Teaching Specialized Legal Research: Business Associations

Business associations are a complex substantive topic that can be included in an advanced legal research course that teaches students sophisticated research, writing, and citation skills. This article presents the basic substantive law regarding business associations necessary to deliver instruction about advanced legal research, writing, and citation. This article also offers a model syllabus with suggested sources and assignments for students. These research assignments require students to perform tasks such as citing primary and secondary sources, learning advanced research skills using loose-leaf materials, assimilating information from multiple sources into cogent narratives, locating information using various electronic resources, digests, and other secondary sources, and locating and using forms pertinent to business association agreements. This article also provides an instructor with twenty-five suggested sources to use in assigning materials to students. These sources consist of both print and electronic versions. They additionally consist of treatises, monographs, guides, model statutory materials, electronic databases, Web sites, form guides, casebooks, a digest, and a citation manual.     

Developing Legal Information Literate Law Students: “That Dog Will Hunt”

The legal profession has been adamant about the need for law schools to more adequately prepare law students for legal practice. Criticisms concerning a student's practical legal skills, such as the ability to conduct legal research, are prevalent. As the legal profession continues to transform, the need for law students and new attorneys to be “legal information literate” prior to being hired is quite evident. In order to instill competent legal research skills, legal research instruction must focus both on incorporating legal information literacy skills and on understanding how students learn. For this reason, teachers of legal research should rethink teaching strategies and explore different teaching methodologies.     

Motivating Law Students to Develop Competent Legal Research Skills

The results of a recent survey indicate that most law students do not consider learning legal research skills important. This article addresses ways in which academic law librarians can help counter negative attitudes toward legal research. The article also contains suggestions for helping motivate law students to develop competent legal research skills. The author encourages academic law librarians to assert their role in legal education by reevaluating legal research programs and, where appropriate, implementing positive change.     

Meeting Business Students' Legal Research Needs: A Selected List of Periodicals on Corporation,Securities, and Bankruptcy

Business students and practitioners are expected to understand the legal framework and the legal environment in which businesses function, but not the complicated black letter law and lengthy judicial opinions. In terms of legal research, different from law school students, business students and practitioners need more secondary legal source support from their libraries. This article will bring the unique legal research needs of business students and practitioners to librarians' attention. A list of selected legal periodicals on corporate law, securities regulations, and bankruptcy will be supplied for libraries to better meet those needs.     

An Empirical Study on the Research and Critical Evaluation Skills of Law Students

Although scholars have explored many aspects of legal education, the fundamental analysis of research behavior and the quality of research skills remains somewhat uncharted territory. There have been assessments of the research skills of incoming law students and the effectiveness of various research programs but little to assess skills and preferences of existing law students. Building on surveys and studies from other disciplines, this article describes an effort to gather empirical data on law students' legal research practices.     

Electronic Legal Research Tools: An Examination of the Resources Available,Training of New Attorneys,and Employer Expectations

Information literacy of recent law school graduates is examined from both the academic and professional sector. This article explores the literature on the different types of legal resources, the adequacy of legal research instruction provided to law students, employers’ expectations in regard to the legal research skills of recent graduates, and the information literacy of lawyers. This study consists of two surveys designed to determine the scope of the research instruction and resources available at law schools, and the electronic resources available to new associates at their employment, and to assess employers’ expectations of the research skills of their new associates. The surveys were sent to samples of Massachusetts’ law school libraries and law firms.     

Legal Research Boot Camp: One Approach to Meeting the Research Needs of Law Students

This article describes the legal research boot camp offered at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. It is an intensive, one-week course offered the first week of the summer break to prepare students for their summer clerkships. It is also a vehicle to teach law librarianship students how to teach legal research.     

Joining the Conversation: Law Library Research Assistant Programs and Current Criticisms of Legal Education

Law libraries should play a greater role in addressing the current crisis in legal education. Proponents for educational reform often view libraries as a vehicle for cost savings, while overlooking the ability of libraries to train students in the skills and competencies that are essential for the practice of law. Libraries’ research assistant programs can be particularly effective in imparting workplace values and lawyering skills beyond the traditional law school curriculum. This article encourages libraries to build on the strengths of their research assistant programs as a substantive way to equip law students with essential skills for today's legal marketplace.     

