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European Legal Research - The Basics

Ways to find EU law; scholarship about about EU law; information on the EU legal system; and materials (including cases) on human rights in Europe.

Why Articles (and Indexes)?

Law review articles and working papers are useful for finding discussions of specific issues and specialized topics in European law. They are also good for finding citations to relevant treaties, EU legislation, cases, and other primary and secondary sources. This page covers general tools for finding articles — especially legal articles — as well as some very specialized tools for finding articles about European legal issues.

This page emphasizes "indexes" — article-finding tools that allow very precise searching but do not themselves contain the full-text of articles. Researchers who don't mind taking the extra step to find the text will often find more articles by including indexes in their search strategy than if they'd just searched full-text articles.

For searching for full-text articles, and for comparisons of the various article-finding tools, take a look at the Zief Library's Finding Articles research guide for links to and descriptions of all the tools for finding law review articles.

Law Journal Articles - Full Text

Find-eR: Catalog of the European Commission Library

Index to Legal Periodicals

Index to Legal Periodicals includes citations to almost all articles from almost every U.S. law review or journal for the time periods it covers. Searches using broad, general terms — searches that often perform poorly in full-text search tools — often succeed in Index to Legal Periodicals.

To limit your results to articles about EU law, ask that either or both of the following terms appear as "Su Subject Terms"

"european economic community"
"european union"

Legal Journals Index - Westlaw

Legal Journals Index is another way to find articles published outside the United States. LJI also has citations only (not full text), but the Zief Library can arrange to get copies from other libraries for USF law students, faculty, and staff.

Add the following to your other search terms to limit your results to articles about EU law:

and "ec law" or "eec law" or (european +2 community or union)

ERPA - Full-Text European Working Papers Archive

Legal & Non-Legal Articles - Google Scholar

Google Scholar, while not comprehensive, provides a quick way to get a cross-disciplinary set of articles. It can be especially useful as you start your research and are still refining your search terms.

Non-Legal Scholarly Articles

To find non-legal articles, start with these sites. 

For scholarly articles, look for a way to limit your search to or filter your results for "peer reviewed" articles.

If you find a citation to an article but no working link to the text, use USF's Journal Finder to see if USF has the journal in print or digital format.

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