What Do You Know About Legal Research, Anyway?

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | March 10, 2009 - 08:49

Attention 1Ls and everybody else: Professor Nancy P. Johnson recently published “Best Practices: What First Year Law Students Should Learn in a Legal Research Class.” The paper presents a fine check list of core principals we know you’ve been taught here, and which you might want to review before the summer employment season starts, such as:

the value of starting with secondary sources to understand a subject area, identify issues, find citations to primary authority
reading the entire text of primary law
understanding the hierarchy of the courts, and the principles of precedent and authority
the implications of official vs. unofficial sources, whether print or electronic
all the parts of a case
finding cases using digests, indexes, or online with Boolean or natural language searching
citators as updating and finding tools
session laws, statutes, codes, annotated codes, how to read a statute carefully, and update
finding and using administrative rules, and decisions of administrative boards
law review articles as research resources

Johnson, Nancy P.,Best Practices: What First-Year Law Students Should Learn in a Legal Research Class(2009). Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 2009; Georgia State University College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-04. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1341118