America (2000-), Supreme Court Yearbook (1989-), Vital Statistics on American Politics (most recent edition), and the Washington Information Directory (most recent edition).
CCH Intelliconnect	Intelliconnect is a comprehensive research platform for access to tax, accounting, finance and business information. A Quick Reference Card is available to help you get started with your research.
Directory of Open Access Journals	The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.
EconLit	EconLit, published by the American Economic Association, indexes economic literature from over 400 mostly English-language journals as well as books, dissertations, conference proceedings, Cambridge University Press Abstracts of Working Papers in English, and the full text of Journal of Economic Literature book reviews.
EDGAR	EDGAR is a database maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which users may find documents required to be filed in accordance with U.S. securities laws. The SEC offers a quick tutorial to EDGAR.
EENews.net	This database provides comprehensive coverage of environmental and energy policy and markets. Titles included are ClimateWire, Environment & Energy Daily, GreenWire, and Land Letter.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online	This database offers full-text access to books published during the 18th Century and is useful for research in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.
Environmental Law Reporter (ELR)	ELR is an environmental, natural resources, toxic tort, energy, health/safety, and land use law research tool containing original source documents, editorial summaries, and expert analysis on state, federal, and international issues.
Factiva	Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, provides comprehensive coverage of business news and information from over 9,000 sources. Coverage includes newspapers, newswires, business journals, trade publications, and company reports. International in scope; content is provided in over 20 languages.
Fastcase	Fastcase is a low-cost legal research system made available to members of select state bar associations (such as Tennessee). It provides access to case law, statutes, regulations, court rules and constitutions.
FDsys	Government Printing Office's electronic access to publications of the Federal Government. Formerly GPO Access.
Foreign Law Guide	This resource endeavors to provide relevant information on sources of foreign law, including complete citations to legislation, the existence of English translations, whenever possible, indications of currentness of the legal materials listed, and, finally, selected references to secondary sources in English. It is not a guide to journal literature.
HathiTrust	HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. While full-text may not be available for some materials due to copyright restrictions, the HathiTrust allows you to search the work for keywords as well as help you locate the work in a library.
Health Affairs	Health Affairs is the leading journal of health policy, thought, and research. It explores health policy issues of current concern in both domestic and international spheres. It is a peer-reviewed journal.
HeinOnline	Hein Online is a comprehensive legal research database. It is known for its extensive coverage of law reviews (in PDF format) and historical access to resources such as the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. It is also helpful for legislative history research and accessing select foreign and international materials. Hein Online also has specialized libraries, such as for intellectual property and taxation and economic reform. Training videos are available to show you how to use select Hein Online libraries.
Homeland Security Digital Library	This database contains over 87,000 documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management from a wide variety of sources including federal, state, and local governments; international governments and institutions; nonprofit organizations; and private entities.	On-Campus Only
IBFD Global Tax Explorer	IBFD is an international provider of cross-border tax expertise and indepdent tax research. The database includes access to global Tax Analyses, Global Tax Surveys, International Tax Glossary, Tax News Service, Tax Treaties Database, and Tax Treaty Case Law.
Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals	This Index provides access to legal literature covering foreign (non-Anglo-American) law, and comparative law and legal systems. Documents covered include journal articles, congress reports, essay collections, yearbooks, and book reviews. Coverage begins in 1985. A quick reference guide is available.
Index to Legal Periodicals (including Retrospective) (searches both current and retrospective databases)	This index assists you in locating law review and other legal periodical articles as well as legal books. Index to Legal Periodicals (coverage from 1981) Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective (coverage from 1908-1981)
International Encyclopaedia of Laws	This resource provides a comprehensive report for countries on the following topics: Commercial & Economic Law Private International Law Tort Law Insurance Law Labour Law Intellectual Property Constitutional Law Contracts Social Security Environmental Law Civil Procedure Family & Succession
Investment Claims	Investment Claims is a regularly-updated collection of materials and analysis used for research in international investment law and arbitration. Investment Claims contains fully searchable arbitration awards and decisions, bilateral investment treaties, multilateral treaties, journal articles, monographs, and arbitration laws all linked and cross-referenced by the Oxford Law Citator.
JSTOR	JSTOR includes over 1,000 academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select books and other materials. Free to search, but must be affiliated with Vanderbilt to retrieve documents.
Justis	Justis is a full-text online legal library of UK, Irish, and European Union case law dating back to 1163 and legislation from 1235. It also provides a citator, JustCite (similar to KeyCite and Shepard's), to expand your research.	Access limited to within the law school building.
Kluwer Arbitration	Kluwer Arbitration is the world's leading online resource for international commercial arbitration research. It contains commentary from expert practitioner authors and an extensive collection of primary source materials. It is a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date arbitration library that is designed for quick and simple browsing and searching. Kluwer Arbitration includes case law, commentary, conventions, legislation and rules. This resource has been recently expanded with an Investment Arbitration section.
