Weslaw

Weslaw offers legislation, case law and journal articles for North America and United Kingdom. Unfortunatelly, it have limited coverage for some countries like Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

• Westlaw contains a vast collection of legal sources including legislation and case law, articles, journal indexes, law dictionaries and legal encyclopedias. This page covers information that applies to Westlaw general.
• As mentioned, Westlaw provides in-depth coverage of North American and United Kingdom sources, plus some content from the European Union, Middle East and Asia. There is limited coverage for Australia and New Zealand.
• The main Westlaw page has selected lists of the databases under collection headings, and a search option on the above allowing users to search up to 10 sources straight from the first screen.
• If you can’t find the publication you want, use the Directory link at the very top centre of any Westlaw page. You can either browse the categories or use the search box on the Directory page.

There are two main ways of searching Westlaw. Natural Language and Terms and Connectors. Natural Language does not require any knowledge of search syntax but lacks the ability to control what results you get back. Terms and Connectors searches allow you to be more specific, but you need to use connectors such as AND/OR. You can also limit your search to specific parts of the document such as the title or abstract. You can specify that the terms occurs within a certain number of words of each other or that they occur in the same sentence.

If you know the name of the legislation required, you can browse Westlaw’s Table of Contents.

Journals in Westlaw are located via:

• the World Journals tab which has the bulk of the most important collections
• WLI international tab and jurisdictional tabs
• the Directory – under Legal periodicals and Current awareness

Some tabs such as Westlaw United Kingdom have “Quick Find”search boxes for journal articles. You can search for individual articles by citation using Search by Citation

Author: international

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