A. Textbooks

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 36-42

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The goal of legal research is to find relevant legislation or judicial decisions (i.e., primary legal resources) that apply to the particular legal problem being researched because only legislation or judicial decisions have the power to affect legal rights. However, finding relevant statutes and cases can be a challenge for first-time legal researchers.

Therefore, an effective legal research technique when starting to research a particular problem is to first consult secondary legal resources to gain a broad overview of the topic. Secondary legal resources include such things as textbooks, law journals, seminar papers, encyclopedias, case law digests, Web guides, and other reference tools. Starting with secondary legal research resources has several advantages:

· Secondary legal resources generally provide a good synopsis of the law and provide footnotes or links to relevant legislation or case law.

· They are usually written by experts in their field, allowing the researcher to take advantage of someone else’s work.

· Most materials are relatively current, especially if they are in looseleaf format or online.

· Some secondary legal resources, such as leading textbooks or well-researched law journal articles, are highly persuasive in court.

This chapter provides a brief overview of textbooks, law journals, CLE/seminar papers, legal encyclopedias, case law digests, and general legal reference resources (law dictionaries, legal citation guides, legal

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directories, forms and precedents, court rules, current awareness tools, and Web guides). The emphasis will be on Canadian materials, with discussion of British, American, and Australian materials where relevant, since these are usually the other jurisdictions of most interest to Canadian legal researchers.

Lawyers, judges, academics, and other researchers have written books on most, if not all, legal topics imaginable. If you find a relevant book covering your area of legal research, you will have saved yourself a lot of time by leveraging the research of experts on the topic (the notion of "standing on the shoulders of giants").

You can find law-related textbooks at most courthouse, law society, and law school law libraries. Many law firms also own their own law-related textbooks relevant to their own areas of practice (for information on selecting or acquiring law-related resources, see Chapter 9). Searching for law-related textbooks has been made easy with the advent of the Internet. Catalogues for major law libraries in Canada (and throughout the world) can now be found online (see Table 2.1). Searching these online library catalogues by author, title, subject, or keyword can help...