The Bluebook does not provide clear guidance on how to cite every authority that law students or legal practitioners need or wish to use in their papers, memos, and briefs. Sometimes, researchers will toil in vain looking for a particular rule or example to cover a less common type of source, only to find that …
Do you need to search criminal cases from the 1800s? Or find state statutes from 1903? What about an old English treatise on contract law? Tracking down historical legal materials can be difficult, but there are a number of online sources available to aid your research. An impressive number of old legal texts, reporters, and …
The Law Library receives many more new books than just those that appear on the new books shelf near the circulation desk. Here’s how to find a list of those books: Go to the Law Library website at https://library.law.unc.edu. Click on “New Books” underneath the search box. On the next page, select the time period …
Struggling to find a topic for a legal research paper? Not sure where to find potential topics for law journal notes or comments? You might consider giving a circuit split a try! What are circuit splits, anyway? In United States federal courts, a circuit split occurs whenever two or more circuit courts of appeals issue …
It seems like you can’t look at the news lately without reading about executive orders. From reports on each newly signed order to controversy over presidential authority to make the orders and the courts authority to rule on them, executive orders have the public’s attention. All eyes are on the White House as we try …
When researching cases in Lexis Advance, you might have noticed that your search results just got a bit more colorful. Lexis Advance’s new Search Term Maps tool utilizes data visualization to help you browse through search results and also navigate through cases based upon your keyword searches. The Search Term Maps function is currently only …
We are excited today about the release of a significant report on legal strategies for libraries to enable open access to orphan works (copyrighted works for which owners cannot be identified or located), authored by UNC Law Library’s Dave Hansen. For all cultural heritage institutions, including law libraries like ours, orphan works pose a major …
There’s a useful tool now in HeinOnline that helps researchers locate difficult-to-find, older English cases. Because English cases were historically published in scores of “nominate” reporters – few of which are available to American researchers – it is often difficult to find them. To make them more available to practitioners, significant cases decided between 1220 …
Students: Writing a paper for a WE or RWE course? Planning to participate in the joint journal competition after classes end? In your writing you will be citing to scholarly sources as well as primary law. Depending on how robust your footnotes are you may feel overwhelmed with managing all your references. As you probably …
As you might know by now, Bloomberg Law is an excellent source for finding court filings from federal, state, and even some foreign or international courts. By clicking on the “Litigation & Dockets” tab, you can search, update, and track dockets with ease. You’ll also find a link there to “Breaking Complaints,” a unique service …