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Legal research is "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication of the results of the investigation."
The most common sources of authority cited are court decisions (cases), statutes, regulations, government documents, treaties, and scholarly writing. Typically, a proper legal citation will inform the reader about a source's authority, how strongly the source supports the writer's proposition, its age, and other, relevant information.
By 2011, The Bluebook was "the main guide and source of authority" on legal references for the past 90 years. [25] It is recognized as the "gold standard" for legal references in the United States, even though it was originally designed only to help teach law students how to cite cases and other legal material. [26]
In American law, the American Law Reports are a resource used by American lawyers to find a variety of sources relating to specific legal rules, doctrines, or principles. It has been published since 1919, originally by Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, and currently by West (a business unit of Thomson Reuters) and remains an important tool for legal research.
Law school libraries also hold legal encyclopedias, such as Corpus Juris Secundum or American Jurisprudence and resources such as American Law Reports. Many major legal research materials may be found online, through both free services, such as Law Library Resource Xchange , PACER (law) , and Google Scholar , and commercial services for ...
The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a non-profit public service of Cornell Law School that provides no-cost access to current American and international legal research sources online. Founded in 1992 by Peter Martin and Tom Bruce, [2] [3] LII was the first law site developed on the internet. [4]
Public law libraries provide access to primary legal sources (statutes, cases, and regulations) and secondary sources (professional reference books, form books, and self-help books) used in legal matters. In most U.S. states, public law libraries are part of the trial court system, a department of the state or county government, or an ...
United States law; List of legal abbreviations; Legal research; Legal research in the United States; For more information on official, unofficial, and authenticated online state laws and regulations, see Matthews & Baish, State-by-State Authentication of Online Legal Resources, American Association of Law Libraries, 2007.