1. Overview:
   What are you looking for?
2. How to start
3. Case law
4. Statutory law
5. Administrative law
6. Secondary sources
7. Updating case law

• Primary law

  A basic understanding of the United States legal system is essential to knowing what to look for and where to find it. The legal system is actually three parallel systems -- federal law, state law, and administrative law -- operating under the authority of the US and state Constitutions. The primary law of each system flows from three primary sources:

  • Statutes
    (Constitution and laws enacted by the legislature)
  • Cases
    (judicial opinions issued by courts)
  • Adjudications
    (administrative agency materials)

  
  In order to research effectively, you must determine what law applies.

  • Federal or state?
  • Statutes, cases, or regulations?
  • criminal?
  • procedural?
    
    
    
• Secondary sources

• To determine what law applies, you can turn to secondary sources. This category of legal materials is essentially everything that is NOT primary law. Secondary sources are materials that explain, analyze,critique or help you find the law. Examples are:

  • Legal encyclopedias
  • Legal periodicals
  • Treatises
  • Practice materials

  Many researchers recommend beginning with secondarysources because these helpful materials are a rich source of citationsto the primary law.

• Key questions
• • 
    
  • Be clear about the scope of your project. Are you researching an issue for an appellate brief, a memo to apartner, a scholarly article, an oral presentation? How much time (andmoney) can you devote to the project?
  • 
    
  • Be sure you have the basic facts. Ask the "who, what, when, where, why and how" questions. This may seemobvious, but you have to be sure you understand the facts surroundingyour legal issue before you start.
  • 
    
  • Articulate the legal issue. What jurisdiction is involved? Federal or state? Is this a civil or criminal matter? Who are the parties and what relief is sought? Is this a substantive or procedural issue?
  • 
    
  • Consider which of three groups may have established the law on this issue: the legislature, the courts or the executive branch. It is quite possible that two and possibly all three groups have touched on the topic. Then look for to the statute,case or regulation that applies.
• 
  
• Search terms
• • To begin to research, you need a list of search terms.
    Search terms are digests, and online databases. Four ways to come up with search terms:
  • 1. Ask the person who gave you the assignment.
    2. Use a dictionary, especially a legal dictionaryor thesaurus.
    3. Ask a librarian or other person familiar with the topic and ask for suggestions.
    4. Brainstorm by jotting down as many synonyms and related wordsas you can because different resources use different terminology torefer to the same topic. For example, "children" could be listed under"infants," "minors," or "parent and child."
       
       
       
• Research strategies
• • Use secondary sources to learn about the law and get references to primary law.
  • 
    
  • Use "One Good Case" to get started.

III. CASES: WHAT ARE CASES AND HOW ARE THEY ORGANIZED?

• What is a case
• How to find a specific case
  • by citation
  • by topic
  • by name
• "One Good Case" Research Strategy

IV. STATUTES: WHAT ARE STATUTES AND HOW ARE THEY ORGANIZED?

• Types of statutes
• How to find a specific law
  • by citation
  • by subject
  • by popular name

V. WHAT IS ADMINISTRATIVE LAW AND WHERE IS IT FOUND?

• Administrative law defined
• Regulations

• Administrative law defined

  The third source of primary law is administrative law. Administrative agencies are created by statute and charged with regulating an area of conduct. For example, the federal Food and Drug Administration regulates drug safety by requiring pharmaceutical companies to adhere to testing and reporting procedures. Agencies operate under the jurisdiction's administrative procedures law and the statute that created them (the "enabling law").The most common form of administrative law encountered by law students and the public is formal rulemaking by agencies that produce regulations. The terms "rules" and "regulations" can be used interchangeably.

• Regulations

  Federal agency regulations must be published in proposed form and again in final form. Regulations first appear in the Federal Register (FR), a daily publication that presents agency business in chronological order, showing what is done on a day-to-day basis. Once the regulations are published in final form, they are organized by agency and published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is essentially a subject arrangement of regulations and is organized into 50 titles, which are subdivided into parts, and further subdivided into sections. States have followed the federal example for organizing state agency regulations.

