 Jennifer Barron is the head of reference services and the lecturing fellow at Duke Law School's J. Michael Goodson Law Library where she provides regular instruction on legal research topics. Jennifer holds both a JD and an MLS from the University of Buffalo and previously worked as a graduate assistant in UB's Charles B. Sears Law Library as well as its Lockwood libraries for our business and government documents reference center. She served as our secretary treasurer of GRS, government resources section of NCLA from 2009 to 2011. Thank you very much Jennifer for joining us and doing this for us. Well, thank you Linda and thank you all to everybody for being here. I'm really glad to see that there's so much interest in this topic and I hope you'll find this overview to be useful. I should preface this all by giving you fair warning that I have condensed into an hour what I typically teach to new law students over the course of eight hours. So maybe a little fast at times but as Linda said we are recording this and so if you have questions you can always feel free to contact me afterwards as well. But here's the plan. I know that most of you who signed up are not from law libraries so I assume that you're interested in helping library patrons conduct legal research with the resources that you have available. So we'll start off by figuring out ways to diagnose the kind of help that your patron really needs before we get into the nitty gritty of actually doing legal research. We'll also look at some helpful starting places for research before we dive into the primary law itself. And finally we'll take a quick tour through each branch of the government and the types of law that each one creates. And since I know we're moving through a huge topic relatively fast but we'll have time to take some questions I hope. Now just so I have a sense of what types of legal research requests that you typically see and also so I feel a little bit less like a weirdo who is talking to her computer monitor. Please take a second to locate that hand raise and illuminate and just raise your hand if you've heard questions along these lines from patrons. Do you have anything to help me make my own will? Oh there was one. How do I fight a traffic ticket? My deadbeat landlord never fixes anything. Can I sue him? And my personal favorite, which I heard quite a bit when I worked in public libraries, I've invented the world's greatest contraption. Now I need a patent for it. Okay, sounds like you all have some experience with this. But if these sounded all familiar then congratulations. You have encountered a pro se patron in the wild. They're not exactly an endangered species but there you go. Pro se from the Latin meaning for oneself is a term we use in law libraries for someone who's chosen to forge ahead with their legal problem without a lawyer. But pro se patrons can vary pretty widely in their experience with conducting legal research as well as in their expectations for help from you, the librarian. So it is critically important to be clear and upfront about the limits of your assistance. And I assume that most of you out there are not lawyers. And even if you happen to have a law degree like I do, that still doesn't make you the patron's lawyer when the patron comes into your library. So it's really critical to outline the distinction between legal reference, which is helping a patron get to a point where he can do his own research, versus legal advice, which would be telling a patron what the best course of action is in their specific legal issue. This can be a difficult concept for patrons to understand. And I recommend having a pretty clear policy. So you're welcome to borrow our language on the Duke Law School's website. I've got the link there. And you can see there's a pretty clear indication of what we can and cannot do. Sometimes this policy stops pro se patrons just dead in their tracks. And we see that a lot in law libraries. Sometimes people really expect to be able to come into a library, sit down with a librarian and get very direct free legal help, essentially. And for patrons who respond to this with a lot of discomfort about the thought of doing their own legal research, it may be really helpful to have some referral numbers available for local lawyers and for free or low-cost legal services. Duke Law has another page like that that you can refer to. It's pretty lengthy. It gives you an idea of what resources are accessible, especially in North Carolina, but also nationally. And I'll just highlight now two of the national organizations since I know that our audience today is bigger than North Carolina, which is really great to see. The first is Legal Services Corporation. You might know them better as Legal Aid. And they provide free legal assistance on civil matters only, so there's no criminal help to qualifying people. As you can imagine, these services are in very high demand and they are perpetually underfunded, and they also have very strict income requirements for who qualifies. But your local office would be a really good number to have handy for people who might qualify and just really need to talk to an attorney. Unfortunately, most of the people that you'll meet would probably be in more of a gray area where they make too much money to qualify for assistance from Legal Aid, but not really enough or so they think to be able to afford an attorney. In that case, they may want to look into local lawyer referral services, many of which offer low-cost initial consultations. The American Bar Association has a website that I've linked here which provides a state-by-state map, findlegalhelp.org. Another good bookmark for you for your patrons. Just to give you one example, North Carolina Bar Association's Find a Lawyer referral service can