You don’t want to write an article that someone has basically already written. Many students mistakenly believe that all they need to do for a preemption check is to search the full text of law reviews in Lexis and Westlaw. Unfortunately, Lexis and Westlaw do not contain the full universe of potential articles. They are useful preemption checking tools but they are not complete. While a thorough preemption check may seem like an intimidating prospect and a lot of work, you can also think of it as preliminary research on your paper.
Due to subscription and licensing agreements, certain library resources are restricted to UC faculty, staff, and currently enrolled students. Some of these databases are available to the entire University of Cincinnati community. Others are restricted to the College of Law.
Note that these are indexes, not full-text sources. The index will give you the citation to an article which you would then need to retrieve if you wanted to review the full-text. There may be some overlap in coverage by the indexes but each covers some periodicals that the others do not.
If writing about an interdisciplinary topic, you may need to check non-legal periodicals. The sources that you would check will differ depending on the topic chosen. The following are some selected, general resources for non-legal periodicals.
