Legal Research - Is There One Right Way?

Over at the Wall Street Journal's always-entertaining Law Blog, a lively discussion has broken out in response to a post describing Pillsbury Winthrop’s Summer Associate Research Challenge, and many of the comments resurrect the old print-versus-online debate.

We Zief Library reference librarians don’t come down on one "side" or another of this hoary question, and we often feel that print-versus-online is in fact a false dichotomy or at least an over-simplification. While there are indeed reasons to choose print over online, or vice versa (some having to do with cost and time, and some having to do with unique properties of online databases or of paper [see note]), there are other, equally important choices to be made in crafting an efficient research strategy.

Two of the central choices are —

• Do you start at primary sources — the cases, statutes, regulations — or do you begin with a treatise, practice guide, article, etc.?

  In this instance we do tend to take sides, strongly favoring starting with the "secondary" source in which some expert (one hopes!) offers an analysis of the area of law and its central issues, along with citations to major cases and statutes. Usually this strategy will save you a lot of time, and reduce your chances of missing some important aspect of the problem. And to the extent that secondary sources are available online, this ceases to be an computer-versus-books decision.

• Do you run a key word search (even then there's the choice of terms and connectors or natural language) or do you take advantage of some preexisting organizing system — a table of contents, an outline (the foremost example being West's Key Number digest system) or an alphabetical index — created by humans to try to impose some order on the information on your topic.

  Here there's no right answer. The best strategy will depend on your issue, the area of law you are in, the amount of time you have, your access to online research tools. And once again, though key word searching of course requires a computer, you can often use tables of contents, indexes, and outlines both online and in the books.

[Note: For a sophisticated discussion of the unique properties of paper and the persistence of paper tools even in high-tech settings, take a look at The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. USF researchers can check out a copy from Gleeson Library. It's on their shelves at HF 5521 .S43 2002.]