Secondary sources of law provide information about the law. They summarise the area of law, focus on relevant issues and list other relevant resources in the footnotes.
Use secondary sources to narrow down to the specific information you need. From there you will be directed to the relevant primary source material (legislation and case law).
Secondary resources include:
Legal dictionaries will help you define a term and place it in a legal context. They usually provide a paragraph summary of a term and refer to other related concepts or primary sources.
We recommend using these two dictionaries:
Find more legal dictionaries in the Law Library Resource Guide.
Legal encyclopedias summarise aspects of the law, giving you an overview and point to important legislation and cases (primary resources). Remember encyclopedias are generally only a place to start, not to complete your research.
You might use an encyclopedia to find:
We subscribe to the two Australian legal encyclopedias:
Textbooks provide essential background to a topic, contextualise the topic within a broader area of law and identify and examine issues in the law.
Books are an invaluable source of information for legal research. Books can provide you with
Some books are available as both e-books and in print, while others may only be available in one format.
The library also has law e-books. You can find these in Primo Search by doing a keyword search on an area of law, then, using the limiters on the left hand side of the page, limit your results to Books and Available Online. You can also change the date range of the results to show more recent publications.
It is important to make sure any books or e-books you are using refer to the correct jurisdiction.
Journal articles are published more quickly than books and can provide depth of analysis and opinion to inform argument. They are often peer reviewed and are written by academics or practitioners with expertise in a particular area of law. Remember journal articles may not always reflect the current law and it is important to check if there have been any updates since the article was published.
Why use law journals?
A key Australian law journal database is AGIS. You can search by keywords in the abstract, author, article title, case name or Act considered.
You can also search in databases related to your discipline. To make sure the content of the article is relevant, check the jurisdiction (country or state) it is discussing.
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