cost anywhere up to $50 for a 30-minute consultation. That's the commitment that you make. So it's not free, but at least it's a way you can offer your patrons to have a relatively low-cost chat with an attorney about their problem, and maybe they'll decide based on that conversation whether their issue is worth pursuing pro-say on their own. Now some pro-say patrons do feel more comfortable with doing their own research. Sometimes patrons who come to libraries just want to learn more background about their problem before they approach an attorney, or I've also seen they may already have an attorney and they just want to be able to communicate with them better and understand more about what the attorney is telling them about their problem. So certainly if you have a law library in your area, I've got a link to law schools here. The temptation may be just to refer them there as we likely are going to have more specialized resources for researchers. But you may not be aware, which I'm assuming is why you're here today, just how many resources you have available right now, particularly in the form of what we call secondary sources. I mentioned in the introduction that we were going to hold off on the primary law, the actual sources of law, until a little bit later. But in order to explain what secondary sources are, it really helps to explain both at the same time. So primary sources in law, as we use that term, are the actual government pronouncements which have the force of law. So they're what we mean when we say something is the law or something is against the law. It's the law in that quote. You can't see me doing my finger quotes, but I am. They're issued within each branch of the government in both the federal and the state systems, and they work together to build this body of the law in finger quotes. Secondary sources, by contrast, don't have the force of law, but they analyze or explain the law. They come in many varieties, and we'll just focus on a few of the major ones today. Legal encyclopedia, journal or law review articles, and specialized treatises. Treatises especially can be really varied in their intended audience and their level of technical detail. To find suggested treatises on a particular legal topic, I always recommend looking at law library research guides, and I've actually linked here a custom search engine from Cornell's Law School, which searches across a number of library guides to identify potentially useful materials on a topic. And it's unlikely that your library will probably have many of these sources, but it may be helpful to be armed with that information if you're going to make a referral to a local law library to just have a sense of what's out there on a topic in law libraries. But for more directly accessible legal treatises, I hope our attendees from North Carolina already are very familiar with the NC Live Consortium, which provides participating libraries with access to a huge amount of databases. And their government and law section has a few databases which are worth highlighting, but I want to focus right now on EBSCO's Legal Information Reference Center. As you can see at the description at the bottom, it includes a number of self-help legal reference books published by NOLO Press. You may already have some of these titles in print in your library, they might look familiar. They're extremely popular in both public and general academic libraries, and of course the advantage to having online access to them is that they're more available to your patrons day and night assuming your library participates in NC Live, which I think every county in the state does. So presumably all our North Carolina attendees have access to this. You can see some of the categories here, and we have a little something for all of those hypothetical patrons earlier when we were raising our hands. We've got, let's see, Will's an estate planning over in the corner. We've got real estate for the landlord person. We've got patents, copyrights and trademarks in the category browse. And we've also down in the bottom got traffic law. Let's get that traffic ticket patron set up with a secondary source right now. If you haven't taken a look at some NOLO Press books, they're searchable or browsable in this online version. And just to give you an example of how they're organized, here's a sample chapter on should you fight your ticket. You can see from the table of contents that it's pretty conversational in tone. And these are written by lawyers for non-lawyers, so that's not surprising. And they do things like outline potential defenses to your traffic ticket in each section down here, deciding whether to fight your ticket. So this may be just what a patron needs to just get started with their topic and learn background about their legal issue. But they're also fairly broad and general in scope. They try to cover what the general rule is in most jurisdictions. And if your patron wants to research the more specific rules in his or her own jurisdiction, say what does North Carolina say about this, they're not going to give very much specific guidance about that. So there may be times where there's just not enough information in these general NOLO Press guides, and you'll need to bump the patron up a level of difficulty to a resource that's written by lawyers for lawyers, such as illegal encyclopedia. These are my absolute favorite legal research starting place. I recommend them to law students all the time. They provide very helpful summaries of the law along with footnotes to primary sources and other secondary sources for further reading. The two major American legal encyclopedias, which we refer to as AMJER and CJS, American Jurisprudence and Corpus Jurispectinum, attempt to cover the general law across the various U.S. states, kind