Hierarchy of Authority
This type of authority must be followed by a court.
What is binding or mandatory authority?
For a new-to-you topic, this is the source type should you consult first to build vocabulary, spot issues, and gather citations to primary law.
What are secondary sources such as practice guides, treatises, or legal encyclopedias?
This is the daily, chronological publication where proposed and final regulations, as well as presidential documents and notices, are first published.
What is the Federal Register?
After citing a case in the immediately preceding sentence, this one-word short form lets you avoid repeating the full citation for the same case, adding only a pincite if the cited page changes.
What is “Id.”?
This is the publication where decisions of a particular court or group of courts are found.
What is a reporter?
When a federal district court in California is considering a Ninth Circuit (a circuit that covers California) decision on a federal law issue, the Ninth Circuit’s decision is this type of authority for that district court.
What is binding or mandatory authority?
Between federal and state law, this is the type of authority most likely to be relevant to a family law research question?
What is state law?
This is the name of the device by which Congress or a state legislature gives an administrative agency the authority to issue regulations.
What is an enabling statute?
This is the proper way to list the United States of America as a party to a case.
What is United States?
These are the paragraphs, highlighting the points of law in an opinion, written by attorney editors and found at the beginning of cases in Westlaw and Lexis.
What are headnotes?
A state trial court weighing a law review article and a sister state’s appellate decision is considering these kinds of sources.
What are persuasive authorities?
These are the questions we referred to in class as the 5 W's and H for analyzing a fact pattern to generate search terms.
What are:
Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?
In an annotated code, this is the section that contains annotations written by attorney editors that summarize important cases interpreting a statute or regulation.
What are the Notes of/to Decisions?
This is the Bluebook citation for title thirty-two, section nineteen of the United States Code.
What is: 32 U.S.C. § 19?
You want a practical overview of a legal issues with checklists, strategy, and sample clauses to jump-start drafting. This is the secondary source type most helpful to you.
What are practice guides and/or formbooks?
Between a state constitution, a state statute, and a state regulation, this source controls when there is a direct conflict under the state’s law.
What is the state constitution?
This is the name of the method we discussed in class for leveraging a single relevant case to find other relevant authorities.
What is the "one good case method"?
You were given only the commonly used name of a statute. This is an effective tool to find where it is codified in the U.S. Code.
What is a popular name table? (Will also accept index)
This is the formatting you must apply to party names in case citation.
A source in which you would find scholarly articles on recent legal topics, most likely on a narrow issue of law.
What is a law review or journal?
On questions of state law, this court’s interpretation is binding on all lower state courts and on federal courts applying that state’s law.
What is the state supreme court (or other highest court)?
You have found a relevant case with 2,000 citing references. These are two filters you could apply to the citing references results to narrow them to more relevant cases.
What are: Jurisdiction, date range, reported status, headnote topic, depth of treatment, or treatment status?
These are three of the five methods we discussed in class for locating a relevant regulation.
What are:
(1) by citation, (2) from secondary sources, (3) from an annotated statutory code, (4) by using an index, and (5) by keyword searching?
This is the Bluebook abbreviation for the official set of books that publishes cases from the U.S. Supreme Court.
What is U.S.?
(the United States Reports).
You've found a Mississippi case that discusses the legal issue you are researching. You want to find cases on that issue under Iowa law. This feature of online research databases is the most efficient way to find relevant case law.
What is a digest feature such as West KeyNumbers or Lexis Topics.