  The CFR is in the Reading Room as are New York's administrative regulations. Other states' regulations are shelved with the state material on the fourth floor. The FR and CFR and most state regulations are on Westlaw, Lexis, GPO Access (federal only),Cornell Legal Information Institute,and Findlaw, among other online sources.

VI. WHAT ARE SECONDARY SOURCES?

• Secondary sources defined
• How to use secondary sources
• How to find secondary sources
  • Finding traditional secondary sources
  • Finding articles in legal periodicals
  • Finding legal periodicals
  • Frequently asked questions about legal periodicals
  • TIPS

• Secondary sources defined

• Secondary sources are materials that discuss, explain, analyze, andcritique the law. They are resources about the law, and not the lawitself. Frequently used secondary sources include legal encyclopedias, legal dictionaries, Restatements of the law, treatises, American Law Reports, and articles in legal periodicals.

  Secondary sources come in varying levels of complexity. Some resources like hornbooks and supplementary sources target law students. Others are designed for the academic orpractitioner. All secondary sources help the researcher understand theparameters of the research topic and learn the basics about the topic.Researchers who know little about the area of law they are dealing withshould first use a secondary source to gain familiarity with thejargon, issues, key cases and statutes, and history.

Be careful how you use
the information you find in secondary sources!

• How to use secondary sources

• How to find secondary sources

• Finding traditional secondary sources

• Many secondary sources are well known print sets that are easy to spot in law libraries. Legal dictionaries, and Beiber's are in the Reference Collection in the Reading Room. Legal encyclopedias, such as Corpus Juris Secondum (CJS), American Jurisprudence (AmJur), and NY Jurisprudence are multivolume sets in the Reading Room, as are American Law Reports and Restatements of the law. The multivolume sets have indexes where you can look up your search terms.The volumes are updated with pocket parts.

  Individual treatises, hornbooks, supplementary sources, and practice materials are often on Reserve behind the Circulation Desk in the Reading Room. They can be found by searching the online catalog, asking a reference librarian, and by scanning the shelves in the appropriate section of the library.

  Secondary sources are beginning to appear online in commercial databases. Westlaw and Lexis have legal encyclopedias, ALR, Restatements and several treatises in their secondary materials databases. Loislaw includes several treatises published by Aspen. You are not likely to find free access to a secondary source on the web.

• Finding articles in legal periodicals
• Articles are secondary source materials that discuss current issues and point researchers to additional resources. Articles can be found in periodicals such as legal newspapers, bar association journals, academic law reviews (edited by law students), topical law reviews (peer reviewed by experts). The articles in each publication serve distinct audiences covering topics ranging from informing the local bar about law firm mergers to extensively analyzing the impact of a specific law or discussing a trend in legal philosophy. Research generally requires looking at the most reputable, scholarly resources available.

  There are two ways to find articles in law reviews and law journals: using an index or full text searching.

  A) Finding articles using an index

  Several indexes to legal literature will help you find relevant articles. Print indexes are multivolumesets that organize articles by topic, author, and/or title soresearchers have a number of ways to find articles on point. Printindexes are organized by year and are not cumulative so researchersmust select what year or years to search and go the volumes coveringthose years. Online indexes allow you to search the same way, but thesearch can be done across all years, saving you the tedious work oflooking up the same topic volume by volume.

  Each index covers a distinct set of periodicals, although there is a great deal of overlap with the academic law reviews. Different indexes cover different spans of time, depending on when they began. The print version of Index to Legal Periodicals (ILP)covers articles from the early 1900s forward, while Current Legal Index (CLI) starts with articles written in 1980.

  Print indexes are in the Reading Room. LegalTrac, a CD-ROM version of CLI, is at a dedicated terminal in the Reading Room.Westlaw and Lexis provide access to LRI (which is the online version of CLI). ILP is available on the CUL Gateway.

  B) Finding articles using full text searching

  Articlescontained in online databases can be found the traditional way byauthor, title or citation. To find articles on a specific topic,researchers search the full text of articles using keywords or phrases.The database will list articles by relevancy ranking, with those usingthe words most ranking nearer to the top on the assumption that themore the term is used in an article, the more likely the article hassomething to do with that term. Keyword searches tend to retrieve toomany articles where the search term appears only once. An efficientresearcher will use unique search terms and restrict the term tosegments within the article to pare the down the results.

