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Major Treatises by Topic

This guide lists major legal treatises, handbooks, hornbooks and guides by topic. It also lists important current awareness and reporting services for each topic.

Introduction to Treatises

When beginning your legal research in an area of law which may be new to you or to which you need a refresher, a good place to start is with legal treatises. This guide aims to direct you to some well-known, recommended treatises and hornbooks arranged alphabetically by legal topics. If you have not yet identified relevant primary law sources such as cases and statutes, treatises may lead you to them.

When you have known primary law sources, you may search for references to those in the tables of good topical treatises. The tables may lead you to discussions of your known resources and may lead you to additional primary information.

Some of the treatises included in this guide are available digitally via Bloomberg Law, Lexis Advance, Westlaw or other electronic resources.  If you are a member of the  Case Western Reserve Law School faculty, student, or staff, you should be able to link directly to these sources.  If you have not registered your accounts to these resources, contact the Law Library for assistance.   

The guide indicates whether we subscribe to the treatises' print versions, digital versions, or both. Many multi-volume legal treatises do not circulate out of this Law Library.  Some single-volume treatises are also non-circulating outside the law school, especially if they are in our course reserve or permanent reserve collections.

Non-Case Law School and non-Case users of this LibGuide wishing to borrow one of these titles should check the CWRU Library Catalog for the availability of print titles at their nearby OhioLINK consortium libraries.

This Libguide was created by Judith Kaul, a long-time reference librarian who retired in 2020.

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