French Legal Research Guide

Journal articles can be an excellent source for researching recent developments and narrower, more specialized legal topics. Articles published in law journals typically include extensive footnotes with citations to primary and secondary sources that are relevant to the topic. Two types of tools for conducting journal article research are described below:

• Journal indexes include bibliographic information about articles, such as titles, the names of the authors, and the names of the journals in which the articles appeared, as well as one or more subject descriptors. Searching in a journal index usually retrieves more relevant articles than searching in a full-text database because the searches are run only on the bibliographic data and the subject descriptors.
• Full-text journal databases allow you to search within the entire texts of articles. Most also include bibliographic information. It is easier to run searches in full-text databases than using journal indexes, but they tend to retrieve many irrelevant articles.

Two major indexes for French legal topics are the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (use this link to see all articles listed in IFLP that are tagged with the country subject “France”) and Westlaw’s Legal Journals Index. Additional indexes are discussed in the library’s guide to Articles for Legal and Non-Legal Research. Note that indexes are not exhaustive, so particular journals may not be included in a particular index.

Full-text databases for journal articles are available through HeinOnline, Westlaw, Lexis, Oxford Journals Online, and Kluwer Law Online, among others.

Selected French-Language Periodicals

• Dalloz Publications
  The Revues category includes more than 30 French-language law journals.
• Revue française de droit constitutionnel (1990–present) K21 .F73
  French law review specializing in constitutional law established in 1990.
• Revue trimestrielle de droit civil (1902–present) K21 .T75
  French law review specializing in civil law established in 1902.
• La Semaine juridique KJV80 .S45 (1987–2012)
  This weekly law journal covers all aspects of French law—civil, public, commercial, and social.
• Les Cahiers du Conseil constitutionnel (1997–2009)/Les Nouveaux Cahiers du Conseil constitutionnel (2010–2019) INTL K3 .A145
  Legal periodical specializing in decisions of the Constitutional Council as well as comparative analysis of the constitutions of other jurisdictions. Replaced by the open-access Titre VII (on the website of the Conseil constitutionnel) beginning in September 2018.