A good place to start is the UW Libraries' subject page for legal materials.  This takes you to the major online databases and collections of journals (some discussed below).

If you're searching for books and other hard-copy legal materials at the UW, it's a good idea to go directly to the UW Law School Library's homepage.  Materials in the Law Library are not in the main UW Library's online catalogue.  Alternatively, you could use the Summit online catalogue, which searches the UW main library and the UW Law Library along with the libraries of dozens of institutions in the Northwest (and you can easily request these materials).

If you're using any of the UW Libraries databases from home, be certain to click on the off-campus access button found on the Libraries' main search page.

You need to become familiar with the format of legal citations.  Most begin with a number (the volume of a publication), an abbreviation of the publication's title, another number (the page on which the material begins) and a date in parentheses.  Thus, FCC v. National Citizens Commission for Broadcasting, 436 U.S. 775 (1978) is a case found in volume 436 of U.S. Reports starting on page 775 and decided in 1978.  U.S. Reports contains only decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, so no further information is given.  Sometimes in parentheses you'll find the name of the court that decided the case (e.g., 7^th Cir. = 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals).  Law reviews follow a similar format: author, title of article, volume, title of publication, page on which it starts, date of publication.

Finally, some legal materials are indexed in communication journals.  To find these, check the UW Libraries' subject page for communication.    For research help, feel free to contact Jessica Albano, the UW communications librarian.

If you have a case name or a citation, you can usually find the case online in LexisNexis Academic (a UW restricted database, which means you have to  click on the off-campus access button if you're not using a UW computer).  Click on the tab Legal; note that the legal page lists several types of materials in the lefthand column.  To find a case, click on Federal & State Cases.   Type in either the case name or the citation; whichever you use, be accurate.   Click Search and you should get the case. 

If you're looking for a U.S. Supreme Court case, you have a choice of two formats in which to read the case found through Lexis: you can read the unformatted text as it appears on the original screen.  Alternatively -- and I would recommend this -- you can read a PDF version of the same case (it's much more readable).  To access the PDF version, click View Lawyers' Edition PDF of this Document in the upper left of the opinion.  Remember: this optional PDF format is available only for U.S. Supreme Court cases.

A tip on reading cases: a lot of the material on the first few or several pages is not official -- it's a summary and annotation supplied by the publisher.   This stuff can be useful in figuring out what's important.  But you must realize that this is not the language of the court, and you certainly don't want to quote it as such.  The official part of the court decision begins after the phrase "Opinion of the Court" or something similar. 

Law reviews—there are hundreds —provide overviews of legal controversies and developments in the law.  Many of the articles argue a particular viewpoint or position.  Law reviews also routinely critique major cases and pieces of legislation.

You have three ways to find law review articles -- LegalTrac, LexisNexis or Hein Online. 

LegalTrac indexes several hundred law reviews published since 1980.  You can search in various ways (keyword, subject, author, etc.).  Keyword searches might give you the most flexibility, but they also sometimes turn up unwieldly numbers of citations, so choose your words carefully.  Some articles found in LegalTrac provide full text; most don't.  To get the full text of the articles, you'll have to go to Hein Online or LexisNexis.

Hein Online provides the full text of articles, in PDF files, for several hundred law reviews.  It covers the full runs of these law reviews no matter how old (a few go back into the 1800s).  It takes several months from date of publication before articles are available in Hein Online; for the most recent articles, you should use LexisNexis.  To use Hein Online, find the citation to an article in Legal Trac or search Hein directly.  Go to Hein Online and click on Law Journal Library.  That takes you to an alphabetical list of law reviews.  If you already know the article you want, you can just go to that publication, find the volume and go to the page on which your article starts.

If you want to search for articles in Hein Online', use it's search function to search the full text of all the law reviews.  Click on the Search  tab on the upper left side of the screen.  The search is thorough, so be certain to narrow your scope as much as possible so you don't have an unreasonable number of returns.   Note that there are tutorials to help you conduct searches.

LexisNexis also provides law review articles going back to about 1980; it's also the most up-to-date source of law reviews.  Go to LexisNexis Academic and click on the  Legal tab.  The legal page lists several types of materials in the lefthand column.  To search law reviews, be certain that you're in Law Reviews (it's the default search when you first go to this page so usually you don't have to click on anything).   Construct your searches carefully so you don't turn up an overwhelming number of articles.  Note that there are tutorials to help you construct searches.  One tip: if you find an article that's more than a year old, you can find a more readable version -- a PDF file -- in Hein Online.