Publishing for Legal Scholars

A preemption check involves searching to discover if a scholar has already written an article, book or book chapter on a topic that shares the same thesis as a proposed topic or article. It is used by authors and by editors of law reviews to ensure originality. Of course, there are many published articles on similar topics, but each article should add something novel to the expert knowledge in the field. So, articles that explore different facets of the same topic, make a new prescriptive claim, critique or narrow a claim, etc. are novel because they add to the scholarly conversation.

A preemption check is comprehensive, that is, it looks for the entire scholarly conversation on your topic. Consequently, you must find every article on your topic. To do so, you will need to use multiple tools and multiple search strategies, including running different types of searches in each database or source. Here is a list of types of searches:

• Keyword — terms and connectors
• Keyword — natural language
• Subject / Descriptor searches
• Case Name
• Statute Name

Run these searches for articles, books, book chapters and dissertations in the following types of sources:

• Legal article indexes
• Full-text sources for legal articles
• Historical legal article indexes if your topic is historical
• International and foreign legal article indexes and full-text sources if your topic warrants
• Indexes and full-text sources for non-legal articles if your topic has an interdisciplinary focus
• ScholarOneSearch for articles, books, book chapters and dissertations
• SSRN and bepress for working papers

Then, set up alerts to keep current on newly-published articles

Because of it's comprehensive nature, some of your search results will overlap. This means that you are doing the preemption check correctly. But it is easy to get distracted. It is important to keep a log of the sources you checked and the searches you did, so that you don't accidentally skip a step — or repeat a step unnecessarily. It is also critical to keep track of your results so that you keep adding the unique items from your different searches and sources to your unique results list.

You can find most of the sources you need on the Law Library's webpage and the NU University Library's webpage.

Law Library Databases A-Z webpage

Use the A-Z list to link to the following databases to look for law review articles and some interdisciplinary articles. The A-Z list has descriptions of each of these resources.

• HeinOnline - Use the Law Journal Library
• HeinOnline - Use the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals to find international and comparative law periodicals and collections of essays
• ILP - Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective - Use this index to find historical articles
• JSTOR - Use the browse feature to select interdisciplinary databases
• LegalTrac - Use the full index by removing the "Full-Text" limiter
• LexisNexis - Use the Law Reviews & Journals database
• Westlaw - Use the Law Reviews & Journals database and the Legal Resource Index

SSRN and bepress for working papers

• SSRN (Social Science Research Network) - Use to find working papers and published articles
• bepress Digital Commons Network - Use to find working papers and published articles
• SSRN and bepress results will also appear in Google Scholar results

ScholarOneSearch for articles, books, book chapters and dissertations

Locate online Research Guides to discover subject specific and interdisciplinary journals at NUSL, the University Library and on the Internet