Legal Research: Knowing When to Stop

-
Beginning researchers often ask, "How do I know when I'm done?"

This is a legitimate question because legal research can send you down many rabbit holes with seemingly endless resources to sort through. The University of San Francisco School of Law put together a wonderful research guide on point.

Here are a few good indicators that you've reached the end of your research project:

  • You've found the answer. Sometimes — this is rare — you will quickly find the authoritative law that applies to your fact pattern. Be sure to Shepardize or KeyCite to check to see if your sources are still good law. 
  • You keep finding the same primary authority no matter which research method you use or which sources you consult. It's usually a good idea to double-check your research by checking two or three sources on the same topic to see if they all cite to the same authority. When you've done thorough research, and you keep turning up the same citations no matter where or how you look, that's a sign that you've reached the foundational cases on point. Again make sure to Shepardize or Keycite. 
  • Your project deadline is fast-approaching. Remember that the best research is pointless if you don't leave enough time to write the paper or to tell the client or assigning attorney what you've found.

What if you're not finding authorities that address your research issue?

If research hasn't yielded any results after 30-45 minutes, it may be time to reevaluate your research strategy. Think comprehensively and creatively. Research broader rules, analogous facts or doctrines, and⁄or the law of other jurisdictions.

Make sure you are:
  • applying a variety of research techniques
  • using both primary and secondary sources
  • using both print and online sources
  • consulting resources from different publishers or vendors (remember that Lexis and Westlaw offer a lot of the same primary sources (cases, statutes, regulations, etc.), but the secondary sources available on each system, like treatises and practice guides, tend to not overlap very much.)

Consult a librarian.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

For The Love Of Archives

-
On a night out last month, I was on my way to a R. Buckminster Fuller documentary at the Detroit Institute of Arts when my friend asked me, "why do we need libraries and librarians when everything is online?" I hardly had a moment to answer because the documentary was about to start, but I did rattle something off about the slow process of digitization and the need to organize the world's information. Then something magical happened. During the beginning of the documentary, the narrator went into great detail about his visit to the Dymaxion Chronofile . "The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. The total collection is estimated to be 270 feet (80 m) worth of paper. This is said to be the most documented human life in history." And the very reason that we still have this wonderful piece of rec
Read more

US News Scholarship Impact Issues

-
Image
In spring 2017, I briefly discussed the issues  with scholarship impact factor in law as a response to a recommendation by a law professor to create a rankings methodology based on Google Scholar citation. Now US News is trying to get in the game of creating a ranking of law faculty by scholarship impact factor using Hein publication metrics. US News is asking each law school for the names and other details of its fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. US News plans to link the names of each individual law school's faculty to citations and publications that were published in the previous five years and are available in HeinOnline. Using this data, HeinOnline will compile faculty scholarly impact indicators for each law school . This will include such measures as mean citations per faculty member, median citations per faculty member, and total number of publications. Those measures will then be provided to US News for use in eventually creating a comprehensiv
Read more

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers 2019-2020 Now Open!

-
Image
The winners in the Open, New Member, and Student Divisions will receive $650 , and the Short Form Division winner will receive $300 , all generously donated by LexisNexis. Co-authors of winning papers share awards. Recipients are recognized during award ceremonies at the AALL Annual Meeting and will be given the opportunity to present their papers in a program. See the Call for Papers website !
Read more