Legal Research

This lesson provides a thorough overview of Louisiana Primary Legal Resources. It covers resources that will be familiar to legal researchers from other jurisdictions and examines resources that are unique to Louisiana.

This lesson will help you master legal citations using the California Style Manual, Fourth Edition (hereinafter "Manual").

This is an introduction to researching the law relating to intergovernmental and non-governmental agencies. IGOs and NGOs have significant input into international law and finding their resources can be integral to researching international law.

The purpose of this lesson is to familiarize the learner with Ohio legal research materials. The lesson will focus on primary source materials in Ohio, including case law, statutes, administrative materials, and court rules.

This lesson provides a general review of legal research and an introduction to Wyoming primary and secondary resources.

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

This lesson introduces students to secondary resources for Arizona legal researchers.

This lesson is designed to introduce students to Washington's primary law: cases, statutes, and regulations. Although the lesson can be used as a standalone tool, it can also be used to supplement other forms of instruction such as classroom lectures or demonstrations. The questions provide students with ongoing feedback as they learn.

This lesson will introduce you to the process of researching federal agency decisions. You should expect to encounter: overview of agency regulatory powers; types of agency decisions; how to find them; how to update them; and their precedential value.

This lesson introduces Nebraska primary legal materials, focusing on the Legislative and Judicial branches.

This lesson is intended to acquaint students with basic information regarding sources of primary law in New York state: case law, statutes and regulations. It can be used to supplement instruction in introductory Research and Writing courses or as a freestanding introduction to doing New York legal research.

This lesson is an overview of the sources for finding and updating Nevada legal materials. Also, it describes materials used in Nevada Legal Research.

Choosing the most appropriate sources for your research need is a crucial part of of research strategy. Differentiating between free or fee-based electronic legal research sources is important for efficient and cost-effective research, as is recognizing when it is beneficial to use print legal research sources.

This lesson covers researching medical information. It emphasizes resources that are publicly available free of charge.

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 will show you the basic tools for finding United Nations materials. It first gives an overview of how the United Nations is organized. It includes descriptions of each of the principal organs of the U.N. and an overview of the United Nations document numbering system. It then shows online tools for United Nations research: the U.N.'s website; the Official Document System; and the U.N. Digital Library.

This lesson is designed for students taking an introductory legal research course who are already somewhat familiar with online research on Westlaw and Lexis. This lesson should be useful for students with basic or intermediate searching knowledge and experience.

Plagiarism in today's online social media world is both confusing and serious, especially for students of the law. This lesson will explain what constitutes plagiarism, distinguish between copyright and plagiarism, and offer opportunities for students to test their understanding of plagiarism.

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 provides an overview of the branches of the U.S. government and how each branch makes 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 lesson gives the basics of copyright and trademark research, including historical background, statutes, regulations, cases, secondary sources, international materials, and current awareness tools.

This lesson will introduce the student to researching legal ethics.