Legal Research

Basics of Legal Research   Locating the Court   Hiring an Attorney for a Specific Task
Law Libraries   Online Resources
Publishers of Law Books

Basics of Legal Research

Statutes are laws which are enacted by a legislature, be it Congress or state legislatures. When a law is initially enacted, it is published as a slip law. Usually slip laws are published on a "slip" of paper or in a pamphlet. At the federal level, these slip laws are assigned a public law number. While at the state level, the slip laws are given a chapter number. During or at the end of a legislative session, slip laws are collected and published in order of enactment as "session laws". Each Congress lasts two years and is divided into two sessions. The Statutes at Large is the official U.S. government compilation of federal session laws. New York State's are chronologically published in volumes entitled Session Laws. Session laws are useful for finding the language of a statute as it was passed in a certain year. It may be necessary to refer to a session law when the law was not enacted into the U.S. Code or Laws of New York. However, when the law has been enacted into the United State Code ("U.S.C.") or the Laws of the State of New York, one must begin with those and will probably not have any need of seeing the session laws unless particular wording in the statute needs to be researched.

When session laws are enacted into the U.S.C. or the laws of the State of New York, they are arranged by subject matter. The U.S.C. is published online at the website of the U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Law Revision Counsel. It is also available on the website of Cornell University. The laws of the State of New York are published online at the website of the New York State Legislature.

These online government publications differ from those published by legal publishers, in that they do not contain any notes or annotations. Annotated codes are very useful because they describe a statute's history, list and describe cases that interpret a statute, provide citations to relevant regulations, and also provide references to other sources, such as American Law Report annotations, treatises, law reviews, etc. Usually this material appears immediately after the text of the statute. By using an annotated official code rather than a non-annotated official publication, one finds a wealth of information interpreting that statute, simply by retrieving a relevant section. These codes are also kept up to date with pocket parts or supplements. Along with their pocket parts or supplements, they state the current language of the law.

Below is information on court law libraries and law school libraries, where one may be able to access the annotated codes for free. There are two commercially published, annotated versions of the United States Code: the United States Code Service (USCS), and United States Code Annotated (USCA). McKinney's Consolidated Laws of New York contains the laws of New York in sixty-four annotated volumes, and McKinney's forms contain sample forms in all areas of the law. New York Jurisprudence 2nd, an encyclopedia of New York law, is a good general reference providing an overview of a wide variety of New York legal topics, including analysis of relevant statutes and leading cases. Almost all the libraries also have online databases, like Westlaw and Fastcase. The libraries have websites, so search or call the library to find out what they contain. Additionally, all of these publications and databases can be read about online, and often single volumes (i.e., the volume pertaining to the relevant area of law) can be purchased alone, which may be more feasible than going to a library.

Remember, the legislature writes and enacts the laws, but the courts interpret and apply those laws to specific factual situations before them ("cases"). Thus, one needs to know which courts to look for decisions from. Begin with knowing the structure of the federal courts and the structure of the New York State courts. If one is dealing with a federal legal issue, determine which district and circuit the case would be brought in. The decisions of those courts, along with the U.S. Supreme Court, would be precedent. If one is dealing with a state legal issue, determine which county, district and appellate division the case would be brought in. The decisions of those courts, along with the N.Y. Court of Appeals, would be precedent.

What is "precedent"? It is a court decision that may be cited as an example or analogy to resolve similar questions of law in later cases in the particular jurisdiction. The Anglo-American common-law tradition is built on the doctrine of Stare Decisis ("stand by decided matters"), which directs a court to look to past decisions for guidance on how to decide a case before it. This means that the legal rules applied to a prior case with facts similar to those of the case now before a court should be applied to resolve the legal dispute. Precedent provides predictability, stability, fairness, and efficiency in the law. Reliance upon precedent contributes predictability to the law because it provides notice of what a person's rights and obligations are in particular circumstances. A person contemplating an action has the ability to know beforehand the legal outcome.

Decisions from other jurisdictions may be "persuasive," in that they may be cited to try and persuade the court to adopt the reasoning of the other jurisdiction, but they are not binding on the court.

The annotations are arranged based on issue decided. Within those divisions, one looks for annotations pertaining to relevant courts. Those annotations provide the "holding" or "ruling" on a specific issue.

