Accessible legal research tools needed for justice (1910)

As the situation now stands, it is impracticable for the average litigant always to get Justice in the average case, for the lawyer he employs often can not properly investigate all the law, that is the multifarious and conflicting authorities, and prepare his briefs without an expenditure of labor and of time out of all proportion to the real value of the services to the client. Often an astute lawyer, either by reason of his ability, his ingenuity or his good fortune, locates or stumbles across a line of authorities which, while not correct in principle, are sufficiently weighty to impress the trial Judge, and the lawyer on the other side is either not sufficiently learned or sufficiently industrious to get the correct decisions on the other side which conflict with and which, if used in argument, would overcome those presented by his opponent. This results in more mistakes and errors in Trial Courts than should occur, and often, indeed very generally, it is impossible, for financial reasons, for the loser to take an appeal.

Lucien Hugh Alexander, Memorandum in re Corpus Juris, 22 Green Bag 59, 84 (1910)

Weddington Went to the Library

That question was not something I had studied in Constitutional Law or in any other law school class, but I knew what to say: "I do not know, but I will go to the library and look it up." That trip to the library twenty-one years ago began a journey that has never ended and has brought me here today.

Sarah Weddington, Roe v. Wade: Past and Future, 24 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 601, 602 (1990)

Law students should learn legal research

A lawyer's books are more than merely the tools with which he works. They are the field which he must cultivate, the mine which he must explore. Obviously, therefore, it is of the first importance that a lawyer should know how to get at the material stored away in the volume at his hand. The law student cannot learn all the law during the two or three or four years of his legal studies, and it is an important part of his work to learn how to use lawbooks.

Edward Q. Keasbey, Instruction in Finding Cases, 1 Am. L. Sch. Rev. 69, 69 (1906*)

The American Law School Review was published by West Publishing Company 1902-47. Edward Q. Keasbey, of the Newark, N.J. Bar, was chairman of the American Bar Association's Committee on Law Reporting and Digesting.

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*HeinOnline says the volume covered 1902-1906. This article was in vol. 1, no. 3. Since a note on p. iii of the volumes says that vol. 1, no. 2 was issued in Nov. 1906, I'm going with 1906.

Legal research changes, and changes

          Legal research changes, as landforms do, by different processes and at different rates. Some changes are fairly minor, as when the wind creates shifting patterns on the surface of the sand—for instance, when the U.S. Government Printing Office began releasing the 2012 edition of the United States Code, there was little that someone familiar with the 2006 edition needed to learn in order to use it effectively. Other changes require some addition to our knowledge, as when a familiar source becomes available on an online platform; think of a river that carves a new channel while the original channel remains. But when familiar sources cease to exist or totally new platforms are introduced, it sometimes feels as though the legal research landscape has been affected by an earthquake that shifts the ground we stand on or a volcano that creates totally new features. We don’t want to carry this metaphor too far—we believe that many of the changes we see in legal research are salutary, not cataclysmic—but the field is dynamic and the resources used to teach it must also change. 

          The changes in the legal research landscape have been and will continue to be dramatic. Here are a few changes since the prior edition of Fundamentals. Industry giants Westlaw and LexisNexis restructured their search interfaces, creating WestlawNext and Lexis Advance. Bloomberg Law made a strong entrance into the law school market. The Government Printing Office revamped and expanded its website, introducing FDsys. After twenty years of developing the very useful THOMAS, the Library of Congress replaced it with Congress.gov. And, although many researchers won’t be as astonished as we were, the IRS stopped compiling the Cumulative Bulletin. Oh, and Scotland nearly left the United Kingdom, a move that would have changed the research in the law of those nations in multiple ways.

Steven M. Barkan, Barbara A. Bintliff & Mary Whisner, Fundamentals of Legal Research (St. Paul: Foundation Press, 2015), p. vi.