  The convenience of immediately having the article at your fingertipsmakes full text searching very popular with students. The value ofhaving numerous irrelevant articles at your fingertips must be decidedby each researcher.

• Finding legal periodicals

• Once an index provides a citation to an article, the next step is to find the cited periodical. To find a print journal, use the online catalog and search using the journal's exact title. The catalog will give you a call number that tells you where the journal is shelved. Most American law schooljournals have call numbers beginning with KF10, which means they are onthe first floor. Print journals located on the first floor are actuallybound copies of issues published in a year. The most recent five yearsof individual journal issues are kept on Special Reserve and will be retrieved for you by the library staff.

  Many periodicals are online. Westlaw has several hundred journalswith the full text of articles dating from 1980 forward in the LawReviews, Journals and Legal Periodicals database. Lexis has a similarcollection in its Secondary Legal-Law Reviews & Journals database. HeinOnline also has full text articles from many journals. Hein is collecting current and back issues of law journals, begining with volume 1 of each title.

• Frequently asked questions about legal periodicals
  
  
• TIPS

• Not every journal is online. Online databases contain different journals, although there is a great deal of overlap.

  Citations to articles written about a specific case can be found at the end of Shepard's or Keycite citing reference.

  Citations to articles about statutes may be listed in theannotations to the statute and at the end of Shepard's or Keyciteciting reference.

  Secondary sources, such as legal encyclopedias and ALR, will provide law review citations.

  Articles written before 1980s must be found using print indexes and print journals.

VII. UPDATING CASE LAW WITH SHEPARD'S AND KEYCITE

• What does it mean to update a case?

Once you have identified useful cases, it is important to update the cases before you rely on them. Updating case law means checking to see if it is still "good law." Using Shepard's or KeyCitecitators, you can determine if a case has been expressly reversed oroverruled or otherwise impacted by subsequent authorities. Shepard'sand KeyCite link to authorities that have mentioned your case. It isthe researcher's responsibility to see if being mentioned may haveimpacted the case you plan to rely on.

• Shepardizing Online using Lexis
• • How to approach Shepard's information

  • You can approach Shepardizing online from two major entry points.

    1. You can link from a Shepard's signal in the case you arereading. Signals, such as a red stop sign and a yellow cautiontriangle, indicate the general nature of the case status. Click on thesignal, and review the Shepard's results.

    2. You can select the "Shepard's - Check a Citation tab. The "Shepard's - Check a Citation" tab is located at the top of thescreen. Use the search box at the top right of the screen to enter yourcitation, and click on GO. This feature is useful when you have severalcases to check.

  • Shepard's SignalsTheShepard's Signalâ„¢ is integrated into case law documents and provides animmediate indication of the subsequent history and treatment of aparticular case. When these codes are present, the LexisNexisâ„¢ researchsystem displays one of the following:

  • NOTE: Not every case will have a signal indicator.

    	Warning-Negative treatment indicated The red Shepard's Signal indicates that citing references in the Shepard's® Citations Service contain strong negative history or treatment of your case (for example, overruled by or reversed).
    	Caution-Possible negative treatment indicated The yellow Shepard's Signal indicates that citing references in the Shepard's Citations Service contain history or treatment that may have a significant negative impact on your case (for example, limited or criticized by).
    	Positive treatment indicated The green Shepard's Signal indicates that citing references in the Shepard's Citations Service contain history or treatment that has a positive impact on your case (for example, affirmed or followed by).
    	Cited and neutral analysis indicated The blue "A" Shepard's Signal indicates that citing references in the Shepard's Citations Service contain treatment of your case that is neither positive nor negative.
    	Citation information available The blue "I" Shepard's Signal indicates that citing references are available in the Shepard's Citations Service for your case, but the references do not have history or treatment analysis (for example, the references are law review citations).

