Law Library Research: Introductory Training for LLM Students

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

The following six videos will to introduce you to library services and research tools. You can watch all of them in less than an hour. After watching, please feel free to request a research consultation for your LL.M. paper research.

• The Law Library Website (5:05)
• The HOLLIS Library Catalog (5:38)
• Advanced HOLLIS and Finding LLM Papers  (5:04)
• Finding a Paper Topic & Preemption Checking (4:01)
• The Bluebook Legal Citation System (5:33)
• Perma: Making Permalinks for LLM Papers (4:37)

This is an outline of the video series with links to related library guides. 

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 library services and navigating to research sources.

The video mentions three databases requiring individual accounts; Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law.  You will receive an email from the Library with instructions about how to register your library-provided, individual accounts. 

HOLLIS is the library catalog for all of Harvard's libraries, including the law school library.

Finding LLM papers from previous years can be helpful to see sample topics and scope. It may also help you identify professors who have supervised papers on subjects that interest you. 

While HOLLIS records refer to LLM papers as "theses",  this is simply a library cataloging convention. LLM papers are not considered "theses". Contact the Graduate Program for questions about this. 

This video suggests methods for finding and developing potential LLM paper topics. It also explains the concept of preemption checking; the process of deep research to ensure your paper topic will be unique and original.

For more information, see our research guides:

The Bluebook is the primary legal citation manual used in legal scholarship. This video explains the process of "Bluebooking" or using the Bluebook to create properly formatted legal citations.

See our Bluebooking guide for additional information:

Zotero for citation management

Zotero is a citation management software that helps with organizing references. Harvard affiliates are provided unlimited storage in Zotero. Some find it useful for larger research projects, but it is completely optional. Information about how to set it up and get started is available in this Zotero Guide. While it offers citation formatting, the Bluebook format from Zotero will not be perfect. You will need to review and refine the results.

Perma is a service that allows you to make permanent links for publicly-accessible websites that you reference in your LLM paper. This video explains why Perma was developed and how to use it.

  Ask Us! Submit a question or search our knowledge base.

Chat with us! Chat  with a librarian (HLS only)

Email: research@law.harvard.edu

 Contact Historical & Special Collections at specialc@law.harvard.edu

 Meet with Us  Schedule an online consult with a Librarian

Hours  Library Hours

Classes View Training Calendar