 This is my plan. We're going to take a quick tour through each branch of government and the law that each one creates. We'll walk through a sample hypothetical research question with a library patron, a hypothetical library patron we're calling Courtney. And we'll see how secondary sources like encyclopedias and articles can help her and other patrons better understand the primary law that they're finding. And we're tackling a really huge topic pretty fast. So I will try to leave time to take questions. I didn't get a chance to do that the first time. So I'm hoping this do over will solve that. That's my goal. So last time I spent probably a little too much time on the concerns that we have as reference or library staff about drawing the line between legal reference and legal advice. And if you're here today then you probably already know that it can be tricky to navigate with library users who are stressed out by a personal legal problem and sometimes just want someone who will just listen and validate their situation. Sometimes they want someone to basically provide them with way more legal help than is appropriate for a staff member to do. So I definitely recommend having a consistent policy that manages those expectations up front. You know, there's a big difference between someone who comes up and says I'd like to read the U.S. Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage that was issued versus I want to sue my deadbeat ex for child support and I need to know how to do that. So it's good to have a consistent policy and some boilerplate language. You're welcome to model after Duke's here. This is very standard about the distinction between providing legal reference and research help getting people set up working on a problem versus interpreting the materials for them or explaining how the law applies to their particular situation. It might also help to have some referral information handy about free or low cost services in your area for legal help. Many people are not aware of these services and may be able to get some help. Legal aid has very strict income requirements so not a lot of people will qualify for that. However, there are also low cost consultation services through state bar associations which you can find through this find legal help.org to give you one example in North Carolina their bar association referral program is $50 for a 30-minute consultation which obviously is not free but it's a little bit better if someone really truly just needs an attorney and some serious legal advice. You could also have some referrals to law school or area law libraries. We have the same sort of limitations on ability to give advice as you would but we might have more specialized resources that could help get people up and running with their own research. That's usually where I would recommend that people begin those sorts of research problems by getting context and background from secondary sources of law and we'll get to that in the second half but I think this time I'm flipping it a little bit from 2013 and we'll start with an overview of the primary law that secondary sources will help you understand. So primary sources of law are the actual government pronouncements with shape the law. So when we say something is the law it's the law to pick up after your dog or it's against the law to smoke on an airplane. That's because there's some government entity which has issued a pronouncement that says that is so. And so that is an example of primary law. This illustration from kids.gov which incidentally you can buy as a poster for your library if you deal with this stuff a lot. It's a nice illustration of the system for the federal government state systems are basically pretty similar. Some of the terminology changes states have governors and not presidents for example you get the idea. In both state and federal systems the primary source of law is of course the federal or that state's constitution which will outline the structure and functions of those branches of government. And this image really reinforces what most of us probably learned in school from civics class that the legislative branch makes the law, the executive branch enforces the law, the judicial branch interprets the law. But the truth is all of these branches make law in that they have the power to issue these primary law pronouncements. So we'll go through them one by one and then put it all together with our hypothetical example at the end. So first the legislative branch. The law that they make comes in the form of statutes which people interchangeably call laws hence the confusion that they're the only branch that makes law which is not true. And they're most typically accessed in a code which is a subject based arrangement of the current laws enforced. So in the interest of time I am going to start from the point at which a law has been signed into effect. So if you need a refresher on the legislative process of course there's always I'm just a bill from school house rock very classic explanation. For a more academic treatment Duke has a federal legislative history research guide. Many other law libraries will have similar guides as well for federal or state legislative research. And there's also been some great ncla help webinars since the last time that we did a legal research basics and I think there are more coming down the pike so that's exciting. So again we're jumping ahead to a bill that's already been enacted signed into law and it's official it is a law. So there are two ways that a researcher might access enacted legislation. So one is through session laws or a chronological compilation of the laws as they were originally enacted by the legislature. So you'd most likely look at these for either a historical research purpose or for very recent laws that are too new to be in the subject