The ghosts, goblins, and ghouls don’t just come around on October 31—you can find them year-round right within HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library. And if you want a research session that will send shivers down your spine, you’re in luck, because we’ve conjured up some spooktacular searching tips and haunting articles that will fright and delight. So let’s stir up the bubbling cauldron that is the Law Journal Library and see what kinds of tricks and treats we uncover.

Spooky Searching

Let’s start with the most obvious Halloween-y search: a keyword search in the Law Journal Library for “Halloween.” That results will yield us over 3,500 results, with intriguing articles such as:

• Selvi Stanislaus’ Halloween Luncheon Speech – Tax Tales of Terror
• The Law of Halloween Nightmares: Damages for Caskets Bouncing down the Highway, Burial Blunders, and More Funeral Frights
• Other Papers: The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends

Make the search a bit more specific, with, say, a search such as “trick or treat;” there are more than 300 mentions of that keyphrase, including articles like:

• The Right to Trick-or-Treat: Constitutional Implications of Halloween Ordinances
• Trick or Treat: Mississippi County Doesn’t Clown around with Halloween Costumes
• FCC: Friend or Foe? SDR: Trick or Treat?

Want to dig into some Halloween history? Try searching for “Samhain AND Halloween” to find titles like:

• Gods behind Bars: How Religious Liberty Has Been Sent Directly to Jail, and How to Get out of Jail Free
• Reports from the Trenches: A Case Study of Religious Freedom Issues Faced by Wiccans Practicing in the United States
• Opening the Broom Closet: Recognizing the Religious Rights of Wiccans, Witches, and Other Neo-Pagans

Try running some keyword searches about topics such as “witches,” “goblins,” or “ghosts” for some frightful results such as:

• Let Ghosts Be Ghosts
• Harry Potter and the (Re) Order of the Artists: Are We Muggles or Goblins
• Constitutional Law – From Goblins to Graveyards: The Problem of Paternalism in Compelled Perception
• Witches, Pirates, Rioters Beware – There Are Laws about You
• Restricted Vision – Women, Witches and Wickedness in the Courtroom

Sinister Subjects in PathFinder

PathFinder is HeinOnline’s custom suite of browse and search tools for subject-specific research, powered by a multi-level subject taxonomy that makes it easy to find articles related to different topics.

Diving into these subjects unveils a wealth of subjects that are certain to pique the interests of any researcher looking for creepy content and spine-tingling scholarship. For example, did you know that we have articles related to:

• The Human Body (inclusive of blood tests, organ donation, drug testing, stem cells, transfusions, transplantation, and more)
• Coroners
• Dead Man’s Statute (admittedly, the definition is not quite as creepy as the name—this statute helps prevent perjury in civil cases by prohibiting parties with an interest in the litigation from testifying against a dead person about communications with said dead person)
• Human Experimentation
• Felony Murder
• Kidnapping
• Burial
• Death and Dying
• Or, some subjects particularly scary to the HeinOnline Bloggers: Tuition (R.I.P. to the pause on student loans), Taxation, and Horses (don’t ask)

Keep Creeping Around in HeinOnline

Lurking around is generally frowned upon, but it’s a-okay when it comes to researching in HeinOnline this Halloween season. Go ahead and sneak up on some articles, haunt some government documents, or kidnap some case law—and we promise you will positively kill your next research project.

And be sure to follow the HeinOnline Blog for more searching tips, current events, true crime tales, and much more, delivered straight to your inbox!