Law Databases

Online tutorials and practice problems to assist in exam and course preparation. Covers a wide variety of subjects. To access the lessons, students can pick up an Authorization Code card at the law library reference desk or email Lori Corso for the code and instructions.

Casemakerx was a low-cost alternative to Lexis and Westlaw. It has merged with another similar service called Fastcase. Students can still get free access to Fastcase by creating a free account here. 

Fastcase is a legal research service that provides access to primary law from all 50 states as well as federal statutes, regulations, court rules and the constitution. Federal cases from the following federal reporter volumes to the present are also available: 1 U.S. 1, 1 F.2d 1, 1 F. Supp. 1 and 1 B.R. 1. Fastcase also offers a newspaper archive, adminstrative opinions and orders, legal forms and federal dockets (via Justia.com). View a list of all materials covered here.

Many state, city and county bar associations as well as other attorney associations offer Fastcase as membership benefit (including the New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania Bar Associations, the D.C. Bar and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)).

Students can still get free access to Fastcase by creating a free account here. 

Casetext is a legal research tool that offers primary law searching through most major sources.  Coverage includes federal statutes, state statutes, and case law from all federal and state courts, generally going back to the 1920s.  Casetext uses A.I. and language processing to show detailed case treatment in its citator.

CARA is the main A.I. component included in Casetext, allowing a user to upload a legal document (i.e. a complaint or brief) and the system will analyze the language and find the most relevant cases to the subject of the document.

Casetext is free for all law students, set up an account here.  

The United States Census Bureau publishes information taken from Census data including building permits data, County business patterns, international trade data, and occupational data. Also see the Data tab at the top of the page for additional Census resources including My Congressional District which breaks down demographic information by district and the American Factfinder which provides city and county-specific demographics. 

The Chancery Daily is an independent news source summarizing corporate and commercial litigation matters pending in Delaware's Chancery Court, the Delaware Supreme Court, and the Delaware Superior Court's Complex Commercial Litigation Division. Law students and faculty can sign up for a free subscription to these summaries using their @law email address. 

Thomson Reuters database providing tax primary sources and analysis materials from Warren, Gorham, and Lamont. Students can self-register for an account by clicking here. Your password can then be used on and off campus.

Congress.gov, a website created by the Library of Congress, provides access to legislation from the current session of Congress along with information about federal legislation from 1973 onward. The site contains various bill versions, amendments, actions taken on bills, committee reports and other legislative information. It also provides links to the Congressional Record, House and Senate Committees, and contact information for members of Congress.

ProQuest’s Congressional and Legislative Insight are databases of select information generated by the federal legislative process. Both contain bills, congressional committee hearing documents, congressional committee reports and prints, transcripts of debates in the House and Senate, and associated documents from entities within and outside Congress, such as the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, and presidential signing statements.

Legislative Insight is the recommended starting point for compiled legislative histories of bills that became law. Start with Congressional when researching legislative actions that did not become law or when that is unknown. Access to some documents is limited; check both platforms and contact reference@law.villanova.edu with questions.

ALM publication provided via our law.com subscription and offers firm articles and analysis of use to corporate or inhouse attorneys. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Decisis is a legal research database that can be used to research cases, statutes, regulations, and agency decisions. Access to Decisis is provided to students through the Pennsylvania Bar. Students must sign up for a free student membership to the PA Bar before they can access Decisis. There is no faculty access to Decisis at this time. 

Legal news publication covering Delaware business information. Provided via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Online access to the regional legal newspaper for Delaware provided via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Database with over 21,000 signed entries on Jewish life, culture, history and religion.

Fastcase is a legal research service that provides access to primary law from all 50 states as well as federal statutes, regulations, court rules and the constitution.  Federal cases from the following federal reporter volumes to the present are also available: 1 U.S. 1, 1 F.2d 1, 1 F. Supp. 1 and 1 B.R. 1. Fastcase also offers a newspaper archive, adminstrative opinions and orders, legal forms and federal dockets (via Justia.com). View a list of all materials covered here. 

Some state, city and county bar associations as well as other attorney associations offer Fastcase as membership benefit (including the New York and  the D.C. Bar and the Jenkins Law Library.)

Free online access to judicial, statutory, and regulatory information from the U.S. Government Printing Office. Browse by title, category of document, date, committee or author of the publication. Will be replaced by GovInfo.gov which is currently in Beta testing. Also previously known as GPOAccess.

Guide with links to Federal court websites.

Online version of Foreign Laws: Current Sources of Codes and Legislation, which provides references to the fulltext of foreign statutes in English, if available.

The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600–1926 provides researchers with instant, full-text access to foreign, comparative, and international legal literature. This collection gathers together over 2,700 titles across nearly 3,500 individual volumes, totaling 1.4 million pages, that address issues in the realms of foreign, comparative, Islamic, Jewish, and even Roman and ancient law. The vast majority of the titles—over 2,000—concentrate on international law, while more than 800 titles devoted to foreign law address legal systems in specific countries.

The Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources, 1600–1970, which complements the collection of treatises found in The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative, and International Law, 1600–1926, provides through monograph publications an interpretive analysis of various legal codes, the "primary sources" of law.  Jurisdictions include Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, as well as other countries in Northern and Eastern Europe.

Free online access to judicial, statutory, and regulatory information from the U.S. Government Printing Office. Browse by title, category of document, date, committee or author of the publication. Previously known as FDSys/GPOAccess.

Extensive digital library collection including PDF full text of journal articles, federal statutes, CFR regulations, and legislative and international materials. Hein also has research guides describing each of the collections and offering search tips and other information for users. 

Job listings for international internships and permanent jobs in international development, foreign policy, international program administration and a variety of other positions. View tabs for weekly and monthly listings.

The peer-reviewed monographs of the International Encyclopaedia of Laws (IELs), provide practical information and valuable insights into both national and international legal frameworks in 11 practice areas, written by over 1,200 leading experts from all over the world. 

Include practice areas are: Commercial & Economic Law, Competition Law, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Corporations & Partnerships, Environmental Law, Intellectual Property, Intergovernmental Organizations, Medical Law, Private International Law, and Sports Law.

Law360 is an online legal news outlet providing analysis about legal issues and cases which are organized by practice area and jurisdiction. Case articles offer full docket numbers, case filing dates and other case citation information.

Users can sign up for email newsletters with links to articles on particular practice areas or state jurisdictions. On-campus access is provided to students, staff, faculty and visitors. 

Off-campus access is available only to faculty (contact your library liaision to request an account).

Students (or faculty without an account) can search for and access individual Law360 articles on Lexis.

Legal news site produced by American Lawyer Media. Access articles about the legal industry as well as specific practice areas including Corporate & Securities, Class Actions, Appeallate practice, Labor & Employment and IP. Also features large list of industry rankings and surveys such as the Top 100 Law Firms, The National Law Journal's Top 500 Firms and the Summer Associates Survey. Offers Legal Terms & Definitions dictionary. Access additional publications such as the National Law Journal, the New Jersey or New York Law Journal, Delaware Law Weekly andCorporate Counsel by clicking on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the homepage.

Free collection of law review articles culled from law schools using Digital Commons institutional repositories. Articles are grouped by practice area or conduct a keyword search across all articles. Databases are also available for other disciplines (Business, Medicine, Economics etc.) via the larger Digital Commons Network.

Law School faculty, students, and staff can now access Law Insider's premium sample contracts, clauses, transactional terms dictionary as well as resource guides and checklists. Users must join the law school's Law Insider Team following the directions below--this establishes an individual account to access the resource as well as make lists/bookmark particular contracts, clauses etc to save for later as well as view a history of what documents have already been viewed on the system. Contact reference@law.villanova.edu with any questions.

To create your individual account: 

1. Go to lawinsider.com
2. Click the blue sign up button in the upper right
3. Enter your law school email address
4. It will tell you an @law.villanova.edu Team exists—click the Join Team button
5. Fill out your information and click the Register & Join Team button
6. A confirmation email will be sent by Law Insider, click on the "confirm email" link to finish setting up your account

NOTE: The University’s virus scan will likely scan the email confirmation link once you click on it. The “This link is being scanned” page will appear but the the confirmation has actually already gone through. Wait a minute or two and then go back to lawinsider.com, refresh your page and you should see a “Welcome back, [Your First Name]” message.

