LibGuides: Family Sciences: Find Sources to Interpret Laws

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Use the Discovery Search to cast a wide net among our resources, or to search for a specific citation, copy and paste the title of your article in the search bar.

(Note: Discovery does not search everything, but it does include most of our databases!)

Search Library Databases

Responses to Public Policies

RAND Corporation - Children and Families Legislation
RAND research addresses child health and how families and neighborhoods affect child well-being. Other family-focused research covers topics such as immigration, caregiving, and household finances.
Non-governmental Organization Search Engine
Searches across over a thousand NGO websites for policy briefs, reports, and more.

Newspaper Source This link opens in a new window
Newspaper Source™ provides cover-to-cover full text for 28 national (U.S.) & international newspapers, including The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, etc. The database also contains selected full text for more than 260 regional (U.S.) newspapers, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, Daily News (New York), San Jose Mercury News, etc.

Legal Opinions on Public Policies

NexisUni This link opens in a new window
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
HeinOnline is the world's largest fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database. It contains comprehensive coverage from inception of both U.S. statutory materials, U.S. Congressional Documents and more than 2,500 scholarly journals, all of the world's constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, and access to the full text of state and federal case law powered by Fastcase. This Government, Politics & Law HeinOnline’s database package offers special collections on Criminal Justice, Religion and the Law and Women and the Law among others.

Academic Research on Public Policies

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Designed for academic institutions, this database is a leading resource for scholarly research. It supports high-level research in the key areas of academic study by providing journals, periodicals, reports, books and more.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
Often Google Scholar will find an article for you, but ask you to pay for it to view the entire article. To access the article for free, ask for help finding it in Fant Library's holdings, or request an Interlibrary Loan.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR's archival journal collections include more than two thousand journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
PsycINFO®, from the American Psychological Association (APA), contains more than 2.4 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, all in psychology and related disciplines, dating as far back as the early 1800s. 98 percent of the covered material is peer-reviewed.