Experiential Learning: Context and Connections for Legal Research–A Case Study

The American Bar Association requires that all law students receive “substantial instruction” in legal research. This article discusses a unique legal research program that meets this requirement by focusing on experiential learning. Two components of experiential learning, context and connections, are explained pedagogically and specifically as to legal research curriculum.     

Of Lizards,Intersubjective Zap,and Trashing:

Critical Legal Studies presents numerous challenges to reference librarians. Among them are the difficulty of identifying and collecting materials written by Critical Legal Studies scholars, the problem of locating and acquiring materials about the Critical Legal Studies movement, and the use by Critical Legal Studies scholars of materials, vocabulary, and a style of scholarship not traditionally found in law schools. Librarians, particularly reference librarians, should be able to anticipate trends in the legal community. The Critical Legal Studies movement has existed for ten years, and yet the academic law library community has only recently responded to its existence by collecting matertals relevant to Critical Legal Studies scholars and by making those materials accessible through subject headings, bibliographies, and computerized legal research sources.     

May It Please the Court: Law Students and Legal Research Instruction in Prison Law Libraries

According to the administrative office of the U.S. Courts, a significant part of the present docket of federal district courts consists of prisoner litigation. This category of litigation, composed largely of habeas corpus petitions, civil rights suits, and suits related to prison conditions, is often pressed by prisoners whose only legal assistance is the resources and materials available in their prison law library. Although prisoner litigation is an essential means of ensuring that our prisons and criminal justice systems operate within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, these often poorly researched and poorly written lawsuits also present special challenges to the federal courts tasked with processing them. This article explores how establishing programs that involve law students in teaching legal research in prison law libraries could help to both ameliorate the burdens that prisoner litigation places on the federal court system and improve prison law libraries’ ability to provide prisoners with meaningful access to the courts. The article begins by discussing the history of prisoner litigation in federal courts and describes four models of legal research instruction and assistance that have been employed in prisons. Based on the lessons learned from these efforts, the article presents a proposal for a prison legal research clinic that could be established by interested law schools and their librarians, and discusses the benefits to law students, prisoners, and the courts that such a program has the potential to deliver.     

Influences of the Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company's American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West's digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring's scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were created and became essential research tools for American lawyers.     

Standing at the Gates: A New Law Librarian Wonders About the Future Role of the Profession in Legal Research Education

ABSTRACT

There have long been complaints about the legal research skills of law school students and recent graduates. In this article the author focuses on the period between the release of two important reports on legal education, the MacCrate Report in 1992 and the Carnegie Report in 2007, examining how law librarians and other professionals involved were engaged in responding to the problem. The author concludes that if law librarians want to be involved more fully in legal research education, some changes or reexamination of our professional culture and positions may be necessary.     

Teaching Legal Research

ABSTRACT

Questions about the importance and viability of legal research and writing as a part of the law school curriculum are not novel. Confronting these questions head-on, however, is a responsibility that should be handled by law librarians. This article addresses the issue of teaching legal research in an academic law library setting. The reasons why the author has pursued an aggressive approach when dealing with legal research instruction are explored. The methods employed to carry out that legal research instruction mandate are examined. creased as legal research and writing are more and more frequently combined and taught by writing faculty.¹ At the same time, the research skills of law students are on a downward spiral. Howland and Lewis document this plunge in an informative survey.² Law librarian Donald Dunn substantiates this decline and attributes it, in part, to “the increased emphasis in law schools on legal writing,”³ in consequence of which, while “legal writing entered the expressway; legal research took the off-ramp.”⁴ Further, law librarians and legal research have even been pummeled by one of America's most popular authors.⁵ In this environment, it may seem unwise to continue to advance the argument that academic law librarians should teach legal research. Notwithstanding the obstacles that face such instruction, law librarians have an obligation to press forward in this important work.⁶ Legal writing instructors have not demonstrated that they have the expertise to provide this instruc-tion.⁷ Likewise, law faculty have demonstrated that they do not have the interest in tackling the task.⁸ Say two authorities on the subject: “Regular faculty members generally do not teach a research course, and when they do decide to teach one, the results are invariably disastrous. Most law faculty members cannot teach legal research because they do not understand it themselves. If compelled to teach the course, they rebel.”⁹ Perhaps it is time for law schools to cede the stewardship for legal research instruction to those information professionals who have been trained and are qualified to teach legal research instruction -law librarians.¹⁰ And it is time for any reticent law librarians to accept the obligation to take a more proactive approach toward teaching legal research.¹¹     