Search a collection of directories in the areas of government, business, and law. Great for networking.

Faculty or Staff can have an account that allows for greater customization and email newsletters. Please reach out to a law librarian or your library liaison for more information.  (Formerly Leadership Directories)

Directory of links to public records databases, court dockets, and filings.

Legal technologies newsletter offering articles on cyber security, e-discovery and other types of legal software provided our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Online version of the daily Philadelphia legal newspaper. Offers columns on legal issues, case analysis, verdicts, legal notices and job postings. Current week's worth of issues available along with some archived columns from previous months. Contact the Library Reference Desk for sources of older articles. Law faculty can request an individual account to set up email and newsletter alerts by contacting their liaison.

Lex Machina is a legal analytics tool used to gain insights into the behavior of judges, attorneys, parties, and both state and federal courts. It includes data from the USPTO, International Trade Commission, and bankruptcy courts. Track what kinds of cases are being heard by jurisdiction or find out how a judge usually rules on motions to dismiss. 

You will need to use your law school email address and then your lexis credentials to access. 

Online access to fulltext journal articles, state and federal primary and secondary sources, forms, news resources and public records data.  Available only to law students and law faculty, others should use Nexis Uni instead.

The Lexis Digital Library gives you online and mobile access to both text and audiobook Study Aids to supplement your class and bar exam prep. With Lexis Digital Library you can add notes and highlights to the ebooks and get definitions for legal terms within the books. Create your own virtual "bookshelf" to access your most-used titles quickly. Includes the Understanding Series and the Questions & Answers Series. 

Provides full-text access to national and international newspaper and magazine articles and news transcripts, business, company, and industry information in the U.S. and abroad, and legal documents, including U.S. Federal and State court cases, and law reviews. Coverage varies

NOTE: If you have full access to Lexis Advance through the law school, use that instead of Nexis Uni

The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600–1926 provides researchers with instant, full-text access to foreign, comparative, and international legal literature. This collection gathers together over 2,700 titles across nearly 3,500 individual volumes, totaling 1.4 million pages, that address issues in the realms of foreign, comparative, Islamic, Jewish, and even Roman and ancient law. The vast majority of the titles—over 2,000—concentrate on international law, while more than 800 titles devoted to foreign law address legal systems in specific countries.

The Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources, 1600–1970, which complements the collection of treatises found in The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative, and International Law, 1600–1926, provides through monograph publications an interpretive analysis of various legal codes, the "primary sources" of law.  Jurisdictions include Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, as well as other countries in Northern and Eastern Europe.

The Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law are a comprehensive resource containing peer-reviewed articles on every aspect of international law. This definitive reference work contains both the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law and the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law. 

National legal newsletter offering articles, anlysis and law firm rankings via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Online access to the regional legal newspaper for New Jersey provided via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Online access to the regional legal newspaper for New York provided via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Users are required to create an individual account in order to access the NYT from off-campus or via mobile app. Create your account at AccessNYT.com. Download mobile apps from nytimes.com/mobile. Once your account is created, you can use it to log on to NYTimes.com from anywhere with full access.

Provides full-text access to national and international newspaper and magazine articles and news transcripts, business, company, and industry information in the U.S. and abroad, and legal documents, including U.S. Federal and State court cases, and law reviews. Coverage varies

NOTE: If you have full access to Lexis Advance through the law school, use that instead of Nexis Uni

The Pennsylvania Bar Institute is the Pennsylvania Bar's home for Continuing Legal Education. This website hosts livestreams, webinars, videos, and print materials on current and practical legal topics for Pennsylvania lawyers. It is also free for law students. 

All PBI courses as well as the PBI ProPass are FREE for all law students. Interested students can contact PBI’s Customer Experience team via email at info@pbi.org or call 1-800-932-4637 Monday through Friday between 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. 

Free access to Pennsylvania administrative regulations, derived from the official code.

State legislative information including bill tracking, House & Senate journals, committee reports and more.