of like how the NOLO books do. Just over half the states have their own encyclopedias which provide footnote references only to primary materials from within that state. Our example is called Strong's North Carolina Index. So if you're researching a matter of state law, you can probably see the obvious advantage to using a state-specific encyclopedia. But unfortunately, most of those state encyclopedias are accessible only within the premium legal research services, Westlaw and LexisNexis, which you'll probably only find in law schools or other law libraries. But if you are part of a library which subscribes to LexisNexis Academic, a campus-wide version of the law school Lexis products, you actually do have access to the AMJER encyclopedia in the U.S. legal section. LexisNexis Academic is extremely common in universities and colleges for its news and business content, but the legal materials section is also pretty robust. You can't use LexisNexis Academic to do everything that's possible in the full law school version of LexisNexis, but you can do a surprising amount. To find AMJER, you can click on the U.S. legal menu and then it's under legal reference. I'm trying a very simple search here for landlord repair as if I were that hypothetical patron from earlier who was having a problem with his landlord. You can get more sophisticated. You can't see it because my animation is covering it up and it didn't work. But there's an edit in advanced search link underneath my little text box here. There are some more advanced search options beyond this very simple search I'm doing. The need for this browse option might become more obvious once you actually try a search, but for now just be aware that legal encyclopedias are presented in a topical outline format rather than the traditional sort of encyclopedia botanical like A to Z entries. So there are times when it can be advantageous to limit your search to specific topics within the encyclopedia if you're getting a lot of false positive hits in your results. So especially if you're trying to search for a word which shows up in different legal contexts. Construction is a good example. You might think of like construction of buildings, some kind of legal issue about a construction worker maybe, and you'll get those results in AMJER doing a search. But you'll also get results about interpreting the construction of the language within contracts or statutes, for example. So that might be a time where you'd want to limit your encyclopedia topics to those related to building construction. In this example, I only got 16 results so it wasn't really much of a problem for me. And as you can see they're presented first alphabetically by their topic. The first result is from the topic elevators and escalators, which is probably not what our hypothetical patron is complaining about. But the remaining results are all from the topic landlord and tenant. So it seems like I've hit on the right section here. And if you read, it might be kind of hard to see on your screen. But you can see it subdivides into all these subtopics and sub-subtopics and goes down in this outline format until you get to a section number and a little heading. And I've highlighted result number two because it says it's generally section 454 is dealing with the landlord's duty to repair or improve. And I almost always try to find an entry label generally to start with because I'm looking for the general rule and then I have to start looking at all the exceptions. But you can see many of the later results here, down arrow, also look like they might potentially be relevant if I'm researching some kind of legal problem with my landlord. But I'll still start with generally. And as the heading suggests, again my animations are not working here, sorry. This entry describes a general rule that a landlord is under no obligation to a tenant to repair unless there's a contract creating a duty to repair. This isn't necessarily the rule in North Carolina. And if you look at the footnotes, footnote one down at the bottom, you can see the cases that were chosen to represent that general rule. The selected cases are all from different states. They're from Missouri. They're from Nebraska. They're from Wyoming. If I was in those states, I'd have a good lead to follow. I'd have a good starting place here. But I still don't know if this is the rule in North Carolina. This is my potential new direction for my research. I've got to figure out is this the rule in North Carolina. And there's also a note at the bottom here that if I want to research more about an agreement by the landlord to repair, there are some subsequent sections within this encyclopedia topic that talk more about that research direction that you might want to take. So definitely you need to look at those too. And in fact, it can be helpful to read the entire section of an encyclopedia sub-topic to identify the various research threads that you might need to pursue. And you can do that here at the top of the screen by clicking where it says Show TOC. So viewing this generally section in context of the whole sub-topic, we can see a few other potential research questions popping out at us. So what the first entry mentioned about maybe needing an agreement by the landlord to repair, there's a whole chunk of stuff to read there. And I saw another potential question pop out at me in this section. It didn't show up in my search results. But maybe there's a statutory duty that was imposed by landlords on the legislature. So there might be legislation I need to look at. And you can already see from just this very simple example just how quickly legal research begins to snowball. It really blows up fast. You get a lot of potential what ifs and a lot of potential threads to follow as you get