Knowledge Mosaic	Knowledge Mosaic provides an abundance of federal statutory, regulatory, enforcement, and disclosure information, organizing it and making it useful through emphasis on search, guidance, current awareness, and analytics. We focus specifically on heavily regulated industries – including securities, finance, communications, technology, and energy – as well as all industries affected by trade, environmental, and labor regulation. Video tutorials and frequent topical searches are available.
Legal Scholarship Network (LSN)	LSN is a component of SSRN that provides access to accepted and working papers. Searching is free and most documents are available for download in PDF format for free. For SSRN email alert services, please contact Jason Sowards.
LegalTrac	LegalTrac provides indexing for more than 1,400 periodicals including major law reviews, legal newspapers, bar association journals, and international legal journals. It also contains law-related articles from over 1,000 additional business and general interest titles.
LexisNexis (including Shepard's)	Limited content legal research system for Vanderbilt University community and provides access to Shepard's Citations for case validation. Access is limited to public terminals and computers within the law school.	Access limited to within the law school building.
LexisNexis for Law Schools	Legal research system for Vanderbilt Law School faculty, students and staff. Please see a reference librarian for assistance.
LexisNexis Academic	This database provides access to news, US and international legal materials, and information about companies, including SEC filings, and industries.
LLMC-Digital	LLMC provides PDF reproduction of predominantly historical legal information from the federal government, US states and territories, foreign jurisdictions, and international organizations. LLMC also provides access to broad collections, such as the Anglo-American and Multi-Jurisdictional subject collections.
Making of Modern Law	This resource consists of 4 databases: Trials, 1600-1926 - provides access to historical documents relating to famous trials during this time period. Primary Sources 1620-1926 - offers access to early state codes, city charters, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history. Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 - comprises more than 21,000 works from the 19th and early 20th centuries on British Commonwealth and American law. It covers nearly every aspect of American and British Commonwealth law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature, some very rare. Coverage includes casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches. Foreign, Comparative & International Law, 1600-1926 - International Law constitutes the largest category in the archive. It corresponds mainly to the period of Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, with classics since the sixteenth century. Foreign Law encompasses foreign legal treatises of a variety of countries. Because the term "treatise" is more of a common-law category, the equivalent works in civil-law systems may have other names such as commentaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, monographs, or festschriften. Comparative Law compares more than one legal system and includes Ancient, Roman, Jewish Law, and Islamic Law. The collection recognizes that the roots of English common law will be found in the deep recesses of European history.
Making of the Modern World	This database provides digital images of every page of 61,000 works of literature on economics and business published from 1450 through 1850. It provides researchers access to material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade, and transport.
Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law	This resource provides article-level treatment on over 1,500 international law topics. Links to primary documents, such as treaties, are also available for some entries.
Morningstar Document Research	Morningstar Document Research site provides access to financial data and filings available from the SEC. It also provides the user with the ability to download this data into popular applications. Morningstar provides training documents and pre- formulated search strategies are available through the Knowledge Base. Users are required to enter their Vanderbilt ID and password, as well as login with their Vanderbilt email address for both on- and off-campus access.
National Law Journal Online	The National Law Journal provides timely legal information of national importance to attorneys that other publications don't, including federal circuit court decisions, editorially-selected verdicts, information for practitioners, legislative activity, and general legal news.
National Wetlands Newsletter (NWN)	The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) established NWN as a clearinghouse for information regarding inland and coastal wetland and floodplains for scientists, planners, managers, attorneys, government agencies, conservation organizations, and other interested groups and individuals.
NBER Working Papers (National Bureau of Economic Research)	NBER Working Papers have not undergone the review accorded official NBER publications; in particular, they have not been submitted for approval by the Board of Directors. They are intended to make results of NBER reserch available to other economists in preliminary form to encourage discussion and suggestsions for revision before publication.
Nineteenth Century Masterfile	An "index of indexes," this resource is excellent for historical scholarly research prior to 1930. The Masterfile aggregates indexes to books, periodicals, newspapers, government documents and patents into a single resource.
Oxford Legal Reference Collection	Oxford provides access to the following legal reference works: Parry & Grant Encyclopaedic Dictionary of International Law, Third Edition The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History Oxford Companion to American Law The New Oxford Companion to Law The Oxford Companion to The Supreme Court of the United States The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions
Oxford Reports on International Law	This database is intended to be a single point of reference for all international law jurisprudence, providing researchers access to the widest possible range of international law jurisprudence. All reported decisions have a headnote, the full text of the decision, and are linked to the Oxford Law Citator.
PACER	Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is a service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, and the PACER Case Locator via the Internet. Information can be retrieved for you by a reference librarian with known information, such as a docket number. Access to dockets is also available from Bloomberg Law. Contact Jason Sowards for a Bloomberg Law ID and password.
