Researching legal materials tends to scare people. However, the same principles apply to legal research that you would use to help patrons in any other area. Paul Callister, Law Reference Librarian & Assistant Professor in the law library at the University of Illinois, made the following statement about library research:

Fundamentally, library and information science is about communication. Nowhere is that more true in understanding the nature of a research problem (which will ultimately define the extent of your research). As Ed Harris demanded as flight director Gene Krantz in the movie Apollo 13, "work the problem." Before you even walk into the library, you need to work the problem and make sure you know everything there is to know about it. Make sure you know going in what the expectations of senior partners, professors, clients are in researching the issue. Do they want the quick answer? Or in depth research? What are the narrow "researchable" issues involved? What form should research results take place? What are the economic limitations on doing the research (for instance can online resources be used)? How soon do they want you to report back on how things are going? Do they have specific resources in mind? What are the risks involved in the issue (is this for a case on appeal or a traffic violation)?

Consequently, my own view that the extent of legal research is not so much of satisfying some golden checklist (consisting of every possible resource and technique), but of understand the problem itself. (For more information, email Callister at callistr@law.uiuc.edu or go to his website at http://www.law.uiuc.edu/callistr/)

In order to research legal issues you should start with the basics. Just as with any other field, start with the dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias. Look for articles with an index. By the time you have done this, you will already know the terms you need to use, some of the major cases, statutes, and administrative regulations on your topic. You will already be on top of the situation. Then you can move on to finding cases, statutes, and administrative regulations.

Take a look at the following two tutorials. These tutorials will explain to you how the legal system works, and what types of materials are produced.

The Cornell Law Library has produced a nice overview at
http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawlibrary/Finding_the_Law/Where_to_Start/tutorial/, and the

University of North Carolina also has a very nice tutorial at http://library.law.unc.edu/tutorial/intro.htm.

Shepards Citations is an important resource. This is a citation index, similar to the Science Citation Index. The point of Shepards is to allow you to take a known case and find out what other cases have been citing it. Shepards also includes law review articles, so this is a very good resource for your research.

A very important part of legal research is the West Digest System. Produced by the West Group, the largest publisher of legal material in the U.S., the digests are similar to the way that the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress Classification System work. This is a system for classifying law topics in order to find cases.

The Digest tutorial is found at http://www.west.thomson.com/documentation/westlaw/wlawdoc/lawstu/lsdig02.pdf

The Shepards tutorial (in .pdf format) is found at http://www.lexisnexis.com/shepards/printsupport/shepardize_print.pdf. This is a lot of material, so you may wish to just skim it.