Legal Research

Through this introductory lesson, students will learn how federal laws are made and about the federal legislative process. Students will also learn about the various types of documents that are created as a proposed bill works its way through Congress. Additionally, this lesson teaches students how to research a statute's federal legislative history, including how to use free websites and paid services. The last part of the lesson walks students through two hypotheticals on legislative history.

Compiled legislative histories are collections of the documents that make up the legislative history of a law. They save researchers the time and frustration of collecting the documents themselves. This lesson builds upon the CALI lesson How to Research Federal Legislative History. While it is not essential to complete that lesson first, doing so will improve your understanding of compiled legislative histories.

This lesson will teach students how to research and efficiently locate rules and regulations promulgated by federal administrative agencies. The lesson addresses the official sources of federal administrative regulations: the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and their related materials.

This lesson will introduce you to the quasi-legislative process known as rulemaking. It will familiarize you with the publication system and with the sources you will access to research regulations. The lesson includes several images of Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations pages, and links to regulatory information on the Government Publishing Office's homepage. The lesson is designed to augment a substantive Administrative Law Course or an Advanced Legal Research class.

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.

This lesson is intended to familiarize the user with the range of documents produced by the Federal government, where they can be found, and how they can be used in a law practice.

This lesson will provide an understanding of the language, mechanics, and process of conducting research of U.S. treaties: the major sources of treaty texts (both official and unofficial), major indexes and finding tools, resources for updating treaties, and a basic strategy for treaty research.

This lesson will provide an overview of secondary resources used in legal research. Secondary resources are books and other material ABOUT legal subjects and issues: they discuss and explain primary resources such as cases and statutes and can be useful in assisting our understanding about specific areas of law. The student will learn about the different types of secondary resources and what secondary resources are most useful for specific types of legal research tasks.

This lesson is about Legal Encyclopedias in print format. As one of the main types of secondary resources for legal research, Legal Encyclopedias can be useful for a variety of basic legal research tasks. This lesson will give you an overview of legal encyclopedias, explain how they are used in legal research, and run through a couple of hypotheticals. The lesson focuses on one of the two legal encyclopedias covering American Law in general - American Jurisprudence 2d (Am. Jur. 2d) - and gives some examples of state legal encyclopedias.

This lesson is an introduction to the American Law Reports (ALR) and is intended for use by students in introductory legal research classes. The goal is to give you an understanding of the features of the resource, the best methods for using it, and an understanding of when to use it. The lesson covers both print and electronic formats of ALR.