    © 2003 LexisNexis

  • Reviewing Shepard's Results

  • Shepard's provides a Summary at the beginning of the results to showwhy the case was labeled with the specific signal that you see. It alsolists and links to the various types of analyses in the Shepard'sreport, and shows the number of secondary sources cited. Next you willsee the History of the case, followed by the Treatment, which lists allthe citing references. The citing references are the cases, as well asstatutes, administrative decisions, law review articles, treatises, ALRannotations, and more, that have mentioned the case you areShepardizing. The references to secondary sources can be very helpful.

  • Customizing the Shepard's Display

  • You can customize the display to help you focus on particular typesof citing materials. At the top of the screen, you can click on "AllNeg" or "All Pos" to see only the negative or positive citations. Orselect Custom at the top of the screen to restrict the display toavailable analyses, jurisdiction, headnotes, and dates. Be sure toclick on Show Restrictions to set the parameters of your customization.

• KeyCite on Westlaw
• • How to approach KeyCite information

  • You can approach KeyCite from two major entry points.

    1. You can link from a KeyCite symbol in the case or in thecitation list. You will see flags, such as a red flag that warns thecase is no longer good law for at least one of the points it containsor a yellow flag that warns the case has some negative history. Clickon the flag or other symbol, and review the KeyCite results.

    2. You can access KeyCite through the KeyCite link at the top ofthe screen. Review the KeyCite result for your citation. Then note the"New citation" box where you can enter your next citation, then clickon GO.

  • KeyCite Flags

  • Status flags warn you that history is available for your case and should be investigated.

    	In cases, a red flag warns that the case is no longer good law for at least one of the points it contains. In statutes, a red flag indicates that a section has been amended or repealed by a recent session law, or declared unconstitutional.
    	In cases, a yellow flag warns that the case has some negative history, but has not been reversed or overruled.
    	A blue H indicates that the case has some history but it is not known to be negative history.
    	A green C indicates that the case has citing references but no direct or negative indirect history.
    	Depth of treatment stars indicate how extensively a cited case has been discussed by the citing case.
    	Quotation marks indicate that the citing case directly quotes the cited case.
    	Pinpoint citations allow you to jump instantly to where the cited case is discussed.

    © 2003 West Group

  • Reviewing KeyCite Results

  • KeyCite presents results in two major sections: KC History and KCCiting Refs. You should look at both. Be sure to click the icon of asplit screen in order to have the KeyCite results fill your screen andto more easily review the information.

    KC History presents citations for the Direct History of the partiesin the case. It also presents Negative Indirect History, which isuseful to many researchers who work from this screen to begin todetermine if the case is still good law.

    KC Citing Refs presents negative cases, positive cases, otherprimary authorities, and secondary sources. The positive cases arearranged in order of the depth of treatment, which is indicated bystars, from one to four stars indicating how extensively the cited casehas been discussed by the citing case. Icons also indicate when thecited case is directly quoted and which headnotes of the cited case arediscussed in the citing case.

  • Customizing the KeyCite Display

  • You can limit the citing references to customize the display andhelp you focus on particular types of citing materials. At the bottomof the screen, you can click on Limit Citing Refs. From the KeyCiteLimits screen, you can restrict the display to available headnotes,jurisdiction, date, document type, and depth of treatment. Be sure toclick the Apply button to set the limits.

• What to Look at when there are so many citations

• Do you have to read every case listed, to make sure your case isstill good law? Probably not. Use your judgment on what you need tofollow up on in the Shepard's or KeyCite list. Here are somesuggestions:

  • Focus on the cases from your own jurisdiction and those that will affect your jurisdiction (i.e. US Supreme Court decisions)
  • 
    
  • Check for negative analysis, especially reversed or overruled. Read those cases to see if your case is still good law. The case may have been overruled on another issue, but it still may weaken your use of this case.
  • 
    
  • Consider the strength of the precedent in light of questioned, criticized, limited, or distinguished, and similar phrases. Those analysis codes may alter the holding of your case without specifically overruling it.
  • 
    
  • Read recent cases. This is a way to check that the precedent as originally written is still being interpreted in the same way today. Recent cases show the continuing usefulness of your case.
  • 
    
  • Track the headnote from your case that is most on point for your research. You can customize the restrictions to that headnote number, and read those.
    
    

  Never Rely on a Legal Authority
  Until You Know Its Current Status