Skilled legal researchers are accustomed to using state legal encyclopedias to support the research of our students, faculty members, and communities. But what about general encyclopedias devoted to individual U.S states and regions? Roughly half of the U.S. states have free, online state encyclopedias available. Many state encyclopedias originated in the print era. Some were …
Multi-jurisdictional statutory research can present many challenges, including trying to account for variations in terms. It is not always intuitive what words appear in the code books for a jurisdiction. For instance, if you wanted to compare real property recording statutes for a handful of states, you may not find all the pertinent provisions by …
Have you been hearing all the buzz about legal analytics on Westlaw Edge and Lexis Advance? Don’t forget that you also have access to legal analytics platform Lex Machina! Lex Machina , a LexisNexis research tool, provides litigation and business data for legal professionals. The tool harvests data from a variety of resources to enable …
You’ve heard of The Bluebook. You’ve heard of The Redbook. (Probably.) But have you heard of The Indigo Book? If not, you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 ! The Indigo Book is an open system of citation that had its beta-release in 2016. It was created by a group of NYU law students and professor, …
This post is my second in a series about Casetext. If you didn’t get a chance to read my first post, check it out here. In this post, I discuss my experience using Casetext’s Case Analysis Research Assistant (CARA). CARA is an artificial intelligence research tool that examines a brief, complaint, or memo you’ve uploaded and returns …
Calling all law students! Have you heard of the newest legal research database Casetext? If not, listen up! Dedicated to “eliminating inefficiencies in legal research,” Casetext was developed with litigators in mind, but it is intended for use by all types of legal researchers, including law students. This week, I blocked some time out in my …
Whether you are running a preemption check or reviewing legal scholarship to support your own research, HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library is an important resource for accessing legal scholarship published in law journals around the world. In an effort to make the contents of this resource more accessible and customizable for researchers, HeinOnline introduced two new …
Frustrated by receiving an error message when clicking on a link to a document or a website? Sometimes documents have been taken down from websites and website URLs “break.” But, there is a tool you can try that may help you recover the past. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that provides free access …
Federal court records and briefs research can be time-intensive and potentially intimidating for a newer attorney. When a lawsuit drags on for years in federal court, a huge paper trail is created that can make effective research in dockets even more complicated. For law students, dockets can also be intimidating because of the variety of …
UNC School of Law offers a course in the spring semester titled “Land Use Control” (Law 290) that covers the “authority for and basic structure of land use regulations (including zoning districts and permits, subdivision, and innovative development review schemes).” Students interested in real property and commercial transactions have found the course to be particularly …