started with your research. And it's really, really critical to remember and to stress to your patrons that there's usually no black or white easy answer to any legal question. And we always joke in law schools that the correct answer to any question a professor asks you is, it depends. But that's really funny because it's true. It's absolutely true. What also depends is the helpfulness of any particular secondary source on your research topic. In this particular example that I cited earlier, law review and journal articles were not so helpful. So I didn't want to waste too much time demonstrating it only to have it fail. There aren't really any good law review or journal articles about landlord duty to repair that I was able to find. But I just want to highlight some places that you can access legal articles because for other research topics they can be extremely helpful due to their extensive footnotes to primary and secondary sources on a particular topic. Lexus-Nexus Academic, again if your institution subscribes, has a section of full text legal journals as does that academic search complete slash business source complete product which is available to the North Carolina Librarians through the NC Live Consortium. There's also free access to law journals through Google Scholar and the American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center also has a free custom search engine which comes through about 400 open access law journals. The open access movement is pretty big in legal scholarship. So just quickly take a look at that. That may be also in addition to treatises and encyclopedias, another source you might want to look at. Not so much for this research problem but definitely for others. Just to sum up this quick introduction to secondary sources, they're most likely your patron's best starting place for legal research. They can give you really useful context on an unfamiliar topic. Sometimes the entries will give you new potential search keywords and citations to some primary law. For our landlord example, we didn't find primary law in our jurisdiction but we at least got some maybe some new search terms to look at, some new threads to pursue about statutory duty to repair, possibly an agreement to repair. To be aware, there's a huge variety of secondary sources out there. You've got to be aware of the intended audience, whether it's written for lawyers or for non-lawyers. The limits of trying to cover general rules across many jurisdictions versus using a state-specific resource that will just give you citations from the jurisdiction that you're in. And also currency is a pretty important consideration as well because the law is constantly changing. Finding something older isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you have to be aware that you're going to have to update it. And a researcher's job really is not done until they've confirmed all of these leads that they discover in secondary sources. So with that, warning in mind, on to primary law. I mentioned earlier that primary sources in law come from all three branches of the government within both the federal and the state system. Here's an illustration from Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government, which is for the federal system, but state systems are basically similar as well. Obviously, some of the terminology changes like governor instead of president, but you get the general idea. And in both systems, the primary source of law that I didn't mention earlier is, of course, the federal or state constitution, which outlines the structure and functions of these branches of government. And you might remember the old saying from civics class that the legislative branch makes the law, the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch interprets the law. But the truth is that they all make law. Each of these branches in both state and federal systems make government pronouncements which have the force of law. So we'll just take them one by one and hopefully put them together at the end. First, the legislative branch. The law that they make comes in the form of statutes, which are often interchangeably just called laws, which is kind of confusing because the other branches make law, too. And they're most easily accessed by researchers in subject-based codes. In the interest of time, we're going to start from the point at which a bill has been signed into effect. Schoolhouse Rocks, I'm just a bill song, is a very classic explanation of the legislative process. If you need a quick refresher, we show it to our students. It's still very popular. We've also got an extensive research guide at Duke for finding the federal legislative history materials which are created during this legislative process, like reports and hearings and debates. North Carolina legislative history was covered really well in an earlier help webinar. And I understand there's also a federal congressional research webinar coming up in the work, so be on the lookout for that, too. So jumping ahead, then, to a bill being signed into law, skipping all that legislative process stuff. There are two ways that researchers might access enacted legislation. The first is through session laws or a chronological compilation of the laws as they were originally passed by the legislature. You would most likely look at these for either historical research purpose or for accessing very recently enacted laws that aren't yet added to the code. If you're looking for the current laws in force, you're probably better off consulting the subject-based code for your jurisdiction, federal or state. Codes provide an updated subject-arranged compilation of the current laws in force where the amended laws get updated and the repealed laws are removed. So here are some examples to illustrate