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Federal Impeachment

Secondary Sources

Howard University Law Library 1900
Howard Univ., Washington, D.C., ca. 1900 - Law library. [ca. 1900]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Secondary legal resources offer analysis or commentary on law and are used to help locate and explain primary sources of law. The resources listed below are books, treatises, and scholarly articles that discuss the law of impeachment. This section also includes bibliographies on the topic of impeachment.

The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are provided when available.

Hundreds of scholarly law articles have been written on the topic of impeachment and impeachment-related issues. What follows is neither a comprehensive listing of journal articles on the subject of impeachment nor an endorsement of any particular ideas. We have endeavored to provide a sampling of what appear to be the most significant titles based on citation metrics. Links to articles available on open access institutional repositories are provided when available. Additional articles can be located using the Index to Legal Periodicals, Academic OneFile, and numerous other legal research databases available at the Law Library of Congress. The resources in this list are organized in alphabetical order by title of periodical. Links to legal research databases available on site at the Library of Congress follow the list of resources.

These treatises and books discuss the English origins of impeachment, debates at the Constitutional Convention, and the development of procedures and practices. The following are recommendations of scholarly resources, unless otherwise noted in the annotations. Popular accounts written during the Watergate era and the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which are not listed but can be found in the Library’s collection, should be consulted with the understanding that they may be written from a partisan viewpoint. The resources in this list are organized in alphabetical order by author.

Bibliographies are curated lists of resources, sometimes focusing on a specific topic. Many researchers and reference librarians have compiled resources related to impeachment and organized them into bibliographies, thereby reducing the amount of time that a researcher will have to spend finding books, articles, and other materials related to their research topic (including the Law Library of Congress External, for a prior Special Presentation on the Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson). The bibliographies below are organized in reverse chronological order, with the newest publications listed first.

Periodical Database Links

The subscription resources marked with a padlock are available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.