Speaker 1: Hi everyone, this video is about how to find credible sources and how to conduct research for notes and articles for the Fordham Undergraduate Law Review. So the first really great resource that we can use for conducting research is the Fordham Library homepage. There's a lot of beneficial resources on this homepage. The first one under Ask a Librarian is an online chat box where you can chat with a reference librarian 24-7 and you can ask questions about how to access material. If you're having problems locating material that you want or any related research questions, you can click on the chat box and you'll be immediately connected with a reference librarian at Fordham. Another great resource on the library homepage is just the ability to search for books and articles or any keywords that you might want to find sources for. We can also search a library catalog, you can search keywords, search by author, search by title, search by subject, etc. And then the Fordham Library homepage also has a list of databases that we have access to as Fordham students. It's by alphabetical order and you can click on each letter to find databases. You can also search databases by subject and you can scroll down if you're specifically looking for law, we can click on that. And it gives us a lot of really, really great resources to search for or databases to use when conducting law-based research. So we can access the Code of Federal Regulations, criminal justice databases, encyclopedias about international law, international economic law, gun regulation, Hein Online Library has a lot of really great resources, including law review articles, Supreme Court cases, we can cite Making of Modern Law, Nexus Uni, ProQuest Legislative Insight, etc. If you're writing about history or economics or anything like that, you can also search by subject for that as well. And each database comes with a little description of the database so you can evaluate if it's going to be useful for your research before you take a look at it. And then the Fordham Library page also has a variety of other resources such as the tutorials, research guides, you can order a book, you can look at the interlibrary loan to find resources that Fordham's library might not provide but other libraries in New York might provide and we can borrow them from other libraries. So the next element to talk about is the best sources to cite to argue for a conclusion in your note. So first, if you're citing or if you're arguing anything about a court opinion, you really should read the entire case, because you really can't get all the information that you need about a case from online summaries or scholarly summaries, although they might be helpful. You really do need to read the whole opinion and cite from the opinion. So one way to get cases is by searching Nexus Uni, and you can just type in the case name that you're looking for and it will come up with the full opinion including any concurring or dissenting opinions in the case. Another way that you can get opinions is by searching for the slip opinion on Google. This really only works for Supreme Court cases. If you type in slip opinion, and you can click on the PDF that comes up and this is the PDF issued by the Supreme Court when the case is decided. You still will need to look at Nexus Uni to find the correct page numbers because the page numbers given on the slip opinion are not the page numbers that we need to cite in our footnotes, but regardless, the slip opinion is helpful. It's a little bit easier to read in terms of the layout of the opinion as opposed to Nexus Uni, and also if you wanted to print out any of the pages, it just looks a little bit neater without all of the citations in it. Another great resource to cite is law review articles, and we can find law review articles on some databases, but Nexus Uni provides us with the biggest selection. In the search bar on Nexus Uni, you can search any key terms that you might be wanting in your sources. I just typed in two phrases that I would want to come up in the law review articles that I might cite, and I used quotations to indicate that I want that whole phrase rather than just one word. If I didn't use one word, it would give me every law review article that said affordable, every law review article that said care, and every law review article that said act. But using these quotations, it just will give me every law review article that says that uses the phrase affordable care act. Using the and connects the two phrases, so the search will only give me law review articles that include both phrases and then severability. If I used or instead of and, it would give me law review articles that included this phrase and law review articles that included this phrase, but it might give me law review articles that include only one or the other. So Nexus Uni automatically filters to news, so we can click on law review journals, and we get 341 law review articles and journals. So not all of the articles that come up will be relevant to your research, but you can go through and read the abstracts or the titles of any of them and see if any of them seem interesting for your research. And you can cite the law review articles directly from Nexus Uni using this citation here. Another helpful resource is peer reviewed scholarly articles on databases. So on the Fordham Library website, we saw that we can search databases by subject or by alphabetical order, but two databases that I really like are JSTOR and HeinOnline. JSTOR we have access to through Fordham, and you can search for, you can search using search terms that using the same method that we did on Nexus Uni by using the quotation marks. So if we want to search for criminal injustice and New York City, using the quotations and the and, it will come up with only journal articles or book chapters that include both phrases. And then we can search. And as always, we can filter our searches based on what type of academic content we wanted. If we just wanted journals, we can search by publication date, filter by subject. And then we can scroll through and see what journal articles that come up might be useful for our research. Similarly, on HeinOnline, we can search by databases by content. We can look at the Pentagon Papers, Oregon Review of International Law, ABA Law Library collection periodicals. You can search using an advanced search using the author, the section title. We can search for case law, using for court opinions, and you can use the same search strategies for on this search bar as we did for JSTOR and Nexus Uni. Books are also a great source to cite. You can cite books that are available in the Fordham Library or if you have any books that you personally own or any books that you found in other libraries. Those are great resources to cite as well. The best online websites to cite are SCOTUSblog, C-SPAN, and OIA. So SCOTUSblog is independent news and analysis of the Supreme Court. And you can access it just on the internet. And you can just type in scotusblog.com and find cases, SCOTUSnews. So this is a recent news article, justices will decide whether to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber. And you can scroll through and read information on the case here. And again, there's a bunch of statistics that you can cite, cases that we can look at, stuff like that. Another great resource to cite is C-SPAN. If you're looking for videos of confirmation hearings, congressional hearings, et cetera, C-SPAN is, again, just available on the internet. And we can go through Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings on reducing gun violence. And we can scroll through and find Senate sessions, oral arguments, et cetera. The last really good online website to cite is OIA. OIA provides a variety of summaries for cases that you might be looking at in the Supreme Court. Again, it's really important that if you're writing about a specific case, that you read the full opinion of that case, rather than just citing OIA's summaries. OIA's summaries are not as extensive as the opinion, obviously, but OIA does give a lot of really great information, such as where the case came from, like what lower court it came from, the citation, when there's a citation available, the petitioner and respondent, and then the facts of the case, the question that the court is considering. And then when we, when the court issues an opinion, it gives the summary of the opinion, as well as what justices voted for and against the majority. Lastly, it's really important to be wary of news articles that you're citing. So news articles include the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, basically any of the news media outlets that you can find information on. And the reason it's important to be wary of news articles is because they don't carry the same weight of credibility as court opinions, law review articles, and scholarly articles. So in general, it's okay to cite news articles when you're talking about public opinion, or giving contextual information, but it's always important to be careful that when you are citing news articles to cite the facts that are given, not the author's analysis of the facts. And sometimes it can be difficult to differentiate the two, but if you can't differentiate the two, you probably shouldn't cite that news article in particular. But overall, there are resources that you can use in place of news articles, such as if you're looking at a news article of a summary of a case, you can use Oye or SCOTUSblog instead. If you're looking at public opinion, you can look at a variety of public opinion databases, including RoperPoll, which we have a tutorial for in another video, which will be linked in the description. You can look at Pew Research databases, Pew Research Studies, etc. So just be wary of when you're citing news articles. So overall, hopefully this was helpful to give you an overview of how to conduct credible research. And if you have any questions, please contact the Fordham Undergraduate Law Review Editorial Board. Thank you.