Cases
This proprietary system in Westlaw helps you find cases by subject.
What is the Key Number System?
This official set contains the codified laws of the United States.
What is the United States Code?
This official publication contains the codified regulations of the federal administrative agencies.
What is the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.)?
A source in which you would find articles written by law professors on legal topics, heavily footnoted and often focused on developing areas of law.
What is a law review or law journal?
The type of authority of a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in an Illinois state court.
What is persuasive authority?
Citations that are standard, court-assigned references for court opinions that remain the same, regardless of the publisher.
What are neutral citations?
West's unofficial version of the United States Code, which contains the laws as found in the United States Code, PLUS case summaries and citations to secondary sources that reference the statutory language.
What is the United States Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.)?
This official publication contains proposed and final regulations of federal administrative agencies in chronological order.
What is the Federal Register?
This source restates the common law doctrines on a subject using the rules in a majority of jurisdictions.
What are the Restatements?
Publisher known for its practitioner-oriented handbooks on Illinois law, which are recognizable by their black paperbound or spiral-bound books.
What is IICLE (or Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education)?
The short, numbered paragraphs, highlighting the points of law in an opinion, written by West editors and found at the beginning of cases in West reporters in print and on Westlaw.
What are headnotes?
Tool used to locate a statute if you only have its name (e.g., Kingpin Bank Fraud Statute).
What is the "Popular Name Table"?
Legislation that defines the scope of an agency's mission and empowers it to perform its functions.
What is enabling legislation or an enabling act?
This legal dictionary is generally seen as the most authoritative of its kind.
What is Black's Law Dictionary?
This search tool organizes and connects the topics in a source and provides cross-references for synonyms.
What is an index?
Names of the citators for Westlaw and LEXIS.
What are KeyCite and Shepard's?
When a federal statute is first published, it is identified by this number.
What is its Public Law Number?
A currently updated, free, online unofficial version of the Code of Federal Regulations.
What is the e-CFR?
Gitlin on Divorce and Nimmer on Copyright are examples of this type of secondary source.
What is a treatise?
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What is a term used for locating words or phrases in the same sentence?
Citations to the same case opinion from different reporters are called this.
What are parallel citations?
This official set contains the text of federal statutes, as passed, in chronological order (by session of Congress).
What is the United States Statutes at Large?
This weekly publication provides a chronological record of Illinois state administrative agency activity.
What is the Illinois Register?
One of the two commercially published Illinois-specific legal encyclopedia sets.
What is Illinois Law & Practice or Illinois Jurisprudence?
The term used to describe a generative AI reference to a non-existent case.
What is hallucination?