Skip to Main Content

Locating 50-State Surveys

This guide is intended to help you identify sources for precompiled 50-state surveys.

Ask us anything!

Law librarians and library staff are available to help you find your way around the library and its legal materials, provide research support, and assist you in locating materials that are not in our library. You can find the latest information about our hours and services on the library homepage. There are several ways to contact us:

Email us

In Person: The Borrowing Services Desk and Reference Office are on the main floor of the law library. Online and in-person appointments with the reference staff can be made from the library homepage

Call us:

Borrowing Services Desk: (650) 723-2477
Reference Desk: (650) 725-0800

50-State Surveys

Westlaw, available to Stanford Law School users by personal name and password, has 50 state surveys available on a variety of statutory and regulatory topics.  

To access the surveys, type "50 state surveys" in the search box.  Then select "50 State Surveys."

Next, you can run a search across the filtered secondary sources.

Jurisdictional Surveys

Jurisdictional Surveys on Westlaw is a tool that allows you to easily keep track of laws across the US and quickly retrieve a customized and relevant compilation of laws across all US jurisdictions on a specific topic. 

Simply start with the citation of a statute, an index term that describes your topical target, or select a topic from the predefined topic page.  Jurisdictional Surveys then compiles an inventory of related laws on the topic, curating a list of statutory sections that accounts for varying terminology across all jurisdictions.  You can also use the tool to refine the list of statutory sections to focus on identifying and analyzing statutory variances and similarities.

To access the surveys, simply type "jurisdictional surveys" in the search box.  Then click "Jurisdictional Surveys" under Content Pages.

Once in Jurisdictional Surveys, you can search by statute citation, index term, or topic.