Note that the annotation is just a brief summary of a holding in the case, and does not inform one of all of the issues and relevant facts that the court had before it. In order to do a proper I.R.A.C., described below, one has to read whole decisions in order to properly compare them to the situation at hand. Whole decisions are published in "reports" or "reporters" in chronological order from date of issuance by a court. Official law reports or reporters are those authorized for publication by statute or other governmental ruling. Governments designate law reports as official in order to provide an authoritative, consistent, and authentic statement of a jurisdiction's primary law. Official case law publishing may be carried out by a government agency, or by a commercial entity. Decisions within official reports or reporters may be cited and quoted. These official publications do not contain all the decisions issued by courts; they are selective, publishing only noteworthy decisions. Unofficial law reports, on the other hand, are not officially sanctioned and are published as a commercial enterprise. Unofficially published court opinions are also often published before the official opinions, so lawyers and law journals must cite the unofficial report until the case comes out in the official report. But once a court opinion is officially published, case citation rules usually require a person to cite to the official reports.

United States Supreme Court decisions are published in three print reporters: the United States Reports, cited as "U.S."; the Supreme Court Reporter, cited as "S. Ct."; and the United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers’ Edition, cited as "L. Ed." and "L. Ed. 2d”. The Supreme Court also places recent decisions, as well as bound volumes of the United States Reports back to volume 502 (October 1991 term), on its website. Opinions issued by the federal circuit courts of appeal (the intermediate level of appeal in the federal system) are published in the Federal Reporter, the first, second, and third series of which are cited as "F.," "F.2d," and "F.3d," respectively. Occasionally, opinions issued by federal district courts (the trial court level in the federal system) are published in a reporter known as the Federal Supplement, the first and second series of which arecited as “F. Supp.,” and “F. Supp. 2d”. Appellate decisions of state courts are often published in official state reporters, as well as the following regional reporters published by West Publishing Co.: Atlantic Reporter (A. & A.2d); North Western Reporter (N.W. & N.W.2d); North Eastern Reporter(N.E. & N.E.2d); Pacific Reporter (P., P.2d, & P.3d); Southern Reporter (So., So.2d, & So.3d); South Eastern Reporter (S.E. & S.E.2d); and South Western Reporter (S.W., S.W.2d, & S.W.3d). The North Eastern Reporter contains decisions from New York appellate courts.

The decisions of the New York State Court of Appeals are published in the New York Reports. (The New York Reports were begun in 1847, the year that the Court of Appeals first convened. Prior to that time, the Official Reports of predecessor courts of last resort were named after their Reporters, such as Johnson, Wendell and Hill.) The decisions of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court are published in the Appellate Division Reports. (The Appellate Division Reports were begun in 1896, which is the date that the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court was created.) Appellate Term and trial court opinions are selectively published in the Miscellaneous Reports. (The Miscellaneous Reports were begun in 1893. The Appellate Terms are the lower appellate courts in the First and Second Departments, and decide civil appeals and criminal appeals from the Civil Court and Criminal Court of the City of New York, District Courts of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, City Courts and Town and Village Justice Courts. The trial courts include the Supreme Court, Court of Claims, Family Court, Surrogate's Court, County Courts, City Courts, Civil Court of the City of New York, Criminal Court of the City of New York, District Courts of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, and Town and Village Justice Courts.)

To research cases or issues online, one can use a case name, a statute number, and/or any other keyword applicable to the matter. Google Scholar has published online a substantial number of cases from all fifty states and the federal courts. One can click for "case law" and then narrow the search to particular courts. Google Scholar also provides a service that is analogous to the Shepardizing system. Click on "How cited" to find out cases that mention the current one.

The Caselaw Access Project, a partnership between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and the legal research company Ravel Law, has published 360 years of caselaw online. That's 6.4 million cases dating back to 1658. It's the most comprehensive database of its kind outside of the Library of Congress. The collection includes nearly all cases from an American court—including territorial courts—between the 1658 Maryland case William Stone against William Boreman and June 30, 2018. The collection may or may not be added to in the future. The Caselaw Access Project says that it does not include “cases not designated as officially published, such as most lower court decisions; non-published trial documents such as party filings, orders, and exhibits; parallel versions of cases from regional reporters, unless those cases were designated by a court as official; [and] cases officially published in digital form, such as recent cases from Illinois and Arkansas.” Users may access the data two ways: through an API and as a bulk download. The API, or application program interface, is a conduit between the database and a user creating remote access to the entire database. The database information is free to the public, though per a deal with Ravel, no one can access more than 500 full-text cases a day. The data can be retrieved in HTML or XML formats. The website also provides tools that help a user make a free caselaw textbook; a word cloud visualization from cases issued between 1852 and 2015; a limerick generator; and Historical Trends, a tool that graphs the frequency of words and phrases through time.