based code yet. If you're looking for current laws and force you're better off consulting that code for your jurisdiction since the code will provide you with an updated subject arranged roughly compilation of the current laws and force and then amended laws get updated repealed laws get removed. So here are some examples to illustrate when you would use one versus the other. If you have a patron perhaps or if you wanted to see the civil rights act as it was passed in 1964 so the civil rights act of 64 landmark federal legislation you would most likely want to look at the session law version as you would find it in U.S. statutes at large because that's not going to show you any changes that came afterward it's going to show you exactly what Congress passed in 1964. On the other hand if you have a patron who's researching federal discrimination law or federal employment discrimination situation and they want to read the current equal employment statutes and force then you'd want to show them the latest addition of the U.S. code since that will incorporate any later amendments to perhaps pieces of the code that were enacted by the civil rights act of 1964. And similarly for state legal research if you have somebody that's looking for something at the state level then the state code would be the best. So session laws more for historical purposes give you a glimpse of it frozen in time no changes incorporated versus the code that will be up to date arranged by subject and we'll show you the current laws in force. There are potentially hundreds of new session laws passed every year in a jurisdiction and there are thousands of code pages in force. I think the U.S. code is up around 50,000 pages at this point. So how do you find relevant statutes on a topic? A couple of ways. The online versions of codes can be keyword searched although I should caution you it can be tricky to construct a search that captures the exact wording that the legislature might have used. Print codes and some of the online versions of codes also have subject or keyword indexes which can be useful. If your law has a short title or a popular name like the civil rights act of 1964 I kind of think everyone just refers to it by that name. There's a table in the code that will give you an alphabetical listing of those popular names and it will show you where the pieces of that session law ended up in the codification. And secondary sources which again we'll get to in the second half are also a good place to start and point you to the appropriate statute citation for a topic. So first a quick overview of the sources for federal session laws and for the federal U.S. code. Probably won't surprise you being a document community here that the government publishing office's website is a really great resource for federal legislation so they have session laws back to 1951 and the official U.S. code editions back to 1994. If you need to go earlier than that for either publication the library of congress has added three back files of both publications since the last time we did this webinar. You'll hear more about their partnership with the subscription database online for other primary sources of law but that's a pretty exciting development for free access to older back files of these primary law publications. If your library subscribes to the database lexus nexus academic which is a paid database but pretty common for its news and business and other content there in general academic and public libraries. They include a commercial annotated version of the U.S. code which contains the text of the laws in force as well as research annotations such as brief case summaries under each code section and links to relevant secondary sources. I also recommend the U.S. code the free U.S. code website from the office of the law revision council up at the top right corner. It's an unannotated version of the code but it has a very user friendly interface and that tends to be the one that I go to first if I don't feel like logging into some of the law school resources that we have here in my library. So let's say that I want to read that civil rights act of 1964 or your patron Now if they're like my law students they would probably start with a search of Google or Wikipedia to get the statute citation and that works. I'm not knocking it but you can also look up the statute names those popular names directly in the U.S. code popular name table called popular name tool here. So I have here an alphabetical listing of not only my civil rights act but also other session laws that are called by that same name from different years. So each entry has a few links. You might think that first link to the public law number which is a unique little control number that helps you find statute by citation. You might think that would take you to the full text of the statute and that would be logical but that's unfortunately wrong. So that will actually bring you to a table which will show you where the different sections of that session law can be found in the current U.S. code. The stat link that follows the one in blue 78 stat 241 is the actual scan of the full text from the U.S. statutes at large the official session law publication. And then the U.S.C. link will take you to the first section in the U.S. code where a piece of the session law still exists. And although it's a few extra steps in navigation I personally prefer once I have a statute citation a public law number or statutes at large citation to go through SDSIS to get to the statutes at large that way. Just a personal quirk of mind I like being able to download the entire law as a PDF versus navigating through you basically like turn the pages of the book in the one that you click through from the U.S. code. So it's personal preference so I took an extra step here to get to the actual PDF of