HeinOnline’s Civil Rights and Social Justice database brings together a diverse offering of publications covering civil rights in the United States as their legal protections and definitions are expanded to cover more and more Americans. Containing hearings and committee prints, legislative histories on the landmark legislation, CRS and GAO reports, briefs from major Supreme Court cases, and publications from the Commission on Civil Rights, this database allows users to educate themselves on the ways our civil rights have been strengthened and expanded over time, as well as how these legal protections can go further still. A varied collection of books on many civil rights topics and a list of prominent civil rights organizations help take the research beyond HeinOnline.
Alt-PressWatch (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
Alt-PressWatch includes full-text newspapers and magazines from alternative, independent presses, providing an unmatched, multidisciplinary resource for researchers seeking an alternative to mainstream media perspectives, including perspectives on social change issues.
America: History and Life with Full Text (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
Search for articles on all aspects of the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Articles from national, state and local historical journals are covered, as well as historical articles in major humanities and social science journals. Also includes citations to reviews, books, and dissertations.
American History in Video
This is an online collection of documentaries and newsreel footage of key historical events in the United States from sources such as PBS, A&E, and The History Channel.
Black Studies Center (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
Black Studies Center has full-text scholarly essays, recent periodicals, and historical newspaper articles, including from The Chicago Defender.
Chicano Database (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains materials discussing issues facing Chicano and Mexican-American communities, including racial and ethnic discrimination.
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This resource includes bibliographic records and full text of journals related to criminal justice and criminology. Subjects covered include: corrections, prisons, criminal investigations, forensic sciences, investigation, substance abuse, addiction, probation, and parole.
De Gruyter: IBZ Online (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains academic journal bibliographies and abstracts discussing social justice issues from around the globe.
Elsevier eBook Complete Collections (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This is a searchable database of full-text eBooks on topics including law and social change.
Exploring Race in Society (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains articles about many race-related topics, including discrimination, antiracism, gentrification, and redlining.
Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains a range of opinions on various social issues, such as feminism, racism, LGBTQ equality, poverty, and police brutality.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar allows searching of multidisciplinary scholarly literature including articles, papers, books, abstracts, and technical reports from a wide variety of resources.
HeinOnline - Criminal Justice Law Reviews and Journals (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
HeinOnline provides full-text, image-based PDF access to 78 law reviews and journals that publish content specific to criminal justice.
HeinOnline: Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This collection brings together all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. It includes every statute on slavery passed by every colony and state, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. More than a thousand pamphlets and books on slavery from the 19th century are also included as well as modern histories of slavery. Searchable access to all congressional debates from the Continental Congress to 1880 is included as well as general keyword, document type and topic searches.
Indigenous Peoples of North America (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This GALE database provides access to information on the cultural and historical heritage of indigenous people.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally funded resource offering reports, journals, statistics, and other information on subjects relating to criminology, criminal justice, substance abuse, corrections, policy, crime victims, and program development worldwide.
SAGE Knowledge Social Sciences (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains Congressional proceedings, historical documents, encyclopedias, and reference guides related to issues arising under the social justice umbrella.
Social Explorer: Explore Maps
This website publishes visually presented research findings on a variety of legal and social issues in the United States, including economic, crime, population, and religion data.
SocIndex with Full Text (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database contains English and foreign-language academic materials regarding social justice from around the world.
Sociological Abstracts (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
Sociological Abstracts covers the international literature of sociology, social work, and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. It provides abstracting and indexing of articles and book reviews drawn from thousands of serials publications, plus books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers, and working papers.
Social Services Abstracts (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This database provides bibliographic coverage of current research focused on social work, human services and related areas, including social welfare, social policy and community development. The database abstracts and indexes thousands of serials publications and includes abstracts of journal articles and dissertations and citations to book reviews.
There are a number of treatises in the Law Library collection related to race and the law. You can search for relevant books in the library catalog by using subject headings such as Civil Rights, Race Relations, and Racism.
Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten US Court Opinions on Race and the Law (Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R. A. Lenhardt, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, editors 2022)
This book contains a collection of key decisions in U.S. law rewritten by feminist legal scholars. The essays in this volume re-write US Supreme Court opinions (and a few lower court opinions) that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, demonstrating how Critical Race Theory can concretely inform the task of judging.
