Law review articles are a good source of current commentary about all aspects of international human rights law. Most American law reviews are indexed in either LegalTrac or the Index to Legal Periodicals, as well as in the HeinOnline Law Journals library. A few of the articles indexed in LegalTrac or the Index to Legal Periodicals are available in PDF, and all are made available in PDF in HeinOnline from volume one of eact title forward. Over 1700 journals are full-text searchable in HeinOnline, and a smaller number are also full-text searchable in Lexis and Westlaw.
If you do not know whether a particular journal is available in electronic format, look it up by title in IUCAT. The IUCAT record will provide links to all electronic databases in which the title is available, together with information about dates of coverage in each database.
HeinOnline offers the option of searching only non-U.S. and international law journals in its International & Non-U.S. Law Journals library. This library is a subset of the Law Journals Library.
There are also several jurisdictionally-based periodical indexes available electronically, i.e., the Index to Canadian Legal Literature and the British Legal Journals Index, both in Westlaw.
Public International Law (PIL) is a semi-annual index of articles and books published in all the various areas of public international law, including human rights. Entries are indexed according to a systemic outline classification. An electronic version ofI PIL goes back to1990.
The index is organized numerically, with all human rights topics organized under the topical number 14. You may select any decimal sub-heading, e.g., 14.5.1 (Human Rights Protection within the Scope of the United Nations System - General), and then optionally refine by title words, or select the entire human rights classification, and then refine your search by title words. To do the latter, search the article notation field in the public access catalog for the term "VR 14.?.?", then select the refine option to reduce the very large retrieval set by title word, e.g., "food" to locate articles on the right to food.
PIL is an index of articles obtained by the Max Planck Institut at Heidelberg, and therefore includes entries for European as well as American law review articles.