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Sep 23, 2024 · Case law is law based on judicial decisions. This guide cites resources for locating and identifying judicial decisions from the U.S. courts using primary and secondary sources of case law.
- Introduction
- Finding Cases in Other Sources
- Finding Cases by Searching
- Finding Cases by Browsing
- Using a Relevant Case to Find More Cases
- Validation of Cases
- Dockets
Reading court decisions is a central part of the law school curriculum. As you’ve seen, however, the legal research process frequently begins with secondary sources and statutes, which can then lead you to relevant case law. With a few cases already in hand, you can next focus on searching for cases more directly and using them as a means for findi...
We recommend starting your research with secondary sources not only because they provide you with an overview (and sometimes an in-depth review) of the law, but also because they direct you to relevant primary sources, case law included; indeed, some secondary sources, like the American Law Reports and the Restatements, center on case law. It’s alw...
Full-text searching is perhaps the most straightforward, though not always the most efficient, way of looking for cases. It’s generally a good practice to set your jurisdiction first before running a search in the main search boxes on Westlaw and Lexis. Here are a few types of full-text searches you can run: Natural language searching: simply ty...
An alternative approach to finding cases is to browse cases by subject. Both Westlaw and Lexis classify cases by subject, allowing you to retrieve relevant cases with the click of a button. Westlaw offers subject browsing through its Key Number System, which includes hundreds of broad legal topics that are each divided into many more subtopics, oft...
Once you’ve located at least one relevant case, you can use that case to find additional relevant cases. The most obvious way to find more cases is to read the opinion and note which decisions the court cites. A second way is to use the headnotes that the editors at Westlaw and Lexis have added to the opinion. Each headnote covers what the editors ...
After finding relevant cases, it’s important to validate them to make sure they’re still good law. Citators are a useful tool for validating cases because they’re designed to list any negative treatment your case has received. The citator on Westlaw is known as KeyCite and uses a series of flags to indicate a case’s validity: Lexis’s citator is c...
While Westlaw and Lexis make available some court filings, the best way to access court dockets while in law school is through Bloomberg Law, which pulls docket information and court filings from the fee-based federal courts docket system, PACER, without charging student users a fee. The dockets search is available on the Bloomberg Law home page: ...
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American law is based on common law from the United Kingdom as one of its core legal pillars (which is then buttressed by, among other sources, the U.S. Constitution, court cases, statutes, restatements, decrees, treatises, and various other rules and regulations).
As a general rule, federal courts and agencies interpret legal issues that arise from federal law, while state courts resolve legal disputes that arise from state laws.1. The laws from both the federal and state legal systems stem from three pri-mary sources: the Constitution, statutes, and common law. 1.
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Feb 29, 2024 · Case law is the collection of reported cases that form the body of law withing a given jurisdiction. It is based upon judicial opinions by various courts, which may set future precedent. Courts in the United States adhere to stare decisis, which generally means that courts respect and adhere to the precedent of previous decisions. However, a ...
- Gerard Fowke
- 2010
In a common law system, cases play a vital role in interpreting statutes, building arguments, organizing analyses, and conveying points of view. Legal research often begins with statutes or regulations, the primary law passed by the legislature or regulatory agency in the relevant jurisdiction.
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It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history.
