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Description

This open source textbook authored by Amy Taylor was designed to provide University of Georgia School of Law students with a comprehensive guide to Georgia legal research. Using this text in combination with appropriate assignments, student objectives include the ability to select, evaluate, and use appropriate legal research tools with an emphasis on cost-effective research and proficiency in the following topics:

  • Developing an efficient and cost effective research strategy
  • Advanced searching skills in legal research databases
  • Case law, including docket research, court rules, and verdicts & settlements
  • Statutory law, including legislative materials and legislative history
  • Administrative regulations, rules, and related materials
  • Practice materials, including litigation and transactional tools
  • Competitive Intelligence & business information
  • Local & municipal law
  • Legal ethics
  • Free and low cost internet legal resources

Attorneys use primary and secondary sources to research the law as it applies to a client’s legal situation in order to give accurate legal advice. A careful legal researcher asks critical questions of these sources and acknowledges the potential strengths and weaknesses of a client’s legal situation before giving legal advice.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1. Research Plan & Searching Strategies 5

  • Importance of the Research Plan 5
  • Metacognition and the Research Process 5
  • Beginning the Research Plan: The Research Interview 7
  • Problem Typing 8
  • Research Plan Categories 9
  • Problems Encountered while Researching 9
  • Research Log 12
  • Searching Basics 13
  • Precision and Recall 13
  • Generating Search Terms 14
  • Natural Language Searching 15
  • Example 15
  • Advanced Searching 16
  • Example (cont.) 19

2. Secondary Sources 21

  • The What 21
  • The Why 21
  • The When 22
  • The How 23

3. Case Law Research 24

  • Introduction 24
  • Georgia Court System 24
  • Finding Cases 25
  • Selecting Cases 26
  • Updating Cases 26
  • Advanced Case Searching 26
  • Advanced Case Selection 27

4. Statutory Law Research 28

  • Creation of Statutes 28
  • Finding Statutes 28
  • Reading & Interpreting Statutes 30

5. Administrative Law Research 32

  • Georgia Rulemaking 32
  • Georgia Regulations 32
  • Georgia Administrative Opinions & Guidance 32

6. Legislative and Regulatory History Research 33

7. Transactional Research 34

8. Free and Low-Cost Legal Research; Ethics Research 35

9. Litigation Research 37

10. Competitive Intelligence and Business Research 38

11. Municipal Law Research 39

Publication Date

1-15-2021

Publisher

Pressbooks.com

City

Athens, GA

Keywords

legal research, Georgia, open source, open educational resources

Disciplines

Law Librarianship | Legal Education | Legal Writing and Research | Library and Information Science | State and Local Government Law

Comments

Georgia Legal Research by Amy Taylor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Georgia Legal Research

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