Q. How can I find full-text doctoral dissertations on school law?

The primary source for dissertations is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, or PQDT. If you search for "school law" or "education law", you'll retrieve a thousand results. (The quotation marks, which create a search phrase, are important because, without them, you'll get many more keyword results for law school instead of school law, etc.)

You can narrow your results by adding search terms related to aspects of the topic you are interested in. Most of what you find on PQDT will be dissertation citations and abstracts (or summaries), not the full-text dissertations themselves.

A more direct way to search for full-text dissertations is by visiting ProQuest Central.

• Once you've clicked the link and reached the Advanced Search screen, immediately check the box for Full text under the search fields.
• Then select "Dissertation/Thesis" from the box headed Document Type.
• Now enter "school law" or "education law" in the top search field and click Search. I got about 200 results, all full-text dissertations.
• You can then click Modify search in the top-right corner of the page and add a secondary search term in a separate field if you want to focus the search on some aspect of school law that interests you, such as "principal" or "funding," etc.