Advanced Legal Research Research Articles

The Urgency of Philosophy of Science for Doctoral Students of Law

Philosophy of science plays a very important role for doctoral students in law, because it provides a critical, reflective, and in-depth foundation for thinking in conducting advanced legal research. This article discusses the urgency of philosophy of science for doctoral students in law from several main aspects, including epistemological and ontological foundations, development of theoretical frameworks, critical evaluation of scientific methods, and improvement of legal reasoning skills. Philosophy of science also provides ethical guidance in research and helps students understand the relationship between law and other disciplines, such as sociology and politics. Through a deeper understanding of philosophy of science, doctoral students in law can compile more comprehensive, relevant, and impactful research, and make significant contributions to the development of legal science in the future.

Critical Legal Research, Artificial Intelligence, and Systemic Racism: Teaching with Jim Crow Text-Mining

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Existence is a text-mining project undertaken by University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill libraries to identify racially based laws passed in the state between 1865 and 1967. In the fall 2022, I used the On the Books project to teach a module in my Advanced Legal Research class on critical legal research and artificial intelligence and legal analytics. This article examines the benefits of those modules for teaching critical thinking about legal research structures and legacies of racism in the American legal system.

Integration & Transformation: Incorporating Critical Information Literacy and Critical Legal Research into Advanced Legal Research Instruction

Integration & Transformation: Incorporating Critical Information Literacy and Critical Legal Research into Advanced Legal Research Instruction

A Librarian’s Experience Teaching Critical Information Literacy

Information literacy focuses on knowing how to use information for work and civic duties, however, critical information literacy goes a step further to recognize that a source’s good reputation does not mean that the source is accurate or unbiased. Critical information literacy questions the motives of the systems that produce the information and includes the knowledge of students so that they influence the lesson as well. Librarians have made critical information literacy a part of their lessons in a variety of ways, and teaching critical information literacy is rooted in critical pedagogy. A review of the literature on critical information literacy and a discussion of the American Association of College and Research Libraries’ framework “Authority Is Constructed and Contextual” in a critical information literacy lesson in an advanced legal research class is considered.

Tax Law Is an Ideal Subject for Advanced Legal Research

Tax Law Is an Ideal Subject for Advanced Legal Research

'Are You a Member of the Law School Community?': Access Policies at Academic Law Libraries and Access to Justice

Law libraries play a crucial role in facilitating access to legal materials, which is a necessary prerequisite to achieving access to justice. However, many academic law libraries, particularly at private law schools, are closed to members of the general public. This paper explores the access policies at law libraries at the top 25 law schools and in the three largest metropolitan areas to investigate whether members of the general public who live in these areas have adequate access to legal materials. This paper also includes a case study of the Seattle area to offer insight into how members of the general public in Seattle can obtain access to legal materials. This paper proposes introducing legal research clinics and restructuring advanced legal research courses at both public and private law schools to help address unmet legal needs and to provide students with public service opportunities. The success of both proposals hinges on the willingness of law librarians to oversee the legal research clinics and to teach the advanced legal research classes. Both proposals will help law schools comply with ABA Standards 303 and 304, which go into effect beginning with the 2016-17 academic year. Implementation of these proposals will also improve the image and reputation of law schools and the legal profession, better equip law students with necessary legal research and writing skills before they graduate, and reduce the amount of unmet legal needs in communities.

Essential Research Skills for New Attorneys: A Survey of Academic and Practitioner Law Librarians

Legal research is generally regarded as an essential skill for attorneys. Despite this fact,research skills of new attorneys continue to be regarded as poor by law librarians. As law schools attempt to address this deficiency, particularly by adding advanced legal research courses, academic law librarians are increasingly involved in legal research instruction. Given this, it is important to ascertain whether academic law librarians and law librarians in legal offices agree as to the most important skills and materials for new lawyers to be familiar with. This paper reports and analyzes the results of a survey conducted among academic and practitioner law librarians in the Southeastern United States and Washington, DC area regarding legal research skills and materials.

