BYU Law Library has a new Civil Rights database, Trends & Policy: U.S. Civil Rights. This database is designed to be an easy-to-use tool that brings together different types of sources, including statutes, executive orders, hearings, and other primary sources along with news articles, data sets, and more, all browsable by topic and organized into timelines.

For example, the timeline for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) shows two significant events that occurred in 2023: the Supreme Court’s decision in Groff v. DeJoy and the introduction of Senate Bill S. 2984 clarifying the applicability of the ADA to web standards (the bill was not enacted). Here is a screenshot of those events from the timeline:

Trends & Policy: U.S. Civil Rights is a useful tool for exploring milestones in Civil Rights law and finding some of the key sources associated with those milestones. Here is a screenshot showing background information and the different resources available for the ADA:

In addition to the ADA, other topics available in this database include:

  • Brown v. Board of Education
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • Native American Rights Movement
  • Right to Privacy
  • And more…

Here is a sample of the tiles from the Browse Topics page:

Tiles for the topics of Freedom Summer of 1964, Freedom of Religion, The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and Types of Discrimination from Trends & Policy: U.S. Civil Rights

U.S. Civil Rights is part of the Trends & Policy series from ProQuest, which includes other databases organized in the same format. We have the following available at BYU:

Contact a librarian if you have questions about using these databases.

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