Legal Research Demystified


Book Description

Legal Research Demystified offers a real-world approach to legal research. The textbook guides law students through eight steps to research common law issues and ten steps to research statutory issues. These research steps are demonstrated through many hypotheticals and visual aids. Students have praised the textbook for its screen captures, checklists, and descriptive charts, such as charts demonstrating Boolean searching and comparing features of citators. Professors have appreciated that the book educates students on how to do legal research instead of discussing finding tools and resources in a vacuum. The second edition includes multiple updates. The chapters on research plans and secondary sources have been moved to their own section because these initial research steps apply to all legal issues. The chapters on secondary sources, citators, and keyword searching have been revised and expanded. New assessment questions on research tools and concepts have been added to almost every chapter. The revised introductions and additional cross references make it easy to assign the chapters out of order. With the purchase of a new book, students gain free access to the assessment and teaching platform of Core Knowledge for Lawyers. That online platform contains interactive questions and exercises that map to Legal Research Demystified. Almost 200 auto-grading questions from the end of each chapter. Hundreds of interactive questions and explanations that walk students through the steps for researching common law and statutory issues on Westlaw and Lexis+. Instant feedback after each question--similar to Core Grammar and MBIE. Robust instructor dashboard--professors can view individual and class performance.




Where the Law is


Book Description

This newly updated law school textbook and course reference is designed specifically for advanced legal research classes and for upper-level students who want to achieve a better understanding of how to use the sources of legal information that they learned about in their introductory courses. It provides in-depth guidance through the research process, advice on format selection, and detail about the tools and techniques needed to function as skilled legal researchers. Up-to-date discussion of all media is fully integrated throughout, focusing on the types of information the researcher needs, rather than on descriptions of particular information products.




Methodologies of Legal Research


Book Description

Until quite recently questions about methodology in legal research have been largely confined to understanding the role of doctrinal research as a scholarly discipline. In turn this has involved asking questions not only about coverage but, fundamentally, questions about the identity of the discipline. Is it (mainly) descriptive, hermeneutical, or normative? Should it also be explanatory? Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behaviour, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient. Consequently many attempts have been made to conceive legal research differently. Social scientific and comparative approaches have proven fruitful. However, does the introduction of other approaches leave merely a residue of 'legal doctrine', to which pockets of social sciences can be added, or should legal doctrine be merged with the social sciences? What would such a broad interdisciplinary field look like and what would its methods be? This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions.







Preparing for Practice


Book Description

Preparing for Practice is a fresh approach to the 1L first semester legal writing and research course, designed to guide students through their development of the essential skills needed to master the MPT section of the bar exam and learn legal analysis and writing from a practice perspective. The coursebook combines practice-oriented case files with theoretical content, eliminating the need for professors to create their own case files.




Legal Research Methods


Book Description

The Murray and DeSanctis titles are designed for the current generation of law students whose familiarity and comfort with on-line and computer-based learning create a demand for teaching resources that take advantage of that familiarity and comfort level. Legal Research Methods provides a process-based text covering all aspects of first year legal analysis and research. This book focuses on legal research tools and the theory and practice of legal research written from a practitioner's perspective. It discusses planning for research and performing research, and provides criteria for determining when you are finished with your research. It has sample research plans for tight budgets in terms of time or expense, and its process-oriented methodology is designed to maximize research results in the most economical ways. Paired with the book is an electronic, computer-based version of the text that adds links to on-line databases and internet-based resources and supplements the text with pop-up definitions from Black's Law Dictionary. The electronic version of the text is searchable and highly portable, with internal and external navigation links, making them more valuable for use in class and out. The interactive text employs a layout that departs from the traditional, all-text casebook format through use of callout text boxes, diagrams, and color/border segregated feature sections for hypotheticals, references to scholarly debates, or other useful information for law students. For more information and additional teaching materials, visit the companion site.




Principles of Legal Research


Book Description

Principles of Legal Research will be published in June and available for fall 2009 class adoptions. Principles of Legal Research is the long-awaited successor to the venerable How to Find the Law, 9th edition, thoroughly updated for the electronic age. The text provides encyclopedic yet concise coverage of research methods and resources using both free and commercial websites as well as printed publications. An introductory survey of research strategies is followed by chapters on the sources of U.S. law created by each branch of government, discussion of major secondary sources, and an overview of international and comparative law. Sample illustrations are included, and an appendix lists nearly 500 major treatises and looseleaf services by subject.




Legal Research


Book Description

Designed to aid the researcher in aquiring and perfecting legal research skills.The book provides steps in learning computerized research emphasizing Lexis and Westlaw. It also includes detailed research footnotes to court rules and decisions that explain the reasons for concepts and provide citations to aid in actual research.A good book for anyone interested in Legal Writing or Civil Litigation.




Demystifying Legal Reasoning


Book Description

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.




Effective Legal Research


Book Description

Provides an overview to types and sources for legal research. Has list of legal abbreviations and index.