Basic Legal Research: Tools and Strategies (Aspen Coursebook) 7th Edition

Book Preface

The seventh edition of Basic Legal Research: Tools and Strategies is fully updated and contains the following new material:

■ Updated sample pages and screen shots—The annotated examples, screen shots, and sample pages have all been
updated.
■ Updated coverage of online sources—The text covers thelatest releases of Lexis Advance, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law, including Bloomberg Law’s natural language searching, BCite citator, and Points of Law function. It also discusses other services such as Fastcase, Casetext, and govinfo.gov (the successor to the Federal Digital System as the official digital repository of federal documents).
■ Updated coverage of citation—The text has been updated to cover both the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation (6th ed.) and the Bluebook (20th ed.).
■ Coverage that refl both teaching needs and actual practice — Several chapters have been reorganized to better align the text’s coverage with the holdings in most law libraries. Many libraries have significantly reduced their print collections, making online sources the predominant focus of instruction. Chapter 4 (Secondary Source Research), Chapter 5 (Case Research), and Chapter 7 (Statutory Research) have been revised so that professors can skip print materials in classes that emphasize online research. For those who teach print research, the text retains thorough print coverage to give students a strong foundation in print research, as well as the information about print material necessary to understand legal citations. The philosophy and the format of the seventh edition remain the same as those of earlier editions. The genesis of this book was a conversation I had with Todd Petit, a student in my Lawyering Skills class at Catholic University, in the fall of 1994. Todd was working on a research project, and he came to me in frustration and bewilderment over the research