Retrieval of legal information and in particular of legal literature is examined in conjunction with the creation of the Portal to Italian legal doctrine developed by the Institute of Theory and Techniques of Legal Information (ITTIG) of the National Research Council of Italy. Subject searching is a major requirement for Italian legal literature users and a solution is described for the retrieval of legal literature's resources. Such solution is based on the exploitation of Dublin Core metadata for both data coming from structured repositories and for web documents, as well as the use of a controlled vocabulary list prepared for accessing indexed articles of the DoGi -- Dottrina Giuridica database. Technical specifications are illustrated as well as advantages and limitations of such solution.