Primary authority is "authority that issues directly from a law-making body." Authority, Black's Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019). Sources of primary authority include:
Access to primary legal sources is available through:
Statutes (also called legislation) are "laws enacted by legislative bodies", such as Congress and state legislatures. Statute, Black's Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019).
We typically start primary law research here. If there is a controlling statute, cases you look for later will interpret that law. There are two types of statutes, annotated and unannotated.
Annotated codes are a great place to start your research. They combine statutory language with citations to cases, regulations, secondary sources, and other relevant statutes. This can quickly connect you to the most relevant cases related to a particular law. Unannotated Codes provide only the text of the statute without editorial additions. Unannotated codes, however, are more often considered official and used for citation purposes.
For a deep dive on federal and state statutes, visit: Statutes: US and State Code (from Harvard Law School Library)
Want to learn more about the history or legislative intent of a law? Learn how to get started here:
Regulations are rules made by executive departments and agencies. Not every legal question will require you to search regulations. However, many areas of law are affected by regulations. So make sure not to skip this step if they are relevant to your question.
To learn more about working with regulations, visit: Administrative Law Research (Harvard Law School Library)
In many areas, finding relevant caselaw will comprise a significant part of your research. This Is particularly true in legal areas that rely heavily on common law principles.
Running Time: 3 minutes, 10 seconds.
Up to 86% of federal case opinions are unpublished. You must determine whether your jurisdiction will consider these unpublished cases as persuasive authority. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure have an overarching rule, Rule 32.1 Each circuit also has local rules regarding citations to unpublished opinions. You must understand both the Federal Rule and the rule in your jurisdiction.
Each state also has its own local rules which can often be accessed through:
HeadnotesHeadnotes show the key legal points in a case. Legal databases use these headnotes to guide researchers to other cases on the same topic. They also use them to organize concepts explored in cases by subject. Publishers, like LexisNexis, create headnotes, so they are not consistent across databases.
In Nexis, headnotes are listed after the Case Summary. If you want to know more about a specific headnote, click on "Shepardize - Narrow by this headnote" to search for cases related to that headnote.
Start by identifying a relevant topic in a digest. Then you can limit those results to your jurisdiction for more relevant results. Sometimes, you can keyword search within only the results on your topic in your jurisdiction. This is a particularly powerful research method.
You can use good cases you find to locate other cases addressing the same topic. These other cases often apply similar rules to a range of diverse fact patterns. The video below is from Harvard Law Library and references databases Western doesn't have. You can do similar searches in NexisUni (from LexisNexis).