the public law and there it is. So you could also click through from the U.S. code. The civil rights act of 1964 as it looked when it was originally passed you'll notice that there's some internal organization and section numbering within the session law and that will change when the different pieces of the session law are cut up and incorporated by their subject matter into the U.S. code. So sometimes you'll hear people refer to title whatever of a particular law that's usually referring to the internal organization within the session law such as title seven. You might be familiar with that idea of title seven federal law protections for employees in the context of discrimination and that's referring to title seven of the civil rights act which starts here. Title seven goes on with some familiar sounding language. You've probably seen this before the different classes of people who are protected from discrimination under federal law in their employment. So where did this particular piece of title seven end up in the current U.S. code. That's where that table we saw earlier will come in handy if you click the public law number. You can get to the table listing where it breaks down the session law pieces in this case there were quite a few sections here so I have to carry it on. But section 703 of the session law ended up at title 42 of the U.S. code which deals with public health and welfare. Section 2000 E-2 and I can click through to see there it is and it lives on today. Now you'll notice if I'd started my research with the U.S. code I could have worked backwards to the session law with that little parenthetical history note. So you could start either way and work forwards or backwards. So this refers me back to section 703 of that session law from 1964 and it also lets me know about two later session laws which have subsequently amended the language of section 2000 E-2 in some sort of way and the amendment notes that follow after the text of the code section give you a little description about what was changed by each of those if you keep scrolling. So state legislation follows a similar publication process. Generally you can access at least some session laws as well as the current code enforced on the state legislature's website. As with the federal system the subscription database hind online offers a back file. Before I leave the legislative branch and move on I should also mention local government ordinances is another potential research angle. So county city town village ordinances look very similar to state and federal codes and may be useful when researching local issues like how long can my neighbor blast her stereo at night before I'm allowed to call the cops. Things like that. So these two websites I've listed here are major publishers of the local ordinances and you can often find them for free on the web. Usually through the jurisdiction's website. So bottom line for legislative branch materials figure out what jurisdiction you're working with and have a look at the current code to start you can always work backwards to the session laws. You may need to consult several different codes to determine which one covers your issue by the way. Federal, state, local, even a combination. Excuse me. Onto the executive. So the old saying goes that this is the branch that enforces the laws but the executive branch also has the power to make laws which we interchangeably call rules or regulations. But the rule making power of the executive actually begins in the legislature. The legislature delegates its rule making authority to an executive branch agency and this is common in very technical or scientific or otherwise specialized areas where an expertise is needed to regulate appropriately so environmental law is a good example of that. Once the legislature has delegated its rule making power the agency may now promulgate rules with legal effect. And as long as the agency acts within the scope of that delegation and doesn't overstep its authority, regulations have the same force of law as if the legislature had passed them directly. The agency rule making process is really interesting. It's a much more direct line to the public in the federal system and in the state equivalence as well generally. You typically see a system of what they call informal or notice and comment rule making and they mean informal as compared to the legislature. So proposed rules are announced and a draft is published in an administrative register. And then there's a period where the public can actually comment directly to the agency on the proposal. The finalized rule then gets republished with a summary of the comments received and eventually the rules are codified into an administrative code. So in the federal system those publications are called the federal register and the code of federal regulations which I'll say CFR, save time. As with legislative materials, FDCIS provides free access back to the mid-90s and that library of congress kind online partnership now gets you back to the first editions of each for free. I particularly like the E CFR from GPO which is unofficial but kept the most current and it's generally updated within one to two days and I actually checked this morning and that beats what we have on the law school databases Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis which is pretty impressive. So if you remember we looked at title seven of the civil rights act of 1964. In addition to establishing federal employment discrimination protections it also created the equal employment opportunity commission the EEOC section 713 of this session law is an enabling statute which delegated rule making power to that commission. So as long as the EEOC stays within the scope of that delegation and doesn't overstep their authority by trying to make rules about endangered birds or something