About This Book
The key to successful legal research is organization. You have to gather your facts, find the relevant law, and then weave the law and facts into a pattern that conveys a story. The story might be one you tell to a judge or jury (or law school professor), or perhaps one you tell to a city council or state legislature. But whatever your story and whoever your audience, your goal is to persuade somebody to agree with you.
You will develop an effective presentation most quickly and with the least effort if you gather your facts and do your legal research methodically. As with any complex task, you need a “game plan” that helps you comprehend and complete the job as quickly, efficiently, and thoroughlyas possible. For legal research, the best game plan simplifies the research process by breaking it down into its basic steps because at that point, legal research becomes an easily comprehended process.
This manual, which presents a basic research procedure suitable for any legal research project, breaks legal research down according to its component phases. By reading this book, you will become familiar with all the steps involved in analyzing and researching a legal problem: gathering and evaluating facts; identifying the legal issues raised by the facts; organizing your problem for research; finding the law; reading and analyzing the law; determining whether the law you’ve located is still valid; taking effective notes; and determining when to stop your research. If you follow the tips included here, neither legal research techniques nor the vast array of books used in legal research will bewilder, intimidate, or overwhelm you. ...