The Law Library of the Library of Congress has produced a good description of how and where court decisions are published.

Lexis/Nexis Help pages:

• Searching guide
• Legal Citation Formats

Georgia Tech has produced an excellent clear training module, "Federal Court Concepts", designed to introduce secondary and postsecondary students to the American federal court system. It contains basic information about the structure of the federal courts, what kind of cases federal courts hear, and how to use federal court decisions in research.

America's Newspapers  America's Newspapers contains the full text content of over 650 U.S. newspapers. Coverage of some of the publications goes back to the mid 1980's. 140 of these titles are exclusively available from this service. Can be searched individually or as multiple titles. Interface is capable of searching the full-text, or limiting to headline, date, author, topic or section of the article record. The papers are updated daily, however the archive depth varies by newspaper. Paid ads are excluded. 

Lexis Nexis Academic Provides full text from national, regional and international newspapers, business and general news magazines, media transcripts, public opinion polls and surveys.Dates included varies for each source, however generally sources don't go back beyond the mid 1980's

Morning Call (Allentown, PA) The Morning Call covers the Lehigh Valley region, including Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton areas (Lehigh, Carbon and Northampton counties in Pennsylvania) and Phillipsburg in Warren County, New Jersey. The Call, started in 1888, provides international, national, state and local news and has a daily circulation of 136,000 and 189,000 on Sundays. Access via NewsBank  includes full-text access back to 1984.

Lexis Nexis Academic -  You can use this database to locate Federal and State court decisions, law review articles and news.

Proquest Congressional - Focusing on Congressional publications and process this database will locate the texts of Bills, Hearings and Reports,  Laws, and also has a legislative history feature.

Com Abstracts - ComAbstracts is a database of article abstracts, books, bibliographic records, and other sources of relevance to researchers, scholars, and students interested in fields related to human communication studies (mass communication, human interaction, rhetoric, health communication, communication and new media, journalism, communication history, etc.)

Some "Proquest" Databases which can be searched simultaneously:

Research Library - Research Library indexes, abstracts and provides selective full-text for a broad spectrum of magazines, journals and newspapers.

Sociological Abstracts -  The Sociological Abstracts database covers research in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. It provides citations and abstracts to articles in over 1,900 journals and other materials such as conference papers, books and dissertations.

World Wide Political Science Abstracts - Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy.

Some "Ebsco Host" Databases:

America: History and Life - If your topic is historical in nature you will want to search AHL which includes scholarly journals and other publications on North American History.

Education Research Complete - Those who have topics relating to students, teachers or education will find this database helpful.

 Use this quick search box to search for books at Lehigh.