crazy like that they're pretty much good to go. They can issue rules and regulations that carry out that delegation. So where did that go? Remember that table will show us it now lives in title 42 of the U.S. code 2000 e-12 and there it is. Again I could have started from the code and work backwards. Let's see an example of a rule that the EEOC is promulgated. If I wanted to look at current EEOC regulations and force the free version of ECFR would probably be my first stop. The 50 subject-based titles are then subdivided by agency which makes it pretty easy to browse you can also search. EEOC is in title 29 which deals with labor not surprising. I've skipped a few navigational steps here but you can browse or search the EEOC regulations within the ECFR to find agency regulations dealing with sexual harassment. This is an interesting example because that phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the civil rights act of 1964 or around the code sections where the sort of federal employment protections live. There is some discussion of sexual harassment in other areas of the code. Military law talks about it a bit but you don't really see the phrase sexual harassment much in the text of the official U.S. code and not from the civil rights act at all. Now we know it to be a form of unlawful sex discrimination in employment because the agency regulations have really enhanced that understanding of the original legislation. So as with the statutory code, regulatory codes also include those parenthetical history notes and here in the CFR it includes not just the administrative register citation for the final rule but there's also a citation to the legislative authority to even make that regulation. So you see an example of both up on the screen. I'm going to jump back a little bit to the actual proposed rule which will also be published in the administrative register so in this case it was interim guidelines from 1980 when the EEOC was initially creating regulations on sexual harassment so this was published in the federal register in April 1980 and the agency invited the public to submit comments about this interim guideline draft. And I don't know if you can see down in the lower left corner there's this direction that all envelopes should be marked sexual harassment on the lower left corner which gave me this really funny mental image of the postman dropping stacks of mail that are all labeled sexual harassment on somebody's desk which must have been an interesting day at the office. But following that period of public comment, following that period of public comment, the agency then republished its final guidelines, final amendment to the guidelines on discrimination because of sex. And if you read that in the federal register it will also include a summary of the comments that they received. So all 160 letters from the public you can't see that description on the screen here but you'll see in the middle column they're discussing the agency's official responses to some of those comments where people were requesting more clarification on particular points and the agency will sort of explain their reasoning and give some additional understanding about what their thoughts are on this regulation. So I know this is very quick I just want to make sure we have enough time to get through our hypothetical here at the end but the bottom line here is you must always check for applicable executive branch regulations either from the federal or from your state jurisdiction. They are legally binding, they do provide additional details that might not be in the actual statutes and the administrative codes tend to be the best starting place for your administrative research. The executive branch does produce some other materials that may be of interest to legal researchers and that includes memoranda, sometimes letters, press releases, even administrative law decisions which are very similar to judicial branch court opinions. Generally the agency website is going to be your best place to access a lot of this material. It's got the list of agencies from USA.gov for the federal system. Although older or sensitive items might require a state or federal freedom of information act request so it will depend a little bit. So on to the judiciary. The law or primary source material that we're talking about here are court opinions and orders. So the old saying goes that the judiciary interprets the law which is true, they do help flesh out what the legislature or executive agency meant by applying the language of a statute or regulation to a particular situation. But in our common law system their interpretations also add to the existing law by creating precedent for future courts to follow in similar situations that can't be differentiated or distinguished in some meaningful way. I should mention here that the majority of case law precedent that your researchers will find is going to come from appellate courts despite the fact that there are relatively tiny fraction of the case law heard every year. And there are practical reasons for this. The sheer number of cases and trial courts and the fact that most of those are fairly routine applications of settled law specific facts. And appeals get a little more selective. Appeals to the intermediate court are of right, the losing party is usually entitled to an appeal although they don't always choose to exercise that right. Appeals to the court of last resort are discretionary. So the U.S. Supreme Court for example and the highest state courts generally get to choose what cases they will hear and so those are a teeny tiny fraction of the overall case law that's out there every year. So it's from these two top appellate levels where we see our case law precedent really being created. I did a webinar shameless plug. I did a webinar last year on finding