Legal Research Process
Preliminary Analysis encompasses these four components.
What are: Facts, jurisdiction, area of law, & type of law
U.S.C.S stands for this primary source.
What is the United States Code Services?
Secondary sources do this for primary sources.
What is provide commentary on?
This is the part of the Bluebook where you find short hands, abbreviations, & terminology.
What is the Tables section?
This is what indicators (on Lexis and Westlaw) do.
What is put the reader on notice as to how this law/case is being treated?
The best place to start any legal research process is in this type of source.
What is a secondary source?
Headnotes & digest contain this.
What are important issues related to the case?
Secondary sources have this weight of authority.
What is persuasive?
Page numbers do this in a non-consecutively paginated journal or magazine.
What is restart in each issue within a volume?
These are the four types of case reporters.
You do this kind of search in our legal databases.
What is a Boolean search?
Bound and published session laws in Virginia are called this.
What are the Virginia Acts of Assembly?
You go to this source to find english meanings of legal words (you can give one of the two or both).
What are: Black's Law Dictionary or Wolter Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary?
Pub. L. No. 117 - 100 is a citation to this kind of law.
What is a slip law?
Court rules dictate this.
What is the procedures and rules that litigants and attorneys must follow?
These are the names of the three big legal research databases that we use.
What are Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg?
The Federal Register contains this.
What is a daily, chronological publication of rules and regulations (and executive & presidential proclamations)?
These are the most persuasive of the secondary sources.
What are restatements?
These are the two types of parentheticals.
What are weight of authority and explanatory?
These are the types of documents that can be found when researching legislative history (You will get points if you can name 3/6)
What are: (1) bill versions, (2) conference reports, (3) committee hearings, (4) floor debates, (5) conference papers, & (6) presidential signing statements?
You restart the legal research process after this step.
What is Update and Refine?
This is the exception to this statement: "Federal Courts do not bind state courts"
What is: "The U.S. Supreme court binds all lower federal and state courts on FEDERAL issues"?
This is the name of Virginia/West Virginia's Jurisprudence.
What is Michie's Jurisprudence Of Virginia and West Virginia (Michie's Juris. of Va. & W.Va.)
This goes at the very end of every citation.
What is a period?
___ is the number of titles in the Code of Federal Regulations.
What is 50?