• Take a look at the suggested readings in Kitty Calavita’s An Invitation to Law and Society (on reserve at the library).
• Wiley- Blackwell publishes volumes (most available electronically through the library) containing essays by leaders in the field quickly summarizing existing scholarship on a variety of broad topics. I recommend: 
  • the Blackwell Handbook of Law & Society (eds. Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick, 2015)
  • the Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Austin Sarat, ed.) has essays quickly summarizing existing scholarship on a variety of broad topics (such as “The Police and Policing,” “Law and Popular Culture,” and “Immigration”).
  • the Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kries, 2004) 
  • the Blackwell Companion to Criminology (ed. Colin Sumner, 2004) 
  • the Blackwell Companion to American Legal History (ed. Sally E. Hadden Alfred L. Brophy, 2013)

• The Oxford Handbooks (available electronically through the library) have very useful short essays on a variety of topics (often with lots of useful citations you can follow up on). You may want to look at:  
  • the Oxford Handbook of Social Movements (eds. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, 2014)
  • the Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security (eds. Derek S. Reveron, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, and John A. Cloud, 2017)
  • the Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government (ed. Donald P. Haider-Markel, 2014)
  • the Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy (ed. Daniel Béland, Kimberly J. Morgan, and Christopher Howard, 2014
  • the Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics (ed. Keith E. Whittington, R. Daniel Kelemen, and Gregory A. Caldeira, 2008) Main Library Stacks 340.115 O98
• Sage Publishers publishes encyclopedias with detailed entries on a variety of legal topics. You may want to look at:
  • the Encyclopedia of Law & Society: American and Global Perspectives (ed. David S. Clark, 2007)
  • the Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment (ed. David Levinson, 2002)
  • the Encyclopedia of Juvenile Justice (eds. Marilyn D. McShane & Frank P. Williams III, 2003) 
  • the Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement (eds. Larry E. Sullivan, Marie Simonetti Rosen, Dorthy Moses Schulz & M. R. Haberfeld, 2004)
  • the Encyclopedia of Prisons & Correctional Facilities (ed. Mary Bosworth, 2005)
• Gale has a number of legal and law & society encyclopedias. You may be interested in:
  • Gale Encyclopedia of American Law (ed. Donna Batten, 2011)
  • Gale Encyclopedia of Everyday Law (ed. Donna Batten, 2013) 
  • Trials of the Century: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture and the Law (ed. Scott P. Johnson, 2011) 
• More extensive treatments of individual legal topics can be found in law reviews and legal treatises. A treatise is a scholarly work written by a recognized expert that provides in-depth discussion of the law in a particular field. (Some well-known ones are Erwin Chemerinsky on Constitutional Law and Melville Nimmer on copyright.) Most of our treatises are located at the Pritzker Legal Research Center and may not be available to send to Evanston. If you visit the law library, however, you can ask a law librarian for a treatise on a topic and they can direct you to what you need. 
• Undergraduates are free to visit the law library and check out books. For more information, see http://www.library.law.northwestern.edu/about/using-the-library

Nutshells are comprehensive guides to the law in specific areas. Written by recognized legal scholars, these books offer a summary of the law and provide references to relevant cases and statutes. These are a great place to get started in legal research.

The library holds many of the nutshell books (published by West), with some at Main Library and many more at the Pritzker Legal Research Center.

You can find these using NUsearch by doing a guided search for the keyword "nutshell" in the title field and "west" in the anywhere field.

Here are just a few examples: