Chapter 4

Researching the Law

Popular, Scholarly, and Professional Sources

• Popular Literature– Publications written for the layperson

• Found in Time, Newsweek, or Reader’s Digest• Any resource to learn law must understand the

limitations of that particular resource. Reader’s Digest will present material differently than United States Law Week

Popular, Scholarly, and Professional Sources

• Professional Literature– Publications written for the practitioner in

the field• This includes Police Chief, FBI Law

Enforcement Bulletin, Corrections Today, UCLA Law Review, and Journal of Municipal Government

Popular, Scholarly, and Professional Sources

• Scholarly Literature– Publications written for those interested in

theory and research• This includes Justice Quarterly, an official

publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice

Primary and Secondary Sources

• Sources of primary information for legal research include the U.S. Constitution, the constitutions of the 50 states, the statutes of the U.S. Congress and of the 50 state legislatures and appellate court decisions of the federal and state courts.

Primary and Secondary Sources

• Primary Information Sources– Presents the raw data or the original information

• Secondary Information Sources– Presents data or information based on the original

information. Among the important secondary information sources for legal research are periodicals, treatises/texts, encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Primary and Secondary Sources

• Legal Periodicals– Three groups of legal periodicals can provide

important information:• Law school publications such as the Harvard Law

Review

• Bar association publications such as the American Bar Association Journal

• Special subject and interest periodicals such as the Black Law Journal and the Women Lawyers Journal

Primary and Secondary Sources

• Treatises/Texts– Treatise is a comprehensive document on

a legal subject– These go into a specific subject in depth

Primary and Secondary Sources• Legal Encyclopedias

– These are narratives arranged alphabetically by subject. The three types of legal encyclopedias are:

• General law• Local or state law• Special subject

– Corpus Juris Secondum– American Jurisprudence 2d– Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice– Guide to American Law

Reading Legal Citations

• Legal Citation– Standardized way of referring to a specific

element in the law

• String Cites– Additional legal citations

Opinions

Court decisions are recorded as opinions.

Opinions describe what the dispute was about, what the court decided and why.

Contents of an Opinion

• Caption– The title of the case setting forth the parties

involved.– ie.) Brandenburg v. Ohio

Contents of an Opinion

• The Court issuing the opinion– Supreme Court of the Untied States

• The reference volume containing a copy of the entire opinion– 395 U.S. 444

• The date the opinion was issued– 1969 (the full date at the beginning)

Contents of an Opinion

• The author of the opinion– By name– Per Curiam

• The rationale of the Court

• The conclusion of the Court

Case Law

Trial court has two basic responsibilities:• find out what happened

• determine what legal rules should be used in deciding the case

Only legal issues will be reviewed on appeal, as new evidence is not permitted.

Case Law

Opinions include more than simply a statement of who won the court case. They tell the story of what occurred, what rules were applied and why the judge decided the case as they did.

Case Law• Opinions contain five important components:

– Description of the facts– Statement of the legal issues presented for decision– Relevant rules of law– The holding– Policies and reasons that support the holding

Case Law• Holding

– Rule of law applied to the facts of a case

• Affirm– A court agreeing with a lower court’s

decision

• Concur– Agreeing with a lower court’s decision

Case Law• Reverse

– Overturn the decision of a lower court

• Remand– Return a case to the lower court for further action

• Brief– Summary of a case

• Dicta– Statements by a court concerning a case

Shepardizing

Using the resource Shepard’s (set of bound volumes and pocket parts published for each set of official volumes of cases) to determine if a case’s status has changed