Posts

Posted on

Evaluating Authority

Principle I:  A Successful Legal Researcher Posses Foundational Knowledge of the Legal System and Legal Information Sources, including Analytical Tools
Standard A.  An information-literate professional considers the full range of potential sources of information, regardless of type or format.
Competencies
3.  Recognizes the differences in the weight of authority among sources and applies that knowledge to the legal research problem.

***************************************************
Click the link below to see the results of the exercise.  The results are color-coded for: most picked, second most picked, and third most picked.

Have your exercise in hand as you look at the results so that you can see how you ranked the resources for their weight of authority.

The instructions for this exercise were:
Please rank the resources based on their relative authority and explain your reasoning.  (Note: You are not ranking them based on when you would use them in research but rather on their strength as a resource.)

Evaluating Authority Exercise

Remember you are ranking the authority of the sources. The highest being one and the lowest being thirteen.

Of course, the rankings would also depend upon the content of the resource.  If the content was not on-point, it would not matter how highly respected the resource.

Some examples:

Wikipedia would have a low ranking as an authoritative source and the Federal Reporter or Florida Law Weekly would have a high ranking as an authoritative source.

American Jurisprudence 2d and Florida Jurisprudence 2d are great to use in the research process for background on an issue but both would have a low ranking as an authoritative source.

Some treatises rank high and some rank low.  For example, Dan T. Coenen’s Constitutional Law: The Commerce Clause would rank low.  It is a study aid. However,  Rotunda and Nowak’s Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance and Procedure would rank high since it authored by two highly respected scholars.  The title Bittker on the Regulation of Interstate and Foreign Commerce would have a high ranking because Bittker was a highly respected scholar even though Denning is now the person updating and revising.

The “ranking” of the law school publishing the law review, the scholarly reputation of the author, and the content all are a part of the determination of the ranking for a law review article.

Here is a link to the Evaluating Authority recording, if you would like to listen again.

If you would like to have a discussion and dig deeper, please let me know.

Posted on

Secondary Sources

Principle I:  A Successful Legal Researcher Posses Foundational Knowledge of the Legal System and Legal Information Sources, including Analytical Tools
Standard A.  An information-literate professional considers the full range of potential sources of information, regardless of type or format.
Competencies
1.  Differentiates between primary and secondary sources and recognizes how their use and importance vary depending upon the legal problem or issue.
2.  Identifies and uses the most effective secondary sources to obtain background information, to gain familiarity with terms of art, and to put primary materials in context.
3.  Recognizes the differences in the weight of authority among sources and applies that knowledge to the legal research problem.

***************************************************

You have been introduced or reintroduced to many secondary sources. 

You will be using all of these sources throughout your career and some of them in the Final Research Project. Be sure that you have thought about when you would want to use each source in a research project.

Note that Competencies 3 “Recognizes the differences in the weight of authority among sources and applies that knowledge to the legal research problem” was addressed in the Evaluating Authority Exercise.

Sources:
Legal Encyclopedias
American Law Reports
Treatises
Periodicals (recording and discussion forum)
Practice Guides (you will be further introduced in Module 6)
Restatements of Law
Uniform Laws and Model Acts (are secondary sources are not  primary sources since the uniform law and model acts are proposals to the legislators in the 50 states)

Citators:
Remember you can KeyCite or Shephardize many secondary sources to find cases, other secondary sources, etc. that have cited that secondary source.  KeyCite and Shepard’s are not for cases only!