PSCI 334 Legal Research & Writing

During the research process, you will most likely need to answer a legal question by applying legal principles to a particular situation or legal issue. While the steps below are not rigid, it is important to establish a research plan and follow a process to succeed with your project. 

Step 1: Determine the facts of the situation and formulate a plan

Identify:

• Facts of the case
• Parties
• Juridiction(s) - federal, state (which one?), or both?
• Area(s) of law - civil, criminal, constitutional, etc.?

Clarifying these will help you focus your efforts and generate search terms before starting your research in resources and databases. When you start your research, take note of every step - what search terms you use, what resources you search in, what cases you find and whether they are relevant and why. You can use different strategies to keep those notes, such as a research log - you can find a template below:

Step 2: Consult Secondary and Primary Sources

It is often a best practice to start with secondary sources, as they will help you get some background on the laws that come into play the legal problem you are researching, and trace down primary sources. Take a look at the "Secondary Sources" and "Primary Sources" tabs in the left navigation menu and decide where to search:

• Do you need a news report or scholarly article interpreting your topic?
• Do you need a statute, cases, or regulation?

Then, generate search terms (you will probably have started identifying keywords that crop up in the first step):

• Check legal dictionaries and thesauri
• Try subject headings from relevant journal and law review articles
• Read the full text of sources, alert for synonyms or interchangeable phrases
• Use synonyms, there are often multiple ways to describe the same concept or object
  • “children” can also be referred to as “minors,” “juveniles,” “infants”
• Search the popular name and the official name of a case, legislation or regulation
  • Affordable Care Act also know as Obamacare
• When searching Case Law it is helpful to know the official citation

Step 3: Expand & Update Primary Law

Once you have found useful cases, you can:

1. Expand your research by getting a report of the cases, statutes, secondary sources, and annotations that cite your case, including more recent cases that rely on your starting case. 
2. Update your research, also known as "Shepardizing" a citation, to make sure that is is still "good law" (i.e., has not been overturned). Refer to Nexis Uni's Shepherdize Symbols Guide to review what each symbol means:

Both of these steps are part of "noting up" cases and can be done by using Shepard's Citation Service in the NexisUni database:

1. Type shep followed by a colon (:) in the Search box, followed by the document citation. For example:

• shep: 800 F.2d 111
• shep: 410 us 73

2. Select search.

Step 4: Evaluate and Analyze Results 

Depending on your legal problem and what you are working on (are you writing a brief? consulting with a client? trying to see if your landlord is in breach of contract?), you will evaluate your results and identify gaps in your analysis. You will need to ask yourself different questions, such as:

• Is the case I am citing and basing my responses on analogous, or similar enough, to the facts of my legal problem?
• Is my argument clear enough because I have found background information or scholarly explanations?
• Am I only citing secondary sources or do I also use persuasive "good law" primary sources?

Research is cyclical, and you might need to search in other sources, select different keywords, or even search in different jurisdiction for similar cases.

Step 5: Conclude Project

Knowing when to stop searching and start writing can be hard, but while your research should be as exhaustive as you can, you also need to consider time constraints and resources. As you write your brief, or paper, make sure to cite your sources! Look at the "Citing Legal Resources" tab, or Contact a Librarian for help.

Keywords and synonyms

Keywords are the main ideas of your research questions or topic. Since there are many ways to describe one concept, it is a best practice to have a variety of keywords and synonyms to search with to get better results. You can combine your keywords with the following strategies to make sure you retrieve the most relevant sources for your research.

"Phrase searching"

• The search results will contain the exact phrase entered with quotation marks (ex: "higher education").

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)

• AND: results must include both words (ex: soccer AND football).
• OR: results can contain either of the words. Use to link synonyms (ex: soccer OR football).
• NOT: results include one word and not the other (ex: soccer NOT football).
• NEAR(x): both terms appear within (x) words of each other (ex: water NEAR3 damage)

You can use multiple operators in one query, combine them, and "nest" the terms with parenthesis. Ex: ethics AND (cloning OR reproductive techniques)

Truncation and wildcards

• Truncation: adding a truncation symbol (Asterisk or Shift + 8) after the root of a word will look for all variations after the * (ex: child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood). Truncation symbols may vary by database; common symbols include: *, !, ?, or #
• Wildcard: substitutes a symbol for one letter of a word: wildcards are useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning (ex: colo?r = color or colour). 

Limit your search

Depending on the database, this could be searching by Title, Author or Publication Date. Also look for Descriptors or Subject Terms assigned to relevant articles, then search by those terms.

Example searches

Combining multiple strategies takes practice, here are a few examples of how it can be done:

• (ethic* OR moral*) AND (bioengineering OR cloning OR "reproductive techniques")
• free (title) AND blair niles (author) AND 1930 (year)

Ask a Librarian

Don't hesitate to Contact a Librarian if you are having difficulty finding relevant articles.