that difference. In our federal example, if your patron wanted a snapshot of the U.S. Patent Act as it read in 1952, you'd want to pull up the session law from the U.S. statutes at large because the text of the current patent laws has been amended a lot over the years, and it looks very different today in the current U.S. code. If they wanted the current requirements for patentability of an invention, like that hypothetical patron we had who had invented the world's greatest contraction, you'd want to take them to the latest edition of the U.S. code. You probably want to take them to a secondary source to be honest with you because it would explain it probably a little more clearly than the language of the code, but that would illustrate the difference between using the session law and the code. And let's say that patron who wants to sue his landlord really wants to know whether in North Carolina landlords are required by state law to repair broken windows. That's their specific problem, maybe. That's another example where they'd want the latest edition of the state code. They want what the current laws in force say right now. But we've got potentially hundreds of new session laws which are passed each year within a jurisdiction. We've got thousands and thousands of code pages in force. So how do you find relevant statutes on a topic? Online codes obviously can be keyword searched, although I'll warn you that it can be difficult to construct a search which captures the exact wording that the legislature might have used. You have to be a little careful. If you have a print code, they offer some subject indexes, which can be pretty useful. If your law that you're looking for has a short title or a popular name, there is a table in the code that will tell you where that session law was codified, so where the pieces of that session law went into the subject arrangement of the code. And secondary sources are also a pretty good start, as we already saw. They give you some citations to primary law. And sometimes they'll link you to something called a 50 state survey or a table which compiles citations to each state's laws on a particular subject. And I'll just give you one example here from a NOLO press book on landlord tenant law that links to state landlord tenant statutes and gives a sort of general range of sections within the code where you might find that. So we'll see if we are able to find this area of the code a little bit later. But first we'll start with the federal, and I'll give you a quick overview of the sources for federal session laws in the U.S. Code. I probably won't surprise you if you're working regularly with documents that FDCIS from the government printing office is a really great resource for accessing federal legislation. They have session laws from the official U.S. statutes at large publication back to 1951, and they have the official U.S. Code back to 1994. If you need earlier versions of either for whatever reason, some historical research purposes, the subscription database HINE Online has modules for session laws in the U.S. Code dating back all the way to inception for each publication. If your library has Lexus-Nexus academic, they also include a commercial annotated version of the U.S. Code, which contains the text of the laws enforced, same as the official U.S. Code, as well as some editorial research annotations. So they give you things like brief descriptions of cases which have been decided under that code section, and also will give you references to secondary sources as well. So that's a pretty handy thing to have. We'll do a comparison a little bit later. I also highly recommend the beta U.S. Code from the Office of the Law Revision Council of the House of Representatives. It's also, it's not annotated, but it does have a very user-friendly searchable interface. So for the free resources, that's probably where I would start first for free. So let's say that I'm a student who's researching the background of the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for a paper. And I started in all the normal student places like Google and Wikipedia, and I learned that the CFPB was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which is listed in the popular name table of the beta code that I just talked about as public law number 111-203. It's actually listed in Wikipedia as that, too, to be fair, so point to Wikipedia. This numbering scheme tells me that it was the 203rd law which was passed in the 111st Congress. And public law numbers can be a really helpful finding aid when you're looking for statutes or code sections, actually. So with that public law number, I can retrieve the full text pretty easily on FDCIS's public and private law section. And I just pulled up the PDF, and I thought, whoa, this is enormous. This session law is almost 850 pages long, and not every part of it deals with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just this area, Title X, which doesn't start till Page 9 of the actual session law. So there's a lot of table of contents before that. And that's another important point for researchers to remember is that a single session law that you might be looking at might deal with many different topics and might amend many different areas of the code. So in this case, I see that sections 1011 and afterward seem to be the sections of the session law which established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and define the scope of its powers. Now, how would I discover where these pieces of the session law ended up in the subject arrangement of the current federal laws and force? Because I'd probably want to look at it in the current U.S. code just in case there have been later amendments which have changed anything about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's