Legal
Research Class Notes
What’s
on tap today?
Headnotes
West
takes points of law out of a case and puts a note about it at the top of the
case. You can’t simply rely on the Headnote, though.
Each Headnote has a Key Number. Headnotes are
reprinted in West’s Digest.
Lexis,
on the other hand, uses “core terms” and does a natural language search.
West’s
Digests
This
is a comprehensive print index to published opinions to all courts. It’s useful if you don’t
have Lexis or Westlaw access or if you’re searching for older cases that aren’t
in Lexis or Westlaw. It’s
obsolete for looking up cases, but now…something about shotguns.
It
has an important, unanticipated constituency.
If you’re in a particular field, you can go to any jurisdiction and find
cases on the same topic as the ones in your jurisdiction.
We
will use West’s Digests even though Westlaw is available. The Key Numbers are super useful.
The
Digests are arranged by topic and broken into increasingly specific
subheadings. The Digests are found after
the last Reporter for a particular state.
When
you look up a topic, you can get a Key Number that guides you to cases in that
area.
The
useful thing is that wherever you go in the
Once
you find one good case on a certain subject and you have the topic and
key number, you can crazy go nuts.
Use
the narrowest digest available.
Headnotes are finding tools only. You
must read the case.
Don’t
forget to check secondary sources too!
All
What
is the color of the most recent version of the Federal Register? It’s always white. Ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha
ha.
Proposed
regulations and existing regulations are both in the Federal Register in
addition to presidential proclamations and executive orders.
Secondary
sources
These
are writings about the law that offer persuasive authority. Why would you want to use them? All sorts of reasons.
How
do you cite a journal article? How do
you cite a book? Look at Bluebook rules
15-17.
Ride
the wave of the Secondary Continuum!
Encyclopedias are very general, while law review articles are very specific. In between you have “nutshells”, “hornbooks”,
and treatises.
Why
are law review articles so specific?
Well, there are tons of law journals; there are often several journals
at each law school and lots and lots of articles.
General
Sources
Encyclopedias
include American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum (CJS).
These can be found on those low reserve shelves in the library. They are super general and they’re not
written by experts.
Now,
let’s get the assignment for case law!