The Government Documents collection contains a wide variety of resources for your research from all federal government branches and departments. These documents are available either in our physical collections or in online formats. We also provide access to a comprehensive collection of the publications and issuances of the United Nations and related organizations.
What you'll find in Government Documents:
Primary sources such as congressional bills, court decisions, testimony, speeches, videos, and U.N. resolutions
Secondary sources like statistics, government reports, blog posts, and legal analyses
The databases and digital resources included in this LibGuide will yield primary and secondary source materials for your research.
The following keywords will help with your searches in the library catalog or databases.
For phrases, try using quotation marks around the phrase to keep the words together in your search.
Also, combine them with geographic areas you are searching for, e.g. "ethnic cleansing" AND Yugoslavia. Other search tips are interspersed among the resources in the guide.
Use this resource when you need to do legal research, primarily dealing with the U.S. but also includes foreign and international law databases.
HeinOnline provides access to these special databases which pertain to your research focus:
Law Journal Library
Civil Rights and Social Justice
Foreign & International Law Resources Database
Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: History, Culture, and Law / American Indian Law Collection
International Law Association Reports
U.S. Treaties and Agreements Library
World Trials Library
It also contains databases dedicated to:
HeinOnline allows for broader historical research, providing coverage, from inception, of more than 2,600 law journals and publications.
Also useful are research Pathfinders, which are collections of resources by subject, for example, Human Rights Law or Crimes Against the Person. These pathfinders will pull up links to documents such as Library of Congress research reports or law journal articles on topics related to war crimes or genocide.
Use the links below to find the most current initiatives, programs, and resources from U.S. government agencies.
Be aware that this information comes from official departments; thus, if you are looking for reports or articles about possible U.S. involvement or responsibility for war crimes or other investigative materials, you might try the IGOs, or OneSearch (our library finding tool) which search databases and collections written by non-governmental sources as well.
GovInfo is the digital repository of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO). This resource provides access to authenticated publications from all three branches of government. Coverage is strongest from the mid-1990s onwards, but older documents can be found here as well. New content is added daily. Use this database to find the text of legislation, speeches, testimony, etc.
What can I find in GovInfo?
Congressional hearings, reports, and testimony related to your research topics, such as:
107th Congress House Hearing on Armenian Genocide
103rd Congress congressional record on Rwanda
111th Congress Senate Hearing on Guantanamo Bay
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearings on Human Trafficking
Senate Hearing on Human Trafficking Investigations
In GovInfo, click on the Advanced tab above the search bar for more powerful searches. You can then filter for:
HathiTrust is a collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items.
HathiTrust includes full text of many hard to find books, historical government publications, rare books and serials.
Full-text access and downloading is available for these items:
Tips for searching in HathiTrust:
Click on "Advanced Full-text Search" under the main search bar. This allows for more specific searching by title, subject, or author, and for "exact phrase" or "any of these words," among other features.
For example, if you are doing research on sexual slavery in Japan during World War II, select
The Global Legal Monitor is an online publication from the Law Library of Congress covering legal news and developments worldwide.
It is updated frequently and draws on information from official national legal publications and reliable press sources. You can find previous news by searching the Global Legal Monitor.
You can do a search for "war crimes," genocide, or other related research keywords, and refine your results by
OneSearch is Hamilton Library's discovery tool that searches many of our physical collections and databases.
This resource is good for comprehensive research from historical to the most current materials, from a wide variety of sources.
The link above takes you to the Advanced Search screen.
In the Advanced Search screen, separate out your search terms to find relevant results.
For example,
The Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) is the nation’s premier collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management.
Advanced Search function available from the homepage:
Links to PDFs of many of the records of the