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What is a Preemption Check?
Before investing your time into research, it is best to check that your topic is not preempted either by law or by author.
Preemption by law is when you are working with "bad law" —a case that has been overturned, a statute or regulation that has been amended or held unconstitutional— or when the legal controversy becomes moot, e.g., the Supreme Court rules on a circuit split.
To check that you have not been preempted by law, you'll need to utilize multiple citators —BCite 
, KeyCite 
, and Shepard's 
— and ensure your topic's legal controversy is not soon to be resolved. If the referenced law has the potential to become "bad law" within the deadline for your work, please discuss your topic's viability with your professor.
Preemption by author is when someone else has already written about the same topic and discussed it in a substantially similar way.
To check that you have not been preempted by author, you'll need to survey legal and specialized databases to find as close to everything on your topic as possible.
Indexes
Indexes list legal publications organized by subject. Starting your search here saves time by utilizing that organization. Develop a list of keywords, synonyms, and terms of art by noting common phrases in publications similar to your topic.
- Current Index of Legal PeriodicalsAn index the most recent issues of primarily American law journals by subject heading allows for easy access to nearly 650 legal publications organized within 104 relevant subject headings. Also included are complete tables of contents from all journals indexed, as well as Bluebook citations.
- Foreign & International Law Resources DatabaseAn index of foreign and international legal periodicals arranged by subject area.
- Legal Resource Index (LRI)
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A controlled-vocabulary index of legal literature with a focus that includes legal newspapers, bar journals, and other practice-oriented material. LRI coverage generally begins in 1980, with a later starting date for certain individual publications. Click the icon of the database you prefer to link to the Index.
Articles
Legal Articles
Law review and other legal commentary. No database has all published work (not even HeinOnline), so it's important to check multiple databases.
- HeinOnline Law Journal LibraryFull-text searching for nearly complete runs of 2,700+ law journals, including ABA Journals.
- Lexis: Law Review and JournalsFull-text searching for hundreds of secondary sources. Filter by topic, jurisdiction, or publication.
- Westlaw: Law Reviews & JournalsFull-text searching for 1,005 secondary sources. Filter by publication, topic, or jurisdiction.
Other Articles
Interdisciplinary and pre- publications. Authors who write on legal topics often post articles to SSRN months before publication. If you wish to cite a prepub, you must note this in your citation.
- Kelvin Smith Library eJournalsSearch by title or discipline. Links to thousands of journals, typically from the first volume and full-text searchable.
- Social Science Research Network (SSRN)Over 43,500 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and over 24,300 downloadable full text PDFs. Search by title, author, or journal/topic.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)Free, full text, open access, quality-controlled scholarly journals. Covers all subjects and languages.
- JSTOR Complete ArchiveProvides electronic, full text access to the backfiles of approximately 670 scholarly periodicals in a variety of disciplines including law, social sciences, humanities, arts and the sciences.
Books
Search everything available through all campus and OhioLINK libraries. Advanced search allows boolean or keyword searching, and filters narrow by discipline, peer-review, library location, and more. Searches will produce results for articles on HeinOnline and treatises on Lexis and Westlaw. Limit by Source Type allows you to filter results to display only eBooks and Books.
Discovery Search
Alerts
Lexis
- Run a search or Shepardize a citation.
- If you run a search, apply filters before creating an alert to optimize relevancy.
- From your search results page or Shepard's report, click the bell icon at the top of the page.
Please see Creating Alerts on Lexis+ for more information.
Westlaw
- Select Notifications > Alerts from the top tab drop-down.
- Select Create Alert and choose which type from the drop-down or Create Newsletter for a report of multiple alerts.
Please see Create Alerts on Westlaw Precision for more information. See Use WestClip for more on search query alerts.
Bloomberg
HeinOnline
- Create a MyHein account.
- Save search queries by running a search and selecting MyHein Search Queries from the drop-down menu provided above the results and click Save/Email.
- Create a SmartCILP Profile to get alerts from the Current Index to Legal Periodicals.
- Go to Google Alerts.
- Enter your topic and change settings by selecting Show options.
- Click Create Alert.
Please see Create an Alert on Google for more information.