Critical Race Theory: A Primer (Khiara M. Bridges, 2019) (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE or an ASU West Academic account)
This treatise discusses the development and application of critical race theory in the legal context, with focus on privilege, implicit bias, and intersections with sexuality, religion, disability. Modern issues explored in depth include criminal justice, education, and healthcare.
Diversifying the Courts: Race, Gender, and Judicial Legitimacy (Nancy Scherer, 2023)
This book illuminates the complicated relationship between diversity and court legitimacy, and shows how diverse representation can positively impact perceptions of the court among women and racial minorities, while having a negative impact on the perceptions among white people and men.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Michelle Alexander, 2020)
Arguing that the criminal justice system in effect imposes a familiar caste system of racial oppression in America. It can also be found on ProQuest Ebook Central (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE).
A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law (Sherrilyn A. Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, Anthony C. Thompson, 2018)
This publication is essentially a transcript of a symposium on racial injustice and law in the U.S. after the 2016 presidential election, convened in celebration of the establishment of NYU Law School’s Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law. The book contains a varied debate, which discusses inequality, indifference, inherent racism, and the consequences of capitalism.
Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (Erwin Chemerinsky, 2021)
In this book, Chemerinsky argues that the Supreme Court has eroded individual rights regarding self-incrimination and search and seizure and that legal doctrines have evolved to shield the police from accountability for misconduct.
Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Matthew K. Clair, 2020)
Through interviews and courtroom visits, the book observes that disadvantages linked to race and class combine to create disparities in outcome in plea deals and trials. This book is also available on ProjectMUSE (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE).
Promises to Keep (Donald G. Nieman, 2020)
This publication examines the growth of equality principles that Black Americans helped enact from the early days of the Constitution, which did not originally equally protect Black Americans, through the Civil War and Jim Crow and into the modern day civil rights movements. It can also be accessed on Oxford Academic (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE).
Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (Tania Das Gupta et. al, eds., 2018)
This book examines racial theory, Colonialism, and modern problems with racism in society and its institutions. It also explores the impact of privileged identity categories.
Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race (Emily S. Lee, ed., 2019)
This work takes account of the unique characteristics and perspectives of individual authors to more fully explore contemporary social issues regarding race, from interactions with law enforcement, psychology, politics, and intersectionality.
Racial Ecologies (LeiLani Nishime & Kim D. Hester Williams eds., 2018, available on campus or remotely with ASURITE)
This is an anthology of scholarly work that examines the outsize impact of environmental degradation on communities of color.
The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Anne Gray Fischer, 2023)
This book argues that police power was built on women's bodies--that the enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and right to move freely through city streets.
Supreme Bias (Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., & Lori A. Ringhand, 2023)
This work presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting that female nominees and nominees of color face more skepticism of their professional competence, are subjected to stereotype-based questioning, and are more frequently interrupted and described in less positive terms by senators.
HeinOnline has several collections featuring journals devoted to legal issues involving (available on campus or remotely with ASURITE):
Crime, Law and Social Change
This journal highlights the intersections and tensions between social justice and the criminal justice system in the U.S. and worldwide, including examinations of punishment strategies and disparate treatment of particular people.
Harvard Journals and Publications on Law and Social Change
This Harvard site lists a variety of publications that examine social justice issues such as civil liberties, human rights, gender, race, and ethnicity.
Law Journal for Social Justice
This journal at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law publishes articles discussing social problems and suggesting reforms on topics including incarceration, sexual abuse, and discrimination.
N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change
This publication explores the legal and ethical concerns on topics such as immigration, criminal justice, and child-welfare governance.
Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
This is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to civil rights and liberties issues--both domestic and foreign.
University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change
This student-run journal is committed to interdisciplinary scholarship that examines social, racial, and economic justice.
Proquest's Black Freedom Struggle in the United States website features select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.
The website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom.
ABA Journal news
This site provides news and analysis on topics such as access to justice and diversity.
Bloomberg Law News (Bloomberg password required)
Bloomberg features news regarding Social Justice & Diversity and many other topics.
Law 360: Access to Justice (available on campus or through ASURITE)
This Law 360 site explores issues related to the criminal justice system, including immigration, policing, criminal law, incarceration, and disparate impacts on racial, ethnic, and other minority groups.
Law.com News
This website aimed at legal professionals features news and analysis arranged by topics including diversity and civil rights.
Westlaw News (Westlaw password required)
Westlaw's searchable database of news and analysis highlights topics such as immigration and criminal justice.