PrivCo	PrivCo provides business and financial data on major, non-publicly traded corporations: family-owned, private equity-owned, venture-backed, and international unlisted companies. Information on private investors, private equity deals, M&A and VC firms.
ProQuest Congressional	This database provides access to U.S. Congressional materials (hearings, bills, Congressional Record and compiled legislative histories). This product was formerly known as LexisNexis Congressional. Training videos are available.
ProQuest Legislative Insight	ProQuest Legislative Insight is a Federal legislative history service that makes available thoroughly researched compilations of digital full text publications created by Congress during the process leading up to the enactment of U.S. Public Laws. A Quick Start guide is available.
ProQuest Statistical Datasets	ProQuest Statistical Datasets is a Web-based research solutions tool that provides fast and easy access to more than 14 billion data points from licensed and public domain datasets. Datasets is available to the Law School Community only. Upon selecting this database, you will need to choose Law Library from the drop-down menu to proceed.
ProQuest Statistical Insight	This resource provides access to national income and production statistics, retail and wholesale trade data, interest rates, economic indicators, and social and demographic statistics, plus data on energy, environmental protection, agriculture and fisheries, crime, and much more. Insight is available to the Vanderbilt community. Insight has training videos.
RIA Checkpoint	RIA's Checkpoint is a web-based tax and accounting research tool. Through Checkpoint, you can access the federal tax code and regulations, Treasury Department decisions and federal court decisions, and IRS Revenue Rulings. State, local, and international materials are also available. Individual passwords are available for long-term research projects. Contact Jason Sowards for more information.
SSRN (Social Science Research Network)	SSRN is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. Searching is free, and a substantial number of documents are available for free download in PDF format.
Tax Analysts	Tax Analysts is a leading provider of tax news and analysis for the global community. More than 150,000 tax professionals in law and accounting firms, corporations, and government agencies rely on Tax Analysts' in-depth federal, state, and international content each day.
THOMAS	THOMAS was launched in January of 1995 to make federal legislative information freely available to the public. Information you may find on THOMAS includes bills and resolutions, the Congressional Record, Congressional committee information, and presidential nominations, among other information.
TracFed	The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a data gathering, data research and data distribution organization associated with Syracuse University. TRAC's purpose is to provide comprehensive information about federal staffing, spending, and the enforcement activities of the federal government. TRACfed provides a wide range of information about federal enforcement activities as well as detailed information about federal staffing, federal funds, and the diverse characteristics of counties, federal districts, and states. Online tutorials are also available.
United Nations Treaty Collection	This database provides access to all multilateral treaties deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations and those formerly deposited with the League of Nations. It includes the latest status of the treaty as well as links to their full text. It also provides access to bilateral and multilateral treaties registered with and published by the UN Secretariat to a certain date. Detailed treaty references and full texts are available in all authentic languages.
United States Supreme Court Database	The Supreme Court Database is the definitive source for researchers interested in the U.S. Supreme Court. The database contains over 200 pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between 1953 and 2008 terms. It is an ideal first stop for any empirical research project relating to the Supreme Court.
US Congressional Serial Set 1817-1980 1995-present	This collection facilitates research of U.S. political, social, cultural, military and ethnic history, as well as international relations, exploration expeditions across the country and throughout the world, commerce, industrial development, and much more. Its contents come not only from the U.S. Congress, but also include key Executive Department publications. The Vanderbilt community has access to Volume 1 in the first session of the 15th Congress (1817) through the 96th Congress (1980). Access to information from 1995 to the present is available to everyone through the Government Printing Office's Federal Digital System (FDSys). Access to the Serial Set from 1981-1994 is available through ProQuest Congressional as well as in print volumes on the ground floor of the Law Library.
U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs (1832-1978)	Containing nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978, this product provides an essential primary source tool for the study of all aspects of American history as well as the U.S. judicial system.
Vlex	vLex is a legal research site providing thousands of primary and secondary law sources (including foreign and international legislation and case law) from dozens of publishers around the world.
Wall Street Journal - Historic (1889-1994)	Historical access to the Wall Street Journal from ProQuest.
Westlaw	Legal research system for Vanderbilt Law School faculty, students and staff. Please see a reference librarian for assistance.
World Bank E-Library	The World Bank e-Library provides access to a growing collection of more than 6,000 ebooks, journal articles, and working papers from the world's most authoritative source on international development as they are published.
WorldCat (OCLC)	WorldCat is a catalog of books, journals and other resources available at libraries throughout the world.
Yearbook of International Organizations	The Yearbook of International Organizations Online is a database containing descriptions of over 64,000 active and dormant/inactive organizations.

If you need research assistance, please email a reference librarian.

If you encounter any broken links or have questions about access to any of these resources, please contact Jason Sowards.