Many secondary sources have value that goes beyond citability in a legal argument. In particular, many titles offer valuable information about current court decisions or new laws. Some may analyze new legal authorities to break down their meaning into more digestible terms, while others consider the potential impact of a new judgment or law. Even more secondary sources may examine current legal trends or the current state of a particular area of law, based on recent court decisions or updates to legislation. The reformulations of the law are an excellent example of such an authority. Many courts are perfectly comfortable quoting a particular section of a reformulation to explain a particular legal issue. Similarly, jury instructions from state and federal courts across the country are used as an authoritative reference when submitting jury instructions. Online catalogues are another starting point for finding print and electronic resources locally. For law students, the law school library will have an online catalog with records of their print and electronic resources. Most importantly, each recording is associated with one or more Library of Congress thematic headings. The searcher can search for keywords directly in a field search, or they can search for keywords in the catalog and then search for keywords found in records that seem relevant.
Records in printed resources provide signatures to locate the object in the library`s physical collection; Electronic resource datasets contain direct links to the online resource. When searching for an unknown area of law or jurisdiction, a secondary source gives the researcher a quick overview of the state of the law in a particular area of law or jurisdiction. For an unknown area of law, a general resource such as a legal encyclopedia may be the best place to start. Once the researcher has a basic introduction, they can move on to a treatise or how-to guide. A law-specific legal encyclopedia would be beneficial for the researcher working with the law in a state where they do not normally practice. A set of court-specific practices can be useful both to understand the subject in the researcher`s home jurisdiction and to identify a set of practices in a new jurisdiction to see how it differs from one`s own. If secondary sources don`t really establish the law, why should they care? There are several ways to find these research guides online. One strategy would be to consult the websites of law libraries in the province or territory where you are searching. These websites will list their research guides and possibly provide court-specific information.
Nowadays, so much information is available online with just a few clicks that we sometimes forget that asking for help from a knowledgeable person remains an option. However, as many of the strategies discussed in this book show, the amount of information just a few clicks away can be the problem. Asking a reference librarian or other person, such as a practicing lawyer, who is familiar with the area in which the researcher is investigating is sometimes the quickest way to find documents that are relevant to the point. Reference librarians are the people who know their collections best, whether it is a law school library or the library of a private organization. They are experts in using many of the systems described in this text and those specific to their own institutions. Your job is not only to familiarize yourself with these systems and resources, but also to help others navigate them. If the researcher does not know where to start their research or if they have encountered an obstacle after following various leads, a reference librarian, a lawyer specializing in this area of law or another legal information specialist may be able to direct them to resources to move them forward. Treaties are comprehensive texts on a narrow legal subject. They usually provide much more discussion and analysis of the legal issue than a legal encyclopedia or ALR annotation, and also guide the researcher through references and citations to primary authorities.
They may or may not be court-specific and their length may vary from one to dozens of volumes. Our client, Mary Smith, was adopted by the Smith family when she was a toddler in California and wants to be reunited with her biological parents. You are a newcomer not only to adoption but to family law in general, and you need to learn about that area of law. Here`s what you`ll find: Many law professors publish their published papers and work in progress on SSRN or the Social Science Research Network. SSRN makes these works available to the public free of charge. The website can be searched and searched in specific areas of legal research, but it can be slow and difficult to use. Reformulations are publications of the American Law Institute (ALI) that clarify and order the current state of jurisprudence on a particular topic or, in other words, reformulate the law. Reformulations contain analyses of an area of law, summarize and refer to case law from different countries, and may contain suggestions on how the legal system might clarify an area of law in the future. The American Law Reports are a series of hundreds of volumes filled with articles called "notes." LRAs offer a strange combination of width and depth; The number of topics covered is enormous, but these topics are much more specific than those of an encyclopedia.