A number of law reviews and academic journals offer coverage of Latin American legal topics. These titles are listed at right. To access these publications, you must be on a Loyola campus terminal, or have a valid Loyola user ID and password for remote access. Note that many law reviews and journals focusing on international law also publish articles on Latin American topics. The texts of international law reviews and journals are available in Westlaw, LexisNexis, and HeinOnline, which are all subscription databases. The subscription database, LegalTrac, provides indexing of many international legal publications. Please see the "Databases" tab for further information on subscription databases.
The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) indexes foreign (including some non-English language) law reviews and journals. The Index is available in print in the 3rd Floor Reference Section at K33 .I5, as well as online through HeinOnline.
Google Scholar provides a search mechanism to locate scholarly literature across multiple disciplines, including law. Search results on campus will indicate whether the source is available full text through a Loyola database. Off campus, users may go to the "Settings" link and then "Library Links" to set up results that show links to LUC full text databases.
There are several open-access scholarship initiatives that are based in Latin America. See:
The following academic journals cover topics related to Latin American law. The database where the full text of the journal is available is listed after the journal title, along with the years covered.
The Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries mantains a list of Latin American law journals and other serials held at selected U.S. libraries. Titles are organized by country, and there is also a general category for Latin America. The majority of items on the list are in Spanish.
A searchable database of the Tables of Contents of 975 journals published in Latin America is available via the link below. The Latin American journals, which include titles in English, focus on the humanties and social sciences. The database is part of LARRP, the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project--a consortium of research libraries that "seeks to increase free and open access to information in support of learning and scholarship in Latin American Studies."
See also the Latin American Open Archives Portal for access to social sciences "grey literature."
SSRN is an electronic repository for international social sciences scholarship that includes the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN). Thousands of downloadable abstracts, working papers, and published papers are available without charge.
Part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)'s Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, the virtual Biblioteca contains the full-texts of monographs, journals, and other materials. Content emphasis is Mexico, but other Latin American countries are also covered.
SmartCILP is a fee-based legal bibliographic service that allows users to set up a profile, based on areas of interest. Each week, users receive a list of new articles in law reviews and journals that pertain to their profile from the Current Index to Legal Periodicals. Some subject headings related to Latin American law include "Comparative and Foreign Law," "Civil Law," and "Human Rights Law." This service is available only to Loyola Law School faculty, staff, and students. Please see a reference librarian in the Law Library to sign up.
Prepared in the summer of 2009, updated in February 2012, this 23-page guide offers instructions and tips on how to research foreign, comparative, and international law at the LUC Law Library. The annotated guide lists print reference sources, subscription databases, free websites, and current awareness sources that may be useful when approaching foreign, comparative and international law questions.