The Philadelphia Business Journal provides full text access to the Philadelphia Business Journal and their Book of Lists with a 10-year archive of content. Subscription is provided by main campus Falvey Library. Register with your Villanova email address and create a password. Accounts will be purged from time to time. When they are, reregistration will be needed.

Collection of resources prepared for and by practitioners. Materials include treatises, CLE course books and program transcripts, Answer Books and sample forms. Note: To access the "My Folders" & "My Searches" features, you must register as a new user using the Register link at the top of the database home page from an on-campus computer or using the Villanova Law wireless internet connection. Once you've created an account, you can then view your search history and list of folders from off-campus but you can only access the full-text of items contained in those folders while on-campus. Please contact the Library for assistance or view the Online Tutorial.

Procertas is an online tool to help you learn and practice specific tasks in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF editing that are commonly done in law practice. Two additional modules offer training on basic (aimed at 1L students) and advanced Bluebooking citation formatting (excellent for law review and journal students). 

Villanova law students, faculty, and staff can set up a Procertas account for free, and with successful completion of the Legal Technology Assessment (LTA) exercises you can download and display digital badges to show off your competence in these tasks. Please see the Procertas Libguide for more information about this program.

ProQuest’s Congressional and Legislative Insight are databases of select information generated by the federal legislative process. Both contain bills, congressional committee hearing documents, congressional committee reports and prints, transcripts of debates in the House and Senate, and associated documents from entities within and outside Congress, such as the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, and presidential signing statements.

Legislative Insight is the recommended starting point for compiled legislative histories of bills that became law. Start with Congressional when researching legislative actions that did not become law or when that is unknown. Access to some documents is limited; check both platforms and contact reference@law.villanova.edu with questions.

Online source for indexes of statistical tables from the U.S. government, business and research organizations with some full-text available from 2007.  

Ravel law is a start-up legal research service that began in 2012 and is based on analytical research. It is not comprehensive but does include cases from Havard's Law library, the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. It also offers judicial analytics profiles which analyzes judicial opinions and other information to help determine how a particular judge might rule on a motion, case or other matter heard in that court.

Law students and faculty should use the link above and then click on the "sign up" button to create a free account. 

"Preprints" of social science and legal academic journal articles.

Newsletter published by the National Law Journal which offers commentary and other information about the cases and lawyers who appear before the Supreme Court. Provided via our law.com subscription. Click on the "List Sites" button in the bottom right corner of the law.com homepage to access this publication.

Database providing statistical information about federal agencies, such as the IRS and the federal courts (number of claims handled, types of claims, etc.)

Free collection of United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) documents. Use the Databases link to access the status, full text, certified true copies and other information for UN treaties. The databases are searchable in a number of different ways including by popular name of the treaty, treaty title or by using the cumulative indexes.

Online version of many Commerce Clearinghouse/Thomson Reuters tax publications and Wolters Kluwer titles. Recently added Corporate Governance and Cybersecurity Privacy titles. See here for full list of new additions.

First-time users should create an account at the VitalLaw Self-Registration site using their law school email address.Students are encouraged to create an account while on-campus for the best experience and then the site can be accessed from any device or location using that new user name and password.

Formerly known as Intelliconnect

Legal research platform that provides full-text secondary sources as well as state and federal cases, statutes, and regulations. Also offers Practical Law materials, directories, dockets, motions & briefs and other legal materials.

The peer-reviewed monographs of the International Encyclopaedia of Laws (IELs), provide practical information and valuable insights into both national and international legal frameworks in 11 practice areas, written by over 1,200 leading experts from all over the world. 

Include practice areas are: Commercial & Economic Law, Competition Law, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Corporations & Partnerships, Environmental Law, Intellectual Property, Intergovernmental Organizations, Medical Law, Private International Law, and Sports Law.

Access to The Wall Street Journal, the premier US business daily, with outstanding coverage of politics, economics, the markets, global business and the arts. Faculty, students and staff may activate membership by registering at http://www.wsj.com/Villanova with Villanova credentials, accepting the terms of use and thereafter accessing via laptop or mobile applications with individual signon.