trial level materials and appellate court records. So please check that out in the interest of time. I'll refer you to that one for more information about researching those types of sources which is really fascinating stuff. For our purposes it's really important to know your relevant jurisdictions for determining whether a particular case you discover is binding precedent or not. So I have links up here to an app of the federal court and to the websites of state judiciary to help researchers understand the court structures that we're talking about. And it's also important for a legal researcher to understand that there are parallel federal and state court system and to understand which system their legal problem would be heard in because that will impact their research process. So in our employment discrimination examples there are both federal and state law protections and questions which would need to be researched. If you're researching an issue of purely state law you might get distracted and you're searching by what other states courts are doing. And there are times when courts might be persuaded by what other state courts are doing but usually that's in the absence of any binding authority within the state you're in. And there's a lot of binding authority out there. So as you can see from the chart here the U.S. Supreme Court binds both federal and state lower courts although the state's courts of last resort are the final word on matters of purely state law so as long as it doesn't conflict with federal law or the U.S. constitution basically. The intermediate courts of appeal tend to bind the lower courts within that jurisdiction although it's common to see disagreement in jurisdictions which have more than one intermediate appellate court. In the federal system that's known as the circuit split. States will vary. Some have only one intermediate appellate court. Some have several. Finally the trial level courts generally don't create precedent. In fact as I mentioned earlier and in that webinar last year it's common not to be able to locate the decisions or orders or other materials from this level at all or without a lot of leg work. There are a number of sources for finding case law within the federal system and the U.S. states so I'll just highlight a few. So first and this one is paid when the subscription database Lexis nexus academic. If your institution subscribed there's a big collection of federal and state case law which includes some value added editorial content in the form of head notes. These outline and summarize the main points of law contained in each case and make your life a little bit easier as a researcher. But there are also some free sources for case law as well. A few years ago Google scholar added federal and state case law to its collection and it's very popular with researchers since it's familiar Google searching. The coverage will vary depending on the level of court and jurisdiction that you're dealing with. Since our last webinar the legal research service Ravel announced a partnership with the Harvard law library where they're digitizing U.S. case law and making it freely available to researchers although you do have to sign up. Right now that site has federal cases beginning in 1925 and historical state case law for New York and California but this site definitely one to watch over the next year or so as the state collections grow. That's what a lot of the free services are missing is historical back files of state materials including Google. The self-help web portal find law which you may be familiar with also offers a number of cases law databases although they tend to be siloed by their jurisdiction and the dates of coverage vary widely and this again is common with the free sources for any primary legal material. Whichever source you use it's important to be aware of those date limitations because what you think of as quote-unquote old cases might still be good law and might still be relevant law for your situation. So I realized that was very fast but I wanted to give you the quick overview and then we'll put this all together into a sample search that is a typical perhaps interaction with someone who is researching a personal legal problem. So I would like to introduce you to Courtney and she's up in the corner there. Courtney is a library patron who just lost her job and she feels like she's been unfairly discriminated against and like a lot of patrons who are facing a personal legal issue she's very upset. She wants to tell you all the gory details. You try to give her some referral information to the bar association low cost consultation service but she waves it off. She says I just lost my job I can't afford a lawyer and she's probably not wrong. She just wants to read the law and figure out what to do. So if Courtney came to my library I would pick up on some immediate red flags here. She's dealing with something that's complex not only legally but also emotionally so there's a little bit of sort of sympathizing and talking her down a little bit. She doesn't seem to have much experience with legal research because we know in the legal realm that codes and court opinions are not instruction manuals. You may be able to find out what the law is or what the law says it's not always clear what you should do about it afterward. If you can I think the best course of action would be to steer Courtney to begin with secondary sources. So they don't have the direct force of law they're going to analyze and explain the law to her a little bit better. They come in a lot of varieties we'll focus on a few of the flavors here so legal encyclopedia, journal articles, some specialized book publications. Treatises especially can vary widely in their intended audience and level of technical detail. So to find suggested legal treatises on a topic I