powers. Sometimes the session law will tell you directly in the text what code section it's supposed to be amending, and sometimes it doesn't. So there are other tables in the code which tell you, basically, let you convert a session law section into its location in the current U.S. code. In the U.S. code beta, that's what's linked under the public law number within the popular name table. And using that table, you can see for public law 111-203, section 1011, that first section that established the Bureau can be found on page 1,964 of the statutes at large, can be found in the U.S. code within Title XII. The subject areas of the code are kind of confusingly called titles. Title XII deals with banks and banking. And within Title XII, it's in section 5,491. And that link even takes you right to the full text of the current code section, which is part of the reason why I really like this beta U.S. code. Now, if I had started my research by searching or browsing within the current code, hopefully I would have constructed a search that's found this code section, because notice they're not actually saying Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If I put that in quotes, I wouldn't have found it. It's Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection in the statutes. So just a little warning about you have to be careful when you're searching the full text of codes and think like the legislators and do some broad searching. But if I started with a search of the code, I found this section, I could also circle back to the session law by scrolling to the end of that section's main text. And you'll always get a little parenthetical listing of all of the session laws which have gone into amending this code section over time. Now, in this case, there's only the one. This code section hasn't been amended at all since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. There will be times that you look at other code sections, and you might see a list of session law sections as long as you're armed. And each of those little pieces amended that code section in some way. So in this case, it was an easy example. There's only one. We'll look at an example where there were a few more session laws that went into a single code section in a minute. State legislation follows a pretty similar publication process to the federal system. Generally, you can access at least some session laws as well as the current code and force on the state legislature's website. North Carolina is a good example of that. We're back to the 1950s for the session laws. And there's a version of the North Carolina code, the general statutes, which is accessible for free through the state legislature's website. Lexus Nexus Academic, again, if your library subscribes, offers current codes for the states. And Hine Online, that subscription database I mentioned earlier, also offers a back file of state session laws and codes as well. All right. So for state research, let's go back to our hypothetical about the landlord repairing broken windows. The legal encyclopedia, remember, didn't give us any information about North Carolina, so we need to do a little more digging into the primary sources. So on the North Carolina General Assembly's website, I can search the current code, the North Carolina General Statutes. I did a very simple search for landlord and repair, just like I did in the encyclopedia. I got six results, and I noticed the headings on number five and six looked pretty good. They both say landlord to provide fit premises. This kind of sounds like my research issue. Sounds promising. So I start with number five. I'm going to skip number six. By the way, if I had gone ahead and opened that one, I would see it deal specifically with vacation rental properties and not with residential dwelling. So I knocked it out. It's no longer relevant to my research, but this is the kind of process of elimination that researchers have to do in law. But what it says underneath in 42-42A is that the landlord shall make all repairs and do whatever is necessary to keep the place in a fit and habitable condition. And that sounds promising, but it's not really clear at that point whether the word habitable might include fixing broken windows. So we keep reading the statute, and it goes on to talk about repairing imminently dangerous conditions on the premises, and then starts to define that phrase. And you can see in subsection 8G here that imminently dangerous conditions could be broken windows or lack of operable locks on all windows on the ground level. Okay, so that sounds good, but now we have some more what-ifs to pursue if I'm that patron, right? What if my window is upstairs, my broken window? Am I out of luck? What if it's on the ground floor but it's a broken window screen, not the actual window itself? Am I out of luck then? So again, I'm going to need to do more research on this. I still don't have a pretty clear answer. So when the code isn't squarely addressing my issue, but it kind of is, it's sort of dancing around it a little bit, I would likely need to start looking at case law to flesh out how a court would likely treat my particular case. So again, no easy answer here. And just to highlight at the bottom here, state codes also include these history notes I showed you from the federal code as well and with this information I could go back to the earlier session laws to see which ones have amended the code section in which ways. The part about the windows was part of the 2009 session law that's linked there. All right, we'll come back to the broken windows question during our tour of the judicial branch, but before I leave the legislative, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention local government ordinances as another potential