Legal Research Demystified

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.

Principles of Legal Research provides comprehensive yet concise coverage of research methods in both online and printed resources. It has been thoroughly updated to explain the latest features of the major legal research platforms as well as dozens of other free and subscription websites. In this expanded and reorganized edition, an introductory survey of research strategies is followed by discussion of major secondary sources, treatment of the sources of U.S. law created by each branch of government, chapters on specialized resources for litigation and transactional practice, and an overview of international and foreign law. Other new features include a deeper look at search algorithms and executive branch lawmaking. Sample illustrations are included throughout, and an appendix lists hundreds of major treatises and topical services by subject.

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.

Hardbound - New, hardbound print book.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

Herbert Kritzer presents a clear introduction to the history, methods and substance of empirical legal research (ELR). Quantitative methods dominate in empirical legal research, but an important segment of the field draws on qualitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews and observation. In this book both methodologies are explored alongside systematic data analysis. Offering an overview of the broad ELR literature, the institutions of the law, the central actors of the law, and the subjects of the law are each addressed in this highly readable account that will be essential reading for legal researchers.

Written by Ernst Hirsch Ballin, this original Advanced Introduction uncovers the foundations of legal research methods, an area of legal scholarship distinctly lacking in standardisation. The author shows how such methods differ along critical, empirical, and fundamental lines, and how our understanding of these is crucial to overcoming crises and restoring trust in the law. Key topics include a consideration of law as a normative language and an examination of the common objects of legal research.