Research Guides: Seminar Paper Research: Preemption Checking

Preemption Checking

Once you have a topic idea, you need to make sure it is unique. Survey the literature to make sure that your article is not too similar to an article that was already published, or one that is forthcoming. Ideally, you should complete the preemption check before you do too much research on the topic. If you find that there has already been a lot of scholarship on your topic, make sure your thesis is original enough that it adds to the body of knowledge. If you are uncertain whether your topic is distinct enough, check with your seminar professor.

What is Preemption Checking?

Make sure your paper:

Hasn’t been previously written
Has not been made obsolete
- Does not mean: your topic has to be totally obscure
- Does mean: you need an angle

Process:

Search the relevant literature
Keep track as you go – this turns into your research log!
Monitor the situation
Make sure it’s not preempted over the course of the semester

Literature Review

Existing Scholarship

Westlaw
Secondary Sources->Law Reviews & Journals
Lexis+
Content->Secondary Materials->Law Reviews & Journals
Google Scholar
Choose Advanced Search from the upper left-hand menu to search for articles in specific date ranges or in specific online databases.

Index to Legal Periodicals (1981 - Date) This link opens in a new window
Full text of select periodicals, as far back as 1994, in addition to indexing of legal journals, law reviews and monographs.
LegalTRAC (1980 - Date) This link opens in a new window
Legal periodical index.

Cross-Discipline & Dissertations

Academic Search Premier on EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Premier on EBSCOhost is a multi-disciplinary database providing citations and abstracts for articles from over 4,140 journals, and includes full text from over 3,430 journals

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Library website (lawlibrary.colorado.edu) ->Catalogs-> University (Chinook) -> Find Articles & Databases-> A-Z Databases -> P ->ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
VPN
If you're researching off-campus, use the VPN.

Pending Scholarship

SSRN
Tomorrow´s Research Today
SSRN´s eLibrary provides 950,733 research papers from 503,172 researchers in more than 55 disciplines both published and unpublished.
BePress
The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
Google Scholar
Use Google Scholar to look up articles in Hein Online, bePress, SSRN and other legal periodical collections.

Monitoring

Use an alert to monitor changes to issues related to your topic. You can set up an alert in any of the following:

Westlaw/Lexis alerts
RSS feeds for relevant blogs
Google alerts
Make full use of the resources you consulted during your literature review

Research Log

Keep track of where you’ve been and what you found. As you research, keep a log of:

Resources consulted
What help the resource(s) provide (or didn’t)
Search terms used
Date accessed
Citations to the resource(s)
Relevant citations obtained from the resource
Updates (make sure you know whether the law is still valid)

Your log can be as simple as a Table like this one. Or you could use a research tool like Zotero https://www.zotero.org/

Seminar Paper Research