Legal Research

This lesson gives the basics of copyright and trademark research, including historical background, statutes, regulations, cases, secondary sources, international materials, and current awareness tools.

We are all aware of the perils of poor electronic legal research skills. And, we have all heard of ways the misuse of electronic legal resources has challenged those engaged in legal practice. Though Westlaw® and Lexis® provide us with sophisticated functionality that can ease the pain of legal research, these systems do not necessarily provide the most cost efficient means of conducting research.

Designed to help bridge the gap between law school and law practice, this tutorial introduces students to commonly-used current awareness tools and alerting services. The lesson covers sources and strategies for finding topical newsletter services, blogs, email discussion lists, and scholarship repositories and instructs on how to use subscription alert services to keep up with the latest developments in a particular area of law.

The definition and location of customary international law is a difficult research task. This lesson begins by defining customary international law and placing customary international law into context through historical examples. Two research strategies for locating custom will be introduced. The first strategy is to locate pre-defined custom using a source that discusses state practice that has risen to the level of custom. The second and more complex strategy involves searching directly for evidence of customary international law.

This series of exercises is designed to help the user recognize whether an issue involves federal or state legal issues, and to select legal research sources appropriate to the jurisdiction and the applicable law. This exercise assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of legal research sources.

This lesson covers Delaware primary legal research resources including the state's constitution, statutory code, legislative history materials, administrative code, administrative bulletin, case decisions, court rules, and legal ethics materials.

This lesson reviews the secondary legal research resources available for Delaware.

This lesson is intended to familiarize the reader with legal research materials in the District of Columbia. The lesson focuses on primary sources such as statutes, cases, agency regulations, and decisions.

This is an introductory lesson about using District of Columbia secondary sources. The secondary sources that are featured in this lesson will help students when they are searching for pertinent discussion and information about District of Columbia law and references to relevant District of Columbia primary sources of law.

A large percentage of litigation arising out of contracts results from poor drafting. In order to eliminate this litigation, it is imperative that students and legal professionals master good drafting skills. One of the most important aspects of drafting a contract is the operative language--language that affects legal relationships. This lesson is designed to introduce law students to operative language commonly used in drafting contracts, in particular, language of obligation (shall), language of authorization (may) and language of condition precedent (must).

Drafters of contracts, wills and statutes are plagued with the ambiguities inherent in the use of these two connectors. This lesson is designed to identify these ambiguities and then help students to draft with conjunctions which eliminate those ambiguities.

This is one in a series of lessons directed at the ethical and professional considerations associated with the production of particular lawyering documents. This lesson is intended to introduce first year law students to the ethical and professional considerations associated with the preparation of predictive, interoffice memoranda. It is assumed that students are familiar with predictive, interoffice memoranda. No prior instruction in professional responsibility is required.

This lesson provides an overview of the history and structure of the European Union, followed by an introduction to researching European Union documents, specifically EU treaties, regulations, directives, and opinions of the European Court of Justice. The European Union is a truly unique structure which represents over half a century of cooperation between select nations.

This lesson will provide the student with the tools to effectively judge the content of web pages. Included in the exercise are four criteria for evaluation: authority, accuracy, comprehensiveness and currency. Each of these concepts is defined through the use of descriptive text followed by screen images of actual law-related web sites to illustrate the concepts.

Compiled legislative histories are collections of the documents that make up the legislative history of a law. They save researchers the time and frustration of collecting the documents themselves. This lesson builds upon the CALI lesson How to Research Federal Legislative History. While it is not essential to complete that lesson first, doing so will improve your understanding of compiled legislative histories.

This lesson on federal tax research covers the legislative, administrative, and judicial materials used in the specialized area of tax law. A basic knowledge of primary sources such as statutes, regulations, and cases; secondary sources such as treatises, law reviews, newsletters, citators, digests, and periodical indexes is assumed. Federal taxation is a specialized field with many publications devoted solely to federal taxes.

In this lesson, you will learn about the International Court of Justice, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. After an introduction to the Court, you'll learn about some of the print reporters of the Court's decisions and online sources for these opinions. Finally, there will be a discussion of print and online digests of the Court's decisions.

This lesson is intended to teach you the basic approaches to finding statutes. It is assumed that you are already familiar with the forms of statutory publication when you run this lesson. See the lessons "Introduction to State and Federal Statutes" or "Forms of Federal Statutory Publication" or "Codification" if you need to review these matters first.

This lesson introduces Florida primary legal resources including the Florida Constitution, statutes, court decisions, Florida administrative law and Florida attorney general opinions.

This lesson introduces the various types of secondary sources available to research Florida law.

The four forms of federal statutory publications are slip laws, session laws (or advance session laws), Codes, and Annotated Codes. As a researcher, you will most frequently use an Annotated Code for accessing federal law. It is, however, important to understand each stage of federal legislative publication and the implications for research.

This lesson is designed to give you an introduction to the intricacies of federal statutory publication. You should understand how the different forms are interconnected as well as the differences between them by the completion of this lesson.

This lesson is intended to familiarize the reader with Georgia legal research materials. The lesson focuses on Georgia's primary source material including cases and digests, citators, statutes, administrative materials, court rules and ethics.

This lesson is intended to familiarize the reader with Georgia legal research materials and will focus on Georgia's secondary source material. You will learn about finding aids for researching secondary source materials and explore both hard cover and online tools to access secondary source materials.

This lesson is intended to familiarize the user with the range of documents produced by the Federal government, where they can be found, and how they can be used in a law practice.