always recommend looking at law library research guides. The link down in the corner is a custom law school website search engine from an organization called Cali where you can search for law library research guides on a topic and you could obviously also do a web search but I sort of like the custom search engine limitation. Now you may or may not have direct access to a lot of the sources that are listed there but it may help the patron arm themselves with some information before they come to an area law library they may be aware of some specific sources that they want to look at. One set of titles which you might already have in print at your library are no low-press self-help legal publications. Sadly since the last time we did this webinar we had electronic access to these through the nc live consortium and now we don't so we're limited to our print collections unless you purchase the ebsco legal information reference center separately but you may have them they're very popular they've been around for a long time and this example here your rights in the workplace might help our patron understand her legal options more broadly than a focused search of statutes or case law would. For example they would probably give her an idea of some federal protections which she would have to begin by filing an eoc complaint and she has a shorter time period to do that than she may have in a state system. They might also outline other options that she has for legal action. They include chapters about how to hire an attorney what questions to ask them and look for how to do your own legal research so they're a good starting point but they're also fairly general in scope so they try to cover what the general rule is in most jurisdiction so if your patron wants to research the more specific rules and his or her own jurisdiction they likely won't give as much guidance on that so in that case you may want to move up to a level of a research written by lawyers for lawyers such as the legal encyclopedia. These are my favorite research starting place for legal questions I recommend them to my students all the time. They're very helpful summaries of the law and they give you some selected foot notes for further reading to primary sources. So there are two sets that try to cover the general law across all U.S. states and you're in CJS these are really only available in subscription resources if you have Lexus nexus academic you do have access to the American jurisprudence encyclopedia you may have access if you are able to get to a law library which offers westlaw patron access you may or may not have one or both of these generally U.S. wide encyclopedia sets. About half little over half the states have their own state specific encyclopedia which give you footnote references only to primary materials from within that state so there's an obvious advantage there if you're researching a matter of state law so unfortunately these tend to be pretty restricted to the premium legal research services but again you would have access to amher if you have Lexus nexus academic. We actually don't even have westlaw patron access at my library but I've done a screenshot here of the north carolina stated encyclopedia from my law school version of westlaw so you can see it's organized by topic there's a topic for labor the chapters subdivide into an interesting looking area about wrongful discharge so if I were able to set up court me with the print or the westlaw patron access version of strong north carolina index she might get herself here and find some interesting looking language about exceptions to at will employment so normally you can be fired for just about anything but there may be some exceptions if your discharge violates public policy so you still don't have an answer about what to do in your situation if you're court me but you have a new thread of research that you might want to pull on for a little bit and see what you can find out so I assume that you're already pretty comfortable with helping your patrons construct article searches on a topic but I did want to quickly highlight since it's a major form of a secondary source places to access legal articles they can be helpful due to extensive footnoting and you probably have access if again if you have Lexus academic there's a big database of law reviews and journals Google scholar also provides some legal journal articles and the American bar association has a great free custom search engine of open access law journal articles that includes I believe about four hundred journals that you can search full text for free so I don't have an example here for this question but can be very useful for legal research scenarios so just to sum up this section secondary sources are most likely going to be your patrons best starting place for legal research they're going to give really useful context on an unfamiliar topic maybe provide some potential search keywords and some citations to primary law there's a huge variety out there though and you must be aware of the intended audience and the limits of trying to cover general rules across multiple jurisdictions also how current the sources because the law is constantly changing and a researcher's job really isn't done until they have confirmed all of the leads they discovered in secondary sources so now let's say courtney wants to look at the north carolina statutes because as she says it happened in north carolina so another little red flag there courtney might already be eliminating potential federal resources and authority like that EEOC complaint we talked about earlier but she gets herself to the north carolina general statutes which are free online from the legislative branch website and she starts searching this is not the most sophisticated search engine so she does a very basic employment and discrimination