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Environmental and Natural Resources Law: Home

United States environmental law research involves federal and state statutes, administrative materials, cases and non-law materials. This research guide focuses primarily on federal environmental research.

Guide Outline

Home

  • Getting Started
  • Administrative Materials
  • Lexis & Westlaw

Treatises & Looseleaf Services

Journals & Article Indexes

  • Current Awareness Services
  • General Information
  • Relevant law Journals

Primary Materials

  • Federal Laws
  • Proposed & Pending Legislation
  • Proposed Rules & Regulations

Legislative History & Case Law

  • Federal Case Law

Getting Started

Start with secondary materials. These materials will provide you with an overview of environmental issues and provide background information to get you started with your research.

Research guides, like this one, will help you identify primary and secondary resources. You may also wish to read:

Administrative Materials

EPA guidelines and policy statements are also available from the following sources:

Agency decisions and actions may be found on the agency website or one of the Looseleaf Services owned by the Law Library 

Make sure you know which agency (or agencies) regulate your issue. You will need to check all relevant agencies to ensure that you have all the information related to your issue. Below is a list of department websites that deal with environmental issues.  These are helpful for learning more about environmental issues.

Lexis & Westlaw

As you will see noted throughout this guide, Westlaw and Lexis contain many of the primary and secondary materials you may use to conduct research in federal law. Both services have created research areas that enable you to search across all relevant databases within the service. In Westlaw visit the Topical Area of Practice – Environmental Law. In Lexis go to Legal > Area of Law – by topic > Environment.

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