Bloomberg Law, Lexis+ and Westlaw Precision are powerful legal research tools, but when seeking information outside the scope of legal databases, did you know that you can browse the UW library's databases by subject?

The databases listed on this UW library site including scholarly journal indexes, historical material, federal legislation, national and local newspapers, statistics, medicine & science databases, like PubMed and Medline, sociology indexes, articles and ebooks on literature, poetry, drama and so forth.  If you can think of a field of study, there is most likely a database available through the UW library website that covers a subject speciality.

Why would this be important to law students?  Sometimes your legal issues will require locating medical information, following the history of a piece of legislation when researching legislative intent, reviewing news of the day or a weather report from a specific time period.  For example, researching how the media covered a labor strike or a snow storm.

If you are looking for information outside of the legal databases and having trouble finding a resource, please stop by the Reference Desk and ask for help.

Submitted by Jenny Zook, Reference Librarian on September 24, 2025

This article appears in the categories: Law Library