research angle, another snowball, another thread, another what-if. So county, city, town, village ordinances look very similar to in structure to state and federal codes and they might be useful when you're researching particularly local issues. So how late can my neighbor blast her stereo at night before I'm allowed to call the cops on her? Are there any local restrictions on the exotic pet that I want to buy my kid for his birthday? Those sorts of questions might be addressed in the local ordinances but you probably have copies of those in your library for your own jurisdictions. You can often find them for free on the government websites and the publishers, there's two major publishers which I've linked here on this slide, also offer them entry points to them on their own websites as well. So the bottom line for the legislative materials is really figuring out what your jurisdiction is and having a look at the current code for it. You might need to consult a couple different codes to figure out exactly which one covers your issue, federal, state, local ordinances, or even a combination, possibly. So onto the executive branch. The old saying goes that this is the branch that enforces the laws but remember the executive branch also has the power to make laws which are interchangeably called rules or regulations. I'll probably play a little fast and loose with that but they mean the exact same thing, I promise. The rulemaking power of the executive actually does begin in the legislative branch though. The legislature typically delegates its rulemaking authority to an executive branch agency and this is common in very technical, scientific, or specialized areas where a certain expertise is needed to regulate it appropriately. Environmental law is a classic example. Aviation standards are anything that requires engineering expertise. Telecommunications is another. The things you'd probably don't want your average member of Congress trying to figure out how to regulate. So once the legislature has delegated that rulemaking power, the executive agency has the power to make rules with legal effect. They call it promulgating. I don't know why we have to use these fancy intent words but we do. As long as the agency is acting within the scope of that delegation from the legislature and it doesn't overstep its authority, regulations have the same force of law as if the legislature had passed them directly. The executive rulemaking process is really interesting. It's a much more direct line to the public. In the federal system and generally in the state equivalents, you typically see a system of informal or called notice and comment rulemaking and in that system proposed rules are announced and a draft gets published in an administrative register. This is typically a weekday publication in printer online. There's a period after that where the public is allowed to comment directly on the proposal. So they have this direct line to the agency to express their support or their concerns about the proposed rule. The finalized rule then gets republished in the administrative register and it includes a summary of those public comments that the agency received along with the agency's official response to those, whether they incorporated it into the final rule or whether they think it's not of this big a concern as this person said, examples, they can be really interesting to read. Eventually those final rules get codified into an administrative code. In the federal system, those sources are called the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations. As with legislative materials, SDSIS provides great free access to them back to the mid-90s and commercial databases date back even farther. State equivalent registers and codes is really going to vary quite a bit. I've linked Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, which gives access to state government materials. So you'll just have to get to know what's in your state. But we'll look at a federal example. All right, remember our research on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a little bit earlier? That Dodd-Frank Act did more than just create the Bureau. It also gave it rulemaking authority. It delegated some rulemaking powers in section 1022 of the session law. Using those same code tables as before, I can convert that section of the session law into its current location in the U.S. Code to read it, title 12, section 5,512. And there it is. I can see here that Congress granted this Bureau the authority to make rules and regulations on the topic of federal consumer financial law. So as long as they stay within the scope of this delegation and the standards that are listed below and they don't overstep this authority by trying to promulgate rules about endangered birds or something, they're pretty much good to go. Let's see an example of a rule that they've promulgated. In November of 2012, the Bureau published a proposed rule in the Federal Register, which I've linked up at the top in the heading, and this rule would amend an existing regulation about the eligibility for opening new credit card accounts. The old regulation, as you can read at the bottom, required proof of independent income in order for a consumer to open a new credit card account, and that was intended to help prevent defaults by college students, which is a great idea, but that rule had the unfortunate effect of excluding stay-at-home spouses opening new accounts as well, because they didn't have independent income. So what this proposed rule was going to change was to require that proof of independent income only for people under the age of 21. The change would still protect college students from running up large debts, but it would also allow stay-at-home spouses who have a reasonable expectation of