Then there is Courtlistener, a website at which one can search millions of opinions (court decisions) by case name, topic, or citation. This database was created and is maintained by the Free Law Project, a California-based non-profit. The project posted every free written opinion and order available on PACER, the federal courts’ document portal. In total, this new collection contains 3.4 million documents from 1.5 million federal district and bankruptcy cases dating back to 1960. The Free Law Project previously set up the database RECAP which boosts 20 million documents downloaded from the PACER system.

If one simply wants to read or print out a specific New York State court decision, that was officially published, by name or citation, one can do so at the New York Official Reports Service. This service also allows a search by "word".

Each federal court, and the appellate New York State courts, have websites that post their decisions. Thus, if you know the court one's case is to be filed in, one can review decisions of the specific court.

Going to the clerk's office of a specific court can help in many ways. Most cases are public record, and many have been scanned into an electronic database at that court, such as with a IQS System. Going through the file of a case, whether in paper or electronic form, allows one to see the papers that were filed. Those papers may help one draft one's own. In federal cases, these papers can also be searched online, currently at a cost.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information online from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts, and the PACER Case Locator. PACER is provided by the Federal Judiciary in keeping with its commitment to providing public access to court information via a centralized service. H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018 would prohibit the federal courts from charging for public documents. The Act would require that documents downloaded from the PACER database be free. Currently, the repository for federal court documents charges up to 10 cents a page, with a maximum of $3.00 per document. The Act would also require that documents be posted to PACER within five days of being filed in federal court, in a digital format that allows for easy searching and linking from external websites. The digitization should “minimize the burden on pro se litigants,” the bill states.

Legal analysis follows this basic format, known as "I.R.A.C.": I - Issue, what is the issue? (A case may have many issues, but they need to be analyzed one by one.) State the facts that bring up the issue. R - Rule, what is the rule? This requires citation to the actual law and quoting of the applicable sections. On the Home page of this website, different types of court proceedings are listed. If present, click on "Sample Decisions" that may help one in addressing specific issues. A - Application, how does the rule apply to one's case? How are the facts similar to those in precedent? How do they differ? Is this a factual situation that has not arisen before, and therefore the holdings from other jurisdictions should be included? C - Conclusion, what should the court conclude based on this analysis?

Visit the court and see how trials are performed, and motions and appeals argued. Almost all proceedings are open to the public.

 

Locating the Court

New York State Courts

Guide to City, Town, and Village Small Claims Courts.

New York City Courts

Courts Outside New York City.
Each county has a County Court, a Surrogate's Court, and a Family Court. Counties differ on whether their judges are elected to all three benches, or just one.
Each county also has a Supreme Court, but may not have a judge that sits in that county. The judges are elected district-wide, with each district covering several counties.

Court of Claims: is the exclusive forum for civil litigation seeking damages against the State of New York or certain other State-related entities such as the New York State Thruway Authority, the City University of New York, the Olympic Regional Development Authority, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute Corporation and the New York State Power Authority (claims for the appropriation of real property only).

Federal district courts in New York:
Northern (courts located in Albany, Binghamton, Plattsburgh, Syracuse, and Utica) covering the counties of Albany, Broome, Cayuga, Chenango, Clinton, Columbia, Cortland, Delaware, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Greene, Hamilton, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Montgomery, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego, Otsego, Rensselaer, Saint Lawrence, Saratoga, Schenectady, Schoharie, Tioga, Tompkins, Ulster, Warren and Washington;
Southern (courts located in Manhattan and White Plains) covering the counties of Bronx, Dutchess, New York, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan and Westchester;
Eastern (courts located in Brooklyn and Central Islip) covering the counties of Kings, Nassau, Queens, Richmond, and Suffolk and concurrently with the Southern District, the waters within the counties of Bronx and New York; and
Western (courts located in Buffalo and Rochester) covering the counties of Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Niagara, Ontario, Orleans, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Wayne, Wyoming and Yates.

Bankruptcy courts within these districts: Northern; Southern; Eastern; and Western.

All of New York State is within the jurisdiction of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, of course, the United States Supreme Court.

