“Primary Sources of Law” from Locating the Law: A Handbook for Non-Law Librarians by SCALL is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
Law review articles and journals are very helpful secondary sources which analyze and critique legal topics and also point to primary sources. Law review journals are typically edited by law students, and contain articles written by professors, attorneys, and law students. Many law reviews focus on new and emerging areas of law.
Law review articles can be accessed through the following links:
Persons new to legal research will likely, at some point, hear or encounter references to Shepard's or Shepardize. Here is a definition from Dictionary.USLegal.com
Shepardize is a legal research method of locating reports of appeals decisions based on prior precedents from Shepard's Citations, books which list the volume and page number of published reports of every appeals court decision which cites a previously decided case or a statute. Shepard's volumes are organized by:
* State and Regional citators
* Federal citators
* Specialized practice area citators
* Other citator products including Shepard’s Acts and Cases by Popular Names
These volumes are updated every month with supplemental booklets. Shepard's Citations are used to find appeals decisions which either follow, distinguish or deviate from prior case law. Shepard's Citations are also available for online legal research.
Here are a few Shepard resources available at the Sycamore Library:
Shepard's acts and cases by popular names, federal and state
Nexis Uni provides a Shepardize tool for statutes, regulations and cases
