Legal Research

Most students do all right with commas, periods, sentence fragments, and verb agreement. But what about colons, dashes, passive voice, and parallelism? This lesson covers several advanced topics in grammar and punctuation for the legal writer who is ready to move beyond the basics.

This lesson will give you some background about Regional Organizations, collections of countries, organized by region, engaged in collaborative work toward some common goal. You will learn to find the documents of some of the most important Regional Organizations on the web.

This is an introductory lesson on Canadian legal research. This particular lesson treats research techniques and sources from the perspective that you are faced with a case based problem. A second separate lesson treats Canadian legal research from the perspective that you have a statute based problem. The lessons assume no knowledge of the areas, but treat basic research in Canadian federal statutes, administrative material, and cases.

This is an introductory lesson on Canadian legal research. This particular lesson treats research techniques and sources from the perspective that you are faced with a statute based problem. A second separate lesson treats Canadian legal research from the perspective that you have a case based problem. The lessons assume no knowledge of the areas, but treat basic research in Canadian federal statutes, administrative material, and cases.

This lesson will teach students how to research and efficiently locate rules and regulations promulgated by federal administrative agencies. The lesson addresses the official sources of federal administrative regulations: the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and their related materials.

This lesson will introduce you to methods of finding and updating federal executive orders. It assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and is therefore appropriate for any student or legal professional who needs to learn how to research federal executive orders. Knowledge of the C.F.R. and the Federal Register is helpful for understanding this lesson.

The purpose of this lesson is to provide an introduction to customary law systems and to offer suggestions for researching the laws of countries where customary law is still being practiced.

This lesson will introduce you to the civil law tradition and discuss research in civil law historical sources. The lesson covers the five major types of world legal systems, explains the current and historical sources of the civil law, and discusses the importance of historical sources in civil law research and interpretation.

This lesson will acquaint you with the sources of international environmental law, and give you strategies for researching it.

This lesson will introduce the student to researching legal ethics. 

This lesson will provide students with some general background on U.S. immigration law and will give an overview of tools students can use for immigration law research. Students should have a fundamental knowledge of legal research tools but do not need to have any background in immigration law to proceed with the lesson. The lesson would work best while also taking a class about immigration law.

This lesson will explain uniform laws and model codes. It provides an overview of how uniform laws and model codes are created and shows researchers how to locate uniform laws and model codes, drafters' commentary, state versions of uniform laws and model codes, and cases interpreting them.

This lesson will introduce you to the quasi-legislative process known as rulemaking. It will familiarize you with the publication system and with the sources you will access to research regulations. The lesson includes several images of Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations pages, and links to regulatory information on the Government Publishing Office's homepage. The lesson is designed to augment a substantive Administrative Law Course or an Advanced Legal Research class.

This lesson will teach students about practice centers, and describe their origins as print legal looseleaf services. Students will use a hypothetical to explore the Practice Centers available on Bloomberg Law BNA, and Thomson Reuters' RIA Checkpoint.

This lesson examines the ethical issues associated with, and tools available for, researching parties, witnesses, and jurors on social media sites.

In the process of legal research, primary authority is the law in your jurisdiction, which comes directly from a legislative body, court, or administrative agency.

This lesson on South Carolina primary source materials covers the South Carolina Constitution; South Carolina state and local laws (Legislative); South Carolina administrative agency regulations and other executive materials (Executive); and, South Carolina appellate court rules and decisions (Judicial).

This lesson will describe and explain how to use South Carolina Secondary Sources. No prior experience is required to complete this lesson. You will learn the various types of secondary source available to you.

This lesson is designed to cover how to distinguish legally relevant facts, contextually relevant facts, and nonrelevant facts; plus, how to use each of those types of facts. It is also designed to cover beginning and organizing a statement of facts, writing facts briefly and readably, stating facts objectively, and stating facts persuasively.