Legal Research

This lesson provides an overview of the branches of the U.S. government and how each branch makes law.

This lesson is designed to help law students develop their abilities to handle legal research assignments. Students who have some experience doing legal research or who have completed their first year legal research course will benefit the most. Legal Research Methodology may also be used to supplement the learning process for students studying legal research for the first time.

This brief lesson will familiarize the student with the basic parts of a case (i.e., the written decision of a court) published in print and on Westlaw.

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.

Knowing when to stop is important for efficient and cost-effective legal research. This exercise will cover several factors which you may wish to consider.

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. You may think that using them makes better use of your time, which necessarily results in savings to your clients, but remember, you will bill for the time you invest in electronic researching, in addition to the cost of the research, and if you have not developed a strategy to search effectively, you may incur increased research costs and additional man hours.

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 exercise assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of legal research sources and will focus on the decisions you may need to make when choosing among freely available websites, fee-based electronic databases, and print resources.

This lesson will give students a basic introduction to using the Internet for legal research. Students will consider when it is appropriate to use the Internet as a research tool in legal practice. Students will then be introduced to three practical approaches to doing legal research on the Internet.

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.

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

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.