but maybe she gets a little excited to see section 143 dash 422.2 of the general statutes which is a legislative declaration of public policy against employment discrimination so she might think this could be something maybe a legal leg to stand on in state court and again she's not thinking about any parallel federal protection she might have although she should be but I suppose you can only research one thing at a time so maybe she's focusing on state research right now. If courtney has access to lexis nexus academic at your library and finds this same section even better their version of the state code is annotated which means it will include selected case law references with little summaries at the end of each section so if we keep skimming down past the text of that legislative declaration which she'll notice looks a little bit different than it did on the previous screen and we'll come back around to that in a few minutes maybe she's taking a look now at the related case law summaries which are a great advantage to looking at the annotated version of a code and she starts to read hoping to find maybe a case that's similar to hers she might get discouraged though because this is where things start to get a little unclear and contradictory and there's all these case notes which make it sound like there isn't a private cause of action in Carolina state courts what she might not be seeing is that these have qualifiers that are talking about constructive discharge come back to that in a minute too or that there still seems to be at the very bottom a common law wrongful discharge claim and violation of public policy which is what that state encyclopedia told us a few minutes ago if Courtney wants to do some further research or just doesn't have access to this nexus academic she could try researching state case law on google scholar I probably go there since it's free and since ravel doesn't yet have North Carolina case law as part of that expansion that they're planning she can search using the code section number to help focus on court opinions which have cited to that code section so that's a handy little work around and she finds some results from North Carolina state courts and opens up this case at the bottom with the Harris feeder to read more about claims for wrongful discharge and violation of public policy okay so far so good and this is an intermediate court of appeals case from 2004 and you can see there's a lot of discussion there google highlights it about wrongful discharge lawsuits and violation of public policy and the history of them in the state so Courtney probably thinks this language looks really promising and her next question might be is this case still good law in North Carolina is the law is always changing statutes can get amended they can get repealed they can get overturned by court regulations can get revised they can expire sometimes they're temporary and then they're removed from the CFR or the state equivalent they can be repealed they can be overturned by court case law can be overruled by later cases or the legislature can pass a new statute that supersedes the old case by making it irrelevant and so on so it's very easy to find primary law on a topic that sort of says what you want something to say it's a lot harder to tell if it's still valid and there are these citator tools that help bring your research up to date legal researchers need to check the validity of every single source they plan to use in the legal filing and also keep up with the latest changes this can be extremely difficult with the free and general academic research systems it's really where you see the premium legal research tools differentiate themselves and make themselves almost seem worth the money that we pay for them. Westlaw's key site service and the shepherd's service on lexus nexus are really the gold standard in determining the validity and current status of a primary law source but let's see how Google scholars cited by feature stacks up to a commercial option we'll give it a chance it includes later citations to the document in case law and some secondary sources if they're available on Google but it doesn't really characterize the treatment in any meaningful way the burden is really on the reader to sort out the context and that can be tricky so here's this how cited page for Whitby Harris-Teter the court of appeals case Google scholar shows it as having been cited by 28 and you can see under the how the document has been cited some of them are articles and some of them are other cases but unlike well actually getting ahead of myself you might notice over in the corner here took me a second to under related documents there's another case with the same name from the North Carolina Supreme Court a year later it's kind of buried on that side of the page let's take a look in a little bit more premium service shepherds available on Lexus nexus academic so if your library subscribes to that database you have a miniature version of the law school shepherds product which can be used for case law and selected secondary sources but unlike the law school version of Lexus you can't use the Lexus nexus academic version to shepherd eyes statutes court rules or regulations citations the best work around there if you need to do that is to search for your citations as a key word in the full text of case law that is far from a perfect solution I acknowledge but at least it'll get you a little bit of that information and researchers can still take advantage of shepherds for case law on Lexus nexus academic so if you have Lexus nexus academic that would probably be a better bet for doing that sort of updating and checking validity of your citations if you go under search by subject or topic under legal you can access shepherds citations that way or you can also retrieve a legal case