Law Library Research: Introductory Training for LLM Students

Welcome to the Harvard Law School Library! We look forward to working with you while you are here. 

This guide contains the following six videos that have been designed to introduce you to the the Library.  You can watch them all in under an hour. 

• The Law Library Website: Library Services and Subscription Database Links (5:05)
• The HOLLIS Library Catalog (5:38)
• Advanced Searching in HOLLIS to Find LLM Papers  (5:04)
• Finding an LLM Paper Topic & Preemption Checking (4:00)
• The Bluebook Legal Citation System (5:33)
• Perma: Making Permanent Links for your LLM Paper (4:38)

Below is an outline of the the content of the videos with links to relevant resources.

Please download this outline and read it carefully before watching the videos.

All videos are close captioned. Use the controls in the lower right to turn captions on and off and to adjust playback speed. 

Start with the Harvard Law School Library website for information about the Library and access to research materials, including legal databases.  

The video mentions three subscription databases that you need to register for separately: Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg.  You will receive an email from the Library with regsitration instructions about how to register for these databases.

For additional training materials for these databases, see our Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg Law Training Guide.

HOLLIS is the library catalog for all of Harvard's libraries, including the law library.  To be an effective researcher at Harvard, you must learn how to use HOLLIS.

Search HOLLIS for LLM papers from previous years in order to:

• See examples of successful topics, subject matters, and scope
• Identify professors who have supervised papers on specific subjects
• Find examples of successfully formatted papers

A note on terminology: 

• LLM papers are not considered "theses." The use of the term "thesis" in HOLLIS is a library cataloging convention.  Contact the Graduate Program if you have questions. 

• Explore methods for finding and developing potential LLM paper topics
• Identify possible faculty advisors
• Start the process of preemption checking in order to
  • gain a well-informed idea of what has already been published about your LLM paper topic , and
  • ensure that your contribution to the scholarly conversation is original.   

For more information, see our research guides:

Follow the steps in this video to create legal citations using the Bluebook, the primary legal citation method used in U.S. legal scholarship. See our Bluebooking guide for additional information.

What about content management systems, like Zotero?  

Zotero and other content management systems are great for organizing your research, but they haven't mastered the Bluebook. While Zotero has an option for Bluebook citations, the citations aren't completely accurate. Do not rely on Zotero to create correct citations for your LLM paper.

As a Harvard student, you have free access to Zotero.  For more information about how to get it and set it up on your computer, see our Zotero Guide. 

Perma is a service provided by the HLS Library's Library Information Lab that allows you to make permanent links for pages on publicly-accessible websites that you cite in your LLM paper.  This video introduces Perma and explains how to use it.

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Email: research@law.harvard.edu

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