1L - First Year Lesson Topics

This is an introductory lesson on Canadian legal research. This particular lesson treats research techniques and sources from the perspective that you are faced with a statute based problem. A second separate lesson treats Canadian legal research from the perspective that you have a case based problem. The lessons assume no knowledge of the areas, but treat basic research in Canadian federal statutes, administrative material, and cases.

This lesson will introduce you to methods of finding and updating federal executive orders. It assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and is therefore appropriate for any student or legal professional who needs to learn how to research federal executive orders.

The purpose of this lesson is to provide an introduction to customary law systems and to offer suggestions for researching the laws of countries where customary law is still being practiced.

This lesson will introduce you to the civil law tradition and discuss research in civil law historical sources. The lesson covers the five major types of world legal systems, explains the current and historical sources of the civil law, and discusses the importance of historical sources in civil law research and interpretation. Specific historical sources are identified, as well as ideas for using secondary sources to make sure that your research is on the right track.

This lesson will acquaint you with the sources of international environmental law, and give you strategies for researching it.

This lesson will introduce the student to researching legal ethics. 

This lesson will provide students with some general background on U.S. immigration law and will give an overview of tools students can use for immigration law research. Students should have a fundamental knowledge of legal research tools but do not need to have any background in immigration law to proceed with the lesson. The lesson would work best while also taking a class about immigration law.

This lesson will explain uniform laws and model codes. It provides an overview of how uniform laws and model codes are created and shows researchers how to locate uniform laws and model codes, drafters' commentary, state versions of uniform laws and model codes, and cases interpreting them.

This lesson explores the remedy of restitution, which can be available both where there is no contract and where there is a contract and the non-breaching party chooses an alternative to the expectancy measure of damages. The lesson can be run either as an introduction to restitution or as a review after you have completed your study.

Effective December 1, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to reflect changes in discovery resulting from the electronic storage of information. CALI's lessons do not yet reflect these amendments. As each lesson is revised to reflect the amended rules, the lesson's catalog description will be updated to enable students and faculty to easily tell which lessons include the amended rules.