and then shepherd eyes it by clicking on one of those symbols there will be a little signal next to the case name and that will take you to the shepherds report so you can see examples of the different signals that you might see within shepherds that warn you or give you positive treatment that explain a little bit about how this document has been cited or treated by later documents so if we look up with the Harris Peter from the court of appeals we can see from that little stop sign up in the corner there that clearly something negative happened to that case judging by that red stop sign and you can see in the subsequent history under the case name that this court of appeals opinion was reversed by the state supreme court one year later so the supreme court agreed with the minority dissenting opinion in the court of appeals and adopted its reasoning as precedent now in the state of north carolina google scholar did not do a great job of showing Courtney that or showing us that either so what happened there well first just technically speaking the north carolina supreme court agreed with the dissenting judge in the lower appellate court and adopted his reasoning for future situations like that so the majority opinion of the court of appeals is no longer precedent it was reversed but when you do a close read of that case you'll see it was actually dealing with that constructive discharge situation we talked about earlier and that's a situation where the employee isn't fired but is so fed up by the alleged hospital work conditions that they quit and so if that's not what happened to Courtney that case may not be relevant to her at all so she's got a new line of research to pursue and you can see how you pull on these threads and then you find a new one I have another curve fall to throw at Courtney I debated making this example so depressing but I just want to illustrate the complexity we're dealing with here so if you remember that free north carolina general statutes version she used the free state code notice the currency at the top of the page it's only through the end of 2015 so that means that any session laws which were passed since 2015 haven't yet been incorporated they were in lexus nexus academic if you noticed that it looked a little bit different when we looked at the legislative declaration of public policy and the reason it did is because on lexus nexus academic that had been updated to include 2016 legislation such as how still to the session law that was passed in late March you might know it better as the north carolina bathroom bill but there's something else in that session law which is relevant to Courtney's case so this is the underlining is what's new what has been added by that session law to existing pieces of the code so there's a word change here about the classes of people who are protected under this public policy to exclude transgender people it's it refers only to biological sex now for sex we're assuming that Courtney is biologically female that might not affect her we don't necessarily know that again that would be a new threat of research if that affects her but perhaps more impactful to Courtney is the amendment to the following section of the general statute which eliminates a common law or statutory private right of action based on the stated public policy so at the moment Courtney and other plaintiffs like Courtney are prohibited from pursuing private discrimination suits in north carolina state court so they need to go to federal court so at this point Courtney might circle back around to researching federal laws and procedures for filing a federal discrimination suit or she might become more interested in that attorney referral information you offered her earlier or and I hope this is not the case Courtney might do what a lot of people do when they have too much money to qualify for legal aid but not enough to hire a lawyer which has become very disillusioned and just give up on the idea of fighting her employer in court Courtney had a really rough day trying to research her legal option she made a lot of common mistakes that wasted her time and caused her frustration and I my goal is not to discourage you or your patrons from trying to learn more about the law but I do want to illustrate how complex this process can be and how hard it can be to navigate especially with free or general academic electronic resources to locate relevant and up to date legal authority which answers those questions and there are some situations where it's a little more straightforward than others like small claims court or fighting traffic tickets or just wanting to better understand terminology in a contract like your lease for example but it is important for you and your users to know that legal research involves a lot of close reading and a lot of very fine hair splitting and a lot of sudden changes that can blow up everything you have found so far so part of managing legal research and legal reference questions is figuring out what type of help would most benefit your patron so if they're pushing for a lot of intervention on your part or telling them what to do that attorney referral or legal services referral list would be really helpful I think if they just want general background on a personal legal problem the secondary sources may be just what they need to understand what they're dealing with but if you have people who have known citations a specific case they want to see or if they're very comfortable with diving into the primary law now you've got a lot of the tools that you need to get them free access to a lot of the sources that will help them so I realized that was very quick but we do have some time for questions and so excited about that so please feel free to enter questions in the chat and I'll do what I can and so thank you all for being here.