PREFACE

• Jurisdiction: United States

Preface

The purpose of this book is to provide law students, attorneys, and others doing legal research a simple step-by-step guide to the basic hard copy research processes. The book is not designed as a textbook to give an in-depth explanation of the law and its sources. Rather, this guide should be used when the research processes are unfamiliar to the researcher either through inexperience or insecurity.

To underscore the common patterns in print form legal research, as well as to simplify comprehension of each research process, checklists appear throughout the text and are separately indexed to allow the reader instant access to particular procedures. Specific problems illustrate each process, enabling the reader to relate better to each step or to follow the process through by using the problem for actual research. Because legal issues are rarely so straightforward as to involve only one research process, some sample problems are used in more than one chapter to demonstrate the...