Image from the treatise known as Bracton, composed in the wake of Magna Carta, the most ambitious legal work from medieval England. (Image from the British Library)
Finding Books and Journals
Use Library Search to access eBooks or to find items in our print collections. Much of the material that you will need to read will be available as an ebook.
To search for a book, use words from the title and the author or editor's name in the search box. If you are searching for a law textbook, always sort by date newest from the left hand side menu. This will ensure that you find the latest edition. You can also limit your search to ebooks.
Law print collections are held in the Wills Library, but you may also need to use the collections held in the Arts and Social Sciences Library.
You can also use Library Search to search for journal articles using the author and title. Some Law Journals are not indexed in Library Search, so if you can't find the article you are looking for - search for the Journal title on our find an e-journal page.
References to Law Journals will often use abbreviated titles, so you may need to use the Cardiff Index of Legal Abbreviations to find the full title.
If you are searching for journal articles on a particular topic, the Journals area in Westlaw is a good starting point.
Tutorial: find law books and articles
This short tutorial demonstrates the most effective way of using Library Search to find books and hard-to-find law articles.
ebook collections
Oxford Scholarship Online
Access a library of over 17,000 outstanding academic books from Oxford University Press
Oxford Handbooks Online
A collection of the most prestigious and successful strands of Oxford's scholarly publishing, bringing together the world's leading scholars to write review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate.
University Press Scholarship Online
UPSO is a vast and rapidly expanding research library, bringing together the best scholarly publishing from around the world. UPSO offers an unparalleled research tool, delivering over 31,000 of the best quality scholarly works from leading university presses, across over 30 subject areas in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, medicine, and law.
Oxford Very Short Introductions
Very Short Introductions can change the way you think about the things that interest you, and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about: from Climate to Consciousness, Game Theory to Ancient Warfare, Privacy to Islamic History, Globalization to Literary Theory.
Oxford Legal Research Library
Collections of leading works in 4 areas: International Commercial Arbitration; International Commercial Law; Financial and Banking Law; and Private International Law.
Cambridge Law Handbooks
Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study, law, and psychological science research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume encompass the most important issues and topics within each subject, offering a coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety.
Westlaw Books
Provides access to a large number of texts including Clerk and Lindsell on Torts and Palmer's Company Law.