The Pedagogical Value of an Integrated Approach to Legal Research Instruction: Overcoming Student Resistance to the Use of Print Sources and Striking a Balance That Instills an Appreciation of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Both Print and Online Sources

The ABA Legal Technology Survey Reports from 2006 to 2012 reported that, on average, 51% of attorneys “regularly” used print materials. Given the propensity of law students to default to online research, this article describes the results of a three-year longitudinal study of an integrated approach to teaching first-year legal research. This approach required students conduct legal research tasks both online and in print sources, and to evaluate their experience. The objective of this approach was to transform the legal research experience from a “treasure hunt” into a much higher level of engagement based on Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.     

Bankruptcy: A Legal Research Course

Several aspects of the subject matter and practice of bankruptcy law lend themselves to use as the underlying subject matter for a course in advanced legal research. Although the unique institutions and procedure in bankruptcy cases call for specialized instruction, the structure of the substantive field around an integrated, codified statute and the intersections of state and federal jurisdiction provide plentiful jumping-off points to reinforce important general concepts of strategic and thoughtful legal research practice. The first half of this article presents an introduction to the field as a basic substantive grounding necessary to any law librarian pondering a legal research course grounded in bankruptcy law. The article also familiarizes the prospective research instructor with the major sources of law in the field and assesses numerous secondary sources and research tools covering the field with an eye to which print and online sources will be of the best anticipated value to today's legal research students. Model syllabi are proposed for either a larger, three-credit course or for a one-credit minicourse in specialized research that might either stand alone or serve as a supplement to a substantive course or seminar in the field.     

Legal Research Works for Non-Law Students

Increasingly now non-law students - those majoring in the social sciences - want to learn more about legal research. They hear law talked about at every level in and out of the university, especially in popular culture where "mouthpiece" stories are second in prevalence only to cop stories. Non-law students discover that professors giver higher grades to term papers incorporating legal issues. Such papers are more substantial as are speeches, debates, and class participation that include discussion of the law. This article encourages libraries that can afford it to build a basic law collection, and once in place, gives examples of how to teach the rudiments of law in an interesting way.     

Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Have We Overemphasized Its Importance?

Surveys of law librarians show concern with the lack of cost-effective research skills of law students and new associates. Some commentators call for greater emphasis on the subject in legal research classes. To explore whether the subject merits increased instructional attention, the author surveyed second- and third-year law students at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law about their summer research experiences. The purpose of the survey was to find out how much importance summer employers placed on containing online research costs. The student survey results contradict the commonly expressed view that employers are greatly concerned with containing online research costs. The author posits that law library surveys generally reflect the experiences of large firm librarians, whereas the great majority of students and practicing attorneys do not work at these organizations. The concerns of these librarians might not be as relevant for students who work at smaller firms and government organizations. The author notes that the survey results suggest that there is no need for increased emphasis on cost-effective research at schools that do not have a large percentage of students who go on to work at large firms.     

Theirs Not to Reason Why,Theirs but to Make Law Review or Die

Abstract

The following annotated bibliography seeks to provide a quick research tool for people interested in understanding and, of course, improving legal scholarship in the United States. In Part I, we provide a brief introduction to the law review system. In Part II, we evaluate various articles that critique the law review system. In Part III, we examine law review articles that critique law review students themselves. In Part IV, we summarize some of the articles that recount the history of law reviews. In Part V, we compile several articles that look at citation trends for legal scholarship. In Part VI, we discuss miscellaneous articles about law reviews.     

Vietnamese Law

Abstract

This bibliography is designed to assist students and scholars of both the history and contemporary features of the Vietnamese legal system. In particular, it takes a broad view of the interconnectedness of law and society. The result of positioning law and society as mutually reflective is that the bibliography includes materials shedding light on Vietnamese history, politics, culture and social and economic development. Although it does not offer an exhaustive listing on these wider issues, it equips the researcher to explore these issues as a corollary of legal research.