Natural Resources Law Clinic Guide: Federal Statutes and Regulations

Research often begins with finding the statutes and regulations on your topic. 

There can be statutes and regulations on the SAME topic, so no regulatory research is COMPLETE without searching for applicable statutes (and no statutory research is COMPLETE without searching for applicable regulations).

Westlaw is easiest for statutory and regulatory research since it has an index for both the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States Code.

There are three ways to find statutes and regulations on Westlaw:

1. Running a search
2. Navigating through the table of contents
3. Looking in the index

The Code of Federal Regulations contains the current regulations of each agency. On Westlaw, there are three ways to search for regulations.

You can run a search (natural language or terms and connectors) in the CFR database.



The index is useful because it provides an alphabetical listing of topics with associated CFR sections.

You can also find CFR sections by browsing through the table of contents. You can also search within a specific part of the table of contents. 

There are also free government websites such as the e-CFR.