Legal Research Flashcards
You must consider the following when determining the hierarchy of authorities:
- Currency
- Levels of court
- Conflicting decisions between circuits
- State and federal decisions concerning an issue
- Conflicts in federal and state authority
- State court decisions
Name primary authorities for legal research
- Court decisions
- Statutes
- Agency rules and regulations
- Constitutions
- Charters
Name secondary authorities for legal research
- Encyclopedias
- American law reports
- Periodicals and law reviews
- Dictionaries
- Thesauri
Name Finding Tools
Digests, Citators, Updaters, Annotated Statutes
What is the United States Reports?
the official, government printed reporter for U.S. Supreme Court cases.
the official government printed reporter for U.S. Supreme Court Cases
United States Reports
What are the commercial Supreme Court Reporters?
Supreme Court Reporter or U.S. Supreme Court Reports, Lawyer’s Edition are the commercial reporters.
What’s the difference between United States Reports and commercial reporters.
United States Reports is the official government printed reporter for U.S. Supreme Court cases, and the commercial reporters are not the official report and are usually published sooner than the official, government-printed version and contain a variety of publisher’s headnotes and case abstracts that will assist in your research.
Commercial reporters are _______________________________________.
usually published faster than the official report and contain a lot of headnotes and case abstracts that will assist you in your resesarch.
West South Western Reporter covers Texas.
TRUE
“shep a case” means
go look it up in west law or lexis. The Shepard’s citator system is the most pervasive, but Lexis bought Shepard.
________________ are services that note when a court has mentioned or relied on a case.
Citators
Which citator is the most pervasive?
Shepard’s citator system, but now Lexis bought them.
What do you learn from reviewing Shepard’s citations?
- List of parallel citations and the history of the case you are reviewing.
- All cases that mention or cite case you are Shepardizing.
- References to West’s headnote system.
- For some citing authorities, additional information about the court’s treatment of the citing cases.
- Can be used to research almost every federal and state case reported in print in the past 200 years.
What are treatises?
Treatises are scholarly works that examine one legal topic in great detail and with very broad coverage. These are generally multi-volume sets.