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American Indian Law: Catalogs & Indexes

Library Catalog: LawCat

LawCat
Use LawCat, the Law Library's online catalog, to search for books, journals (but not individual articles contained within journals, for which use Lexis Advance, Westlaw Edge, and the periodical indexes described below), microforms, and other materials. Note that your search of LawCat will not identify books, etc., held in other campus libraries. To find those materials and materials held by libraries on all UC campuses, use UC Library Search.

A UC Library Search Browse Search will let you search by author name, title, or subject headings.

  • Author: meriam, lewis
    Enter the author's last name followed by the first name, or only as much of the last name as you know.
  • Title: native american legal materials
    Enter the first few words of a title.
  • Subject: indians of north america government relations
    The easiest way to identify these subject headings is by viewing the catalog records of titles you have already located. You can also browse the list of subject headings beginning Indians of North America by entering only that phrase. (You do not need to type the hyphens appearing in subdivided subject headings.)

As always, please ask at the Reference Desk -- (510) 642-0900 -- for assistance with LawCat or any other library resources.

Periodical Indexes

A periodical index can be an efficient way to identify scholarly articles not generally available on the web, but also to avoid the familiar glut of irrelevant hits retrieved via indiscriminate web search engines. In addition to searching for relevant terms in titles, keywords, abstracts, subjects, etc., a useful strategy is to identify relevant subject headings and to focus your search on articles to which they have been assigned.

Index to Legal Periodicals & Books and Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1918-1981 (UCB only).
Index to Legal Periodicals & Books indexes nearly 300 journals and the contents of 1,400 books per year, as far back as 1994. The Retrospective index includes over 500 journals. Both include English language international sources, but neither includes full-text documents.

Use the Thesaurus to identify relevant terms. For example, a search in the Thesaurus for native americans identifies Indians as the term to use when searching these indexes, as well as narrower terms (e.g., Blackfoot Nation). A subsequent search for indians reveals related subject terms (e.g., Indians/Californiaand the databases (i.e., Periodicals & Books or Retrospective) in which they occur.

Use the Browse function to view an alphabetical list of subjects.

Search by keyword in the Basic Search, or narrow your search to the Subject(s) or other fields using Advanced Search. For example:

  • Basic Search: indians and cultural rights
    The results include index records in which your terms appear in the title and subject fields.
  • Advanced Search: indians [Subject(s)] and allotment [All-Smart Search]
    Results include records in which indians appears in the subject fields and allotment appears in any other field.

LegalTrac (UCB only).
LegalTrac includes "indexing [from 1980] for approximately 1,300 titles: major law reviews, legal newspapers, law specialty publications, bar association journals and international legal journals," as well as "law-related articles from more than 1,000 additional business and general interest titles." Full-text is available for only approximately 110 of the journals.

Search by subject or keyword. For example:

  • Subject: native americans
    The result allows you to continue to narrow your search using an extensive list of subdivided subjects (e.g., Native Americans - laws, regulations and rules) or a list of related terms (e.g., Algonquians).
  • Keyword: indian gaming regulatory act (popular name of a statute); oliphant and suquamish (case name); or indian* and religion (legal issues)

Ethnic NewsWatch (UCB only).
Ethnic NewsWatch describes itself as "an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press." Among its indexed titles relating to native peoples, for example, are Native American Times and the American Indian Quarterly (available via Project Muse (UCB only) and JSTOR (UCB only)). Although these are not primarily legal journals, Ethnic NewsWatch may nevertheless be useful for finding news and scholarly articles from other disciplines.

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