Each of these terms is used frequently in legal research and writing, and understanding them can greatly assist in navigating legal materials.
American Law Reports (ALR): Series of articles on the approach of courts across different jurisdictions on a specific legal issue.
Annotations: Brief summaries and analyses of legal cases or statutes often found in legal research databases and publications. They help provide context and interpretative insight to primary law.
Case Law Locators: Secondary sources that are specifically designed to help users find case law, or judicial decisions. They can take various forms, such as legal databases (like Westlaw or Lexis), indices (like the Topic and Key Number System), and annotated legal directories. These tools guide users to relevant case law by allowing them to input specific search terms, legal topics, or citation references. They often provide brief summaries or annotations for each case, helping users to determine its relevance without reading the full text of the decision.
Citation Reference: A reference to a legal source in a standard format, helping users locate the source and understand its authority. Examples include case citations, statute citations, and references to law review articles.
Citators: Legal research tools (like Shepard's or KeyCite) used to track the history and subsequent references of a case or statute, helping to determine whether the case or statute is still good law and how it has been interpreted or applied.
Good Law: A legal principle, case, or statute that has not been overruled or repealed and is still in force.
Government Publications: Documents produced by government agencies, including reports, statistics, and analysis.
Law Reviews & Journals: Scholarly periodicals focused on legal issues, often containing both shorter articles and longer, in-depth analyses.
Legal Blogs and Websites: Online platforms that offer informal, timely commentary, updates, and discussions on legal issues.
Legal Databases: Online resources that provide access to a wide array of legal materials, including case law, statutes, regulations, legal journals, and secondary sources. Examples include Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law.
Legal Digests: Indexes of case law, summarizing and categorizing cases by subject matter. They consist of collections of brief summaries (or "digests") of judicial decisions, organized by subject matter. Each summary typically includes key facts, the decision reached, and the reasoning used by the court. Legal Digests help users identify relevant cases by topic, making them a valuable tool when researching a specific issue. Over time, as legal research has become more digitized, many Legal Digests have been integrated into or replaced by online legal databases and case law locators.
Legal Encyclopedias: Comprehensive sets of brief articles that provide a general overview of various legal topics.
Legal Periodicals and Newspapers: Publications that provide updates, commentary, and analyses of recent legal developments.
Legal Treatises: Comprehensive scholarly works that provide in-depth analyses on a specific area of law.
Lineage of a Legal Precedent: The series of cases that have followed, interpreted, distinguished, or overruled a particular legal decision.
Primary Sources: The original sources of the law, such as statutes, regulations, case law, and constitutions.
Practitioner Materials: Practical resources, such as form books, checklists, or how-to guides, that assist lawyers in their practice.
Restatements of the Law: Scholarly summaries of common law rules in areas such as Contracts, Torts, Agency, Trusts, and Property.
Secondary Sources: Materials that discuss, explain, interpret, and analyze what the law is and why it is that way. They don't state the law but provide valuable insights.
Terms of Art: Words or phrases that have a specialized, precise meaning within a particular field or profession, such as law.
