Speaker 1: Hi, this segment continues your introduction to legal research. In the previous segment, Professor Walensky discussed how you start to think about a legal problem. And in this segment, I'm gonna talk about how the law is collected and where you begin the research process once you understand the resources that are available to you. Recall in the previous segment that one of your tasks was to determine which jurisdiction's law would likely govern the legal problem. And that's critical because all primary sources of the law and many secondary sources of the law are collected by jurisdiction. So remember that each state is its own jurisdiction and the federal government its own jurisdiction. Moving forward to look at the legal resources, they're divided into two groups. The first is primary sources. Primary sources are the law and include things like case law, regulations, statutes, the constitution. Secondary sources discuss the law and they include things like encyclopedias, uniform laws, restatements, some of the things you've likely already seen so far in law school classes. So secondary sources discuss, explain, or analyze what the law is or what it should be. And although they're rarely used in court documents like briefs to the court, they are an incredibly useful and efficient research resource. One of the most common secondary sources are encyclopedias. Legal encyclopedias are a group of short articles on various legal issues arranged alphabetically just like a regular encyclopedia. On screen are two of the most common general encyclopedia and they include the Corpus Juris Secundum or CJS as you'll commonly see it abbreviated and American Jurisprudence or AmJur. In addition to these general encyclopedia, there are state encyclopedia and encyclopedia on specific areas of law. For example, on criminal law. A second common type of secondary source is a treatise. A treatise is just a fancy word for a book and legal treatises are single volumes or multi-volume sets of books on a particular area of the law such as torts or bankruptcy or civil procedure. They are incredibly useful in giving you some background and some context for the legal issue that you are about to research. There's two main access points for these secondary sources. The first is a hard copy version from the library and the second are through the paid services and by that I mean things like Bloomberg, Lexis, Westlaw and several others. The one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at secondary law is that the paid services while great for the general encyclopedias like CJS and AmJur only have about a dozen state encyclopedias and so for those you're going to have to resort back to hard copy. The paid services also only have the most prominent of the treatises. So regardless of whether you access the secondary sources in hard copy or in the paid services however, they're incredibly useful and ten minutes of search in a secondary source could save you a lot of time and effort because again they give you background, they give you context and probably most importantly to you, these secondary sources will also cross reference to the primary sources of the law, to statutes, to case law, to the sources that you'll ultimately need to find to answer your research question. Okay, primary law, your statutes, regulations, constitution, case law, they are the law. For federal statutes, they are collected in the United States Code or the USC. It's a multi-volume collection of federal statutes arranged by subject matter. Each state also has its own collection of statutes with varying titles. So not every state collection has the word code in it and you can see on screen there's some Michigan compiled laws, the Pennsylvania consolidated statutes, etc. To determine the name of a particular collection of state statutes, you can look in the blue book. The blue tipped pages of the blue book have a page or two devoted to every state and it includes information like the name of the state code collection. Please recall are the rules created by executive branch agencies to help them implement statutes. Federal regulations are collected in the Code of Federal Regulations or the CFR. And like the United States Code, it's a multi-volume collection arranged by subject matter. Again, each state will have its own collection of its agency regulations. The names vary and the blue book, again, can tell you the name of each state's collection of regulations. Unlike the secondary law, you have three access points for statutes and regulations. The first, of course, is hard copy, the second is free government websites, and the third are the paid services. Just a moment on the free government websites. FEDCIS that you see here is the federal website that contains a complete copy of the United States Code, a complete copy of the Code of Federal Regulations, as well as other congressional and executive branch documents. Very useful. Most states also maintain a website. Here you see Michigan's website, which is MIGov, and they will also contain things like their statutes and their regulations. The third free source is agency websites. Remember, these are executive branch agencies, and their websites very often contain both the statutes and the regulations that are pertinent to the work the agency does. The next primary law is case law. Case law is collected in reporters. Reporters are a roughly chronological collection of published cases by jurisdiction. And on the federal side, there are three different reporters representing the three different levels of courts. So the US reporter collects Supreme Court cases, while the federal reporter collects all appellate court cases. That's across all 12 appellate courts. And federal supplement reporter collects all federal district court cases that are published. Each state also has one or more state reporters specific to that state. So for example, in Michigan, there's a Michigan Supreme Court reporter, and there's a Michigan appellate court reporter. In addition, state cases that are published are each published also in a regional reporter. So on screen here, you see the Pacific reporter, and that's the reporter that collects cases from a lot of the western states. Access for case law is by two main points. First in hard copy, and second through the paid services, like many of the ones listed here. You'll notice that I haven't listed any free websites for accessing case law. That doesn't mean that there aren't case law available through websites. In fact, a lot of court systems have websites where they publish recently decided cases. However, those court websites don't have search capabilities. So I don't list them because they're not a good resource for searching case law. They could be useful if you're looking for a single case, a recently published case, for example, or a very famous case. But for the most part, they're not a viable research resource. Okay, now that you've figured out where your various sources of law are collected, you have to figure out where to start with your research process. One thing to keep in mind is that each of these sources have cross-references to the other. So for example, if you were starting with an encyclopedia article, which is a secondary source, that encyclopedia article will very likely reference any relevant statutes, any relevant case law, any relevant regulations. On the other hand, if you were to start with a statute, that statute is going to contain cross-references to case law that discuss or analyze the statute, or to regulations that likewise implement the statute or discuss the statute, and to secondary sources. Having said that though, there are still some starting points that are better than others. As a rule, particularly for novice researchers, you can't go wrong starting with a secondary source. As I noted earlier, the secondary source is going to give you a wealth of information, background, context, specific legal terms that you should be aware of, but also cross-references to that very necessary primary law. If, however, you know a statute is involved, or you know that a rule is involved, for example, the rule of civil procedure, I suggest that you start by searching for that statute or that rule, because it's a relatively straightforward process, and once you find the relevant statute or rule, the annotations, those cross-references, are going to give you a lot of pertinent information, including secondary sources, case law, regulations, etc. Now that you know where to start and what the resources are, the next step is going to be figuring out how to efficiently access each of these resources and use them in the most efficient way possible, and that's what we're going to be spending a lot of time on this year.