Shepard for a Day: A Novel Class Exercise for Teaching Citators

This article describes a novel class assignment and its pilot implementation in the Advanced Legal Research courses at eight law schools during 2014–2015. The assignment tasks students with creating concise citator entries, fostering a better understanding of the limits of commercial citators. The assignment was implemented using the free legal research platform Casetext.

Specialized Legal Research Courses: The Next Generation of Advanced Legal Research

This article examines the current state of Advanced Legal Research (ALR) courses and the emergence of Specialized Legal Research (SLR) courses. It surveys the curriculum of all ABA-accredited law schools and provides updated statistics of ALR course offerings. It also identifies for the first time (1) the law schools currently offering SLR courses, (2) the most popular SLR course topics, and (3) the role of the law library in determining whether to implement a SLR course. The results of this survey will hopefully educate law schools about the trends and variety of legal research course offerings.

Specialized Legal Research Courses: The Next Generation of Advanced Legal Research

The goal of this paper is to update the past surveys on Advanced Legal Research trends and to initiate data collection on the trends for Specialized Legal Research (SLR) courses. The data illuminates the number of schools offering ALR and SLR courses in the 2012-2013 academic year; which SLR topics are most often taught; and whether U.S. News & World Report rankings have any correlation to the trends in SLR course offerings. Further, the paper examines how this data can give law librarians the knowledge necessary to market themselves as a cost-effective option for implementing the practical skills courses that are in high demand in today's legal education.

Teaching Two Skills at Once: Strengthening Federal Legislative History and Treaty Interpretation Skills in an Advanced Legal Research Course in International Law

Law schools today increasingly devote more of their resources to international legal studies, including study abroad program and international legal institutes or center, and international legal issues are often examined in substantive legal subjects, such as contracts, torts, environmental law, and antitrust. As a result, many law schools have developed international legal research curriculums and even require or recommend international legal research as a course. A very difficult topic for students in an advanced legal research course in international law is the use of travaux preparatoires and treaty interpretation as articulated in the Vienna Convention. Because the processes and controversies surrounding statutory interpretation and treaty interpretation are very similar in the United States and abroad, it makes sense to introduce them at the same time in an international legal research course and strengthen students’ understanding of both topics.

Testing the Limits of WestlawNext

Law students in Advanced Legal Research courses at two law schools completed a series of exercises designed to explore several discrete aspects of WestlawNext. Professor Peoples reports the results of this study concerning the impact of WestlawNext's pricing model, user interface, and search algorithm on research results. The article concludes with suggestions for improvement to WestlawNext and a call for librarians to become more involved in training students to use WestlawNext.

Embedded Librarians: Teaching Legal Research as a Lawyering Skill

The current movement for reform of legal education focuses on teaching both knowledge and practical skills in combination, as recommended in the 2007 Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers. In light of technology that now makes masses of law and related information available online, unorganized and seemingly unmanageable, this article proposes that law schools draw on the professional skills of their law librarians to teach students advanced legal research and analysis by embedding them in law school clinics. It outlines a pedagogy for teaching legal research in clinics as a lawyering skill, complete with ethical responsibilities and professional standards, consonant with the recommendations of the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, the 2009 Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education, and the 1992 ABA Taskforce on Law Schools and the Profession, Legal Education and Professional Development (the MacCrate Report). It examines how the relatively new trend of embedding librarians in practice settings, offering assistance at the point of need, could be effective in law schools. Finally, it advances a model for embedding law librarians in law school clinics based on the experiment conducted at the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, begun by first embedding one librarian in the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic and then continued by adding on other clinics. This article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Legal Education.

Bankruptcy: A Legal Research Course

Several aspects of the subject matter and practice of bankruptcy law lend themselves to use as the underlying subject matter for a course in advanced legal research. Although the unique institutions and procedure in bankruptcy cases call for specialized instruction, the structure of the substantive field around an integrated, codified statute and the intersections of state and federal jurisdiction provide plentiful jumping-off points to reinforce important general concepts of strategic and thoughtful legal research practice. The first half of this article presents an introduction to the field as a basic substantive grounding necessary to any law librarian pondering a legal research course grounded in bankruptcy law. The article also familiarizes the prospective research instructor with the major sources of law in the field and assesses numerous secondary sources and research tools covering the field with an eye to which print and online sources will be of the best anticipated value to today's legal research students. Model syllabi are proposed for either a larger, three-credit course or for a one-credit minicourse in specialized research that might either stand alone or serve as a supplement to a substantive course or seminar in the field.

Teaching Specialized Legal Research: Business Associations

Business associations are a complex substantive topic that can be included in an advanced legal research course that teaches students sophisticated research, writing, and citation skills. This article presents the basic substantive law regarding business associations necessary to deliver instruction about advanced legal research, writing, and citation. This article also offers a model syllabus with suggested sources and assignments for students. These research assignments require students to perform tasks such as citing primary and secondary sources, learning advanced research skills using loose-leaf materials, assimilating information from multiple sources into cogent narratives, locating information using various electronic resources, digests, and other secondary sources, and locating and using forms pertinent to business association agreements. This article also provides an instructor with twenty-five suggested sources to use in assigning materials to students. These sources consist of both print and electronic versions. They additionally consist of treatises, monographs, guides, model statutory materials, electronic databases, Web sites, form guides, casebooks, a digest, and a citation manual.

On Teaching Advanced Legal Research

This article addresses the issues faced by instructors of courses in advanced legal research. Everyone teaching in this area must have a strategy for organizing the subject matter, drafting problems and assignments, constructing a syllabus, and planning and delivering a course designed to meet its stated goals. Most importantly, the instructor must give serious thought to the desired outcomes at which he or she aims. In this article, Professor Knott has categorized outcome targets into three levels: competency, fluency, and mastery. The instructor's decisions about desired outcomes will have implications for all aspects of course design and delivery. The article identifies and discusses these issues and provides a framework instructors can use when designing their own courses. Attached as appendices are specific examples of many of the kinds of materials discussed in the article, all drawn from material prepared for use in the author's advanced legal research classes.

Teaching Advanced Legal Research: Philosophy and Context

Is there a philosophy that grounds the teaching of advanced legal research (ALR)? Can a coherent identity be found? The authors draw upon the experience of twenty-five years of teaching ALR to large numbers of students to puzzle this question out. Are we teaching a mechanical skill? Are we offering a course in jurisprudence? Are we simply forcing the students to teach themselves? Has the information revolution changed the whole enterprise? Basing the discussion on the context of legal information, the students, and the law, the authors try to find an answer to these fundamental questions.

Perspectives on Teaching Foreign and International Legal Research

ABSTRACT This article discusses various models for teaching international and foreign legal research. In some law schools, international and foreign legal research is a semester-long course. In other law schools, international and foreign legal research is a component of an advanced legal research seminar or an international law course. Stefa-nie Weigmann presents an overview of teaching international legal research and describes her experience teaching in various formats. Kath-erine Topulos outlines some of the resources that are helpful for those who want to begin teaching foreign and international legal research. Jean Davis and Victoria Szymczak discuss teaching techniques and class activities for a semester-long course.

Teaching Legal Research in American Law Schools:

Teaching legal research in the Law School setting has become a timely topic - forty percent of the journal articles that have been written about it have appeared within the last ten years and at least twenty-seven law schools have developed advanced legal research courses in addition to the basic course. We have attempted to compile an exhaustive bibliography of journal articles that in some way contribute to the pedagogical literature of legal research. We do not include articles which describe research techniques and sources, nor do we include articles devoted solely to the teaching of legal writing or advocacy.

Advanced Legal Research Courses:

Advanced Legal Research Courses: