For more article-finding tools, and for detailed advice and information about finding articles about law, see our Finding Articles research guide.
The challenge for researchers looking for articles about the U.S. Supreme Court or its justices is separating the articles that are actually about the Court from the thousands upon thousands of articles that merely mention the Court or a justice in passing.
Index to Legal Periodicals — an article-finding tool ("index") that contains citations to articles labeled by the topic, case, statute, or person the article discusses — can help you find relevant articles that are truly about the Court. (For more on finding articles, see the Zief Library's Finding Articles research guide.)
To find articles about the Court in Index to Legal Periodicals, use the "Advanced Search" option.
For the first search text box, select "SU Subject Terms" from the adjacent pull-down menu, and enter the following exact expression (including the quotation marks and the slash!):
"united states/supreme court"
Add other keywords to the other Advance Search text boxes as needed. For example:
environment*
"judicial nominations"
"separation of powers"
statistic*
For good introductions to the U.S. Supreme Court and its work, see…
A great way to find books about the Supreme Court is to use Ignacio.
Ignacio searches broad descriptions of books. Using and combining some of the following search terms will help you find books about different aspects of the Supreme Court.
Once you have results, you can limit them in several ways, using the "Refine by" options on the left-hand side of the Doncore results screen. One useful technique is to refine by selection "Law Stacks" or "Gleeson Stacks" from the "Location" options.
The major search term for books about the Supreme Court is:
"United States Supreme Court"
You can combine this search term with many other useful terms related to the court or to constitutional law. These are just a few examples examples of searches you can run:
"United States Supreme Court" History
"United States Supreme Court" Constitution*
"United States Supreme Court" Religio*
"United States Supreme Court" Speech
"United States Supreme Court" "Judicial Review"
"United States Supreme Court" "Judicial Process"
"United States Supreme Court" "Decision Making"
"United States Supreme Court" "Public Opinion"
"United States Supreme Court" Judges
"United States Supreme Court" Judges "Selection and Appointment"
"United States Supreme Court" Biography
"United States Supreme Court" "Officials and Employees"
"United States Supreme Court" Statistics
"United States Supreme Court" Bibliography
A few other particularly useful search terms related to the Supreme Court include (but are by no means limited to):
"Political Questions and Judicial Power"
"Constitutional Law United States"
"Civil Rights United States"
"United States Solicitor General"
"Government Litigation United States"