Legal Research Demystified

Book excerpt: Legal Research Demystified offers a real-world approach to legal research. The textbook guides law students through eight steps to research common law issues and ten steps to research statutory issues. These research steps are demonstrated through many hypotheticals and visual aids. Students have praised the textbook for its screen captures, checklists, and descriptive charts, such as charts demonstrating Boolean searching and comparing features of citators. Professors have appreciated that the book educates students on how to do legal research instead of discussing finding tools and resources in a vacuum. The second edition includes multiple updates. The chapters on research plans and secondary sources have been moved to their own section because these initial research steps apply to all legal issues. The chapters on secondary sources, citators, and keyword searching have been revised and expanded. New assessment questions on research tools and concepts have been added to almost every chapter. The revised introductions and additional cross references make it easy to assign the chapters out of order. With the purchase of a new book, students gain free access to the assessment and teaching platform of Core Knowledge for Lawyers. That online platform contains interactive questions and exercises that map to Legal Research Demystified. Almost 200 auto-grading questions from the end of each chapter. Hundreds of interactive questions and explanations that walk students through the steps for researching common law and statutory issues on Westlaw and Lexis+. Instant feedback after each question--similar to Core Grammar and MBIE. Robust instructor dashboard--professors can view individual and class performance.