Comparing federal and state courts.
Types of cases heard in federal court

 

Hiring an Attorney for a Specific Task

As the reader is undoubtedly aware, criminal defendants who cannot afford an attorney have a consitutional right to counsel, and once a defendant fills out an application with his financial information, the criminal court will review it and appoint an attorney (aka a lawyer). However, there is no such right in most civil matters. The civil matter would have to involve the potential loss of a consitutional right, such as the right to custody of one's child(ren) in a custody, separation, or divorce proceeding; or the right to liberty in a willful failure to pay child support (incarceration is a possible result), before a person could make an application for free counsel (aka assigned counsel), that is, an attorney paid for by the government. Combined with legal aid agencies having a limited number of areas of law which they cover, and their assistance generally being limited to low income persons, a wide swath of the population has had no access to free legal representation even though they have no room in their budgets to pay for an attorney. This has not gone unnoticed by those working in the legal field. The New York State Unified Court system put up forms, instructions, and do-it-yourself programs on its website. Many attorneys have provided pro bono and/or low-cost representation. And New York has moved away from disallowing, or at least discouraging, limited representation in litigation matters, to explicitly allowing it under Rule 1.2.

Rule 1.2(c) of the New York State Model Rules of Professional Conduct allows "[a] lawyer [to] limit the scope of the representation if the limitation is reasonable under the circumstances, the client gives informed consent and where necessary notice is provided to the tribunal and/or opposing counsel." This type of assistance from an attorney is commonly named "unbundled legal services," and may also be referred to as "limited assistance," "discrete task representation," and "segmentation." No matter which term is used, it is a practice in which the lawyer and the client agree that the lawyer will provide some, but not all, of the work involved in traditional full service representation. The attorney performs only the agreed upon tasks, rather than the whole “bundle,” and the client performs the remaining tasks on his/her own. Unbundled services can take countless forms, including providing advice and information, “coaching,” drafting court papers, and making limited court appearances. For example, a person can hire an attorney to draft the Complaint in an action, particularly in an area of law where failure to plead each and every element of a cause of action will result in a dismissal of the Complaint. Or perhaps the judge has requested a Memorandum of Law from each of the parties, and it would be worth the expense to hire an attorney instead of doing the legal research required for that Memo. Of course, one has to find an attorney who agrees to provide such limited scope representation.

Some factors an attorney may consider before agreeing to limited scope representation: How sophisticated is the client? Does he/she communicate well? Have the ability to understand the issues? Capable of doing the remaining work? Is the matter clear cut? Are there secondary issues? Is the client fully informed? Is this unbundling of services in the client's best interest? No matter what, the attorney must advise the client of the need for further assistance of counsel, when warranted.

 

Law Libraries

As stated on the NYS Unified Court System website: "State Law provides that each county have a court law library with access to the general public. The majority of these libraries have case law, statutes and secondary source materials with regard to New York State law. Several have additional information. Materials are provided in print as well as online formats. Symphony, the court system's Library and Information Network, contains the online catalogs of the libraries' various collections." Search the directory of court law libaries open to the public.

Law libraries are also found in law schools. Check with any one of them to see if they are open to the public.

Albany Law School, Albany, NY
Brooklyn Law School, Brooklyn, NY
CUNY School of Law, Flushing, NY
Columbia School of Law, New York, NY
Cornell Law School, Ithaca, NY
Fordham University School of Law, NewYork, NY
Hofstra University School of Law, Hempstead, NY
New York University School of Law, New York, NY
Pace University School of Law, White Plains, NY
Saint John's University School of Law, Queens, NY
State University of New York at Buffalo, NY
Syracuse University School of Law, Syracuse, NY
Touro College Law Center, Central Islip, NY
Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York, NY
New York Law School, New York, NY

Check also with the local court to see whether it has a law library open to the public and, if so, what it contains.

The Federal Depository Library Program (44 U.S.C. § 19), administered by the U.S. Government Publishing Office, was established by Congress in 1813 to ensure that the American public has access to Government information in depository libraries throughout the U.S. and its territories. Members of Congress may designate up to two qualified libraries. Anyone can visit and use free of charge the collections at any of our Nation’s 1,150 Federal depository libraries.
 
American Association of Law Libraries

 

Online Resources

Law Library of Congress
Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (US Supreme Court website)
Opinions of the United States Court (BYU Law website)
Federal Statutes (Library of Congress website)
Federal Statutes at Large (BYU Law website)
Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) Allows users to examine how words from the Constitution were used from 1750 to 1799 (BYU Law website)
The Hammurabi Project: Codifying U.S. law in machine-executable form
U.S. Government Information
 
The Constitution of the State of New York (NYS Department of State website)
Laws of New York (NYS Legislature website)
New York Codes, Rules and Regulations (unofficial)
New York State Official Reports
 
The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale University)

 

Publishers of Law Books

Thomson Reuters: Publisher of Black's Law Dictionary, McKinney's New York Civil Practice Law and Rules, New York Practice (Pactitioner Treatise Series), New York Trial Objections, to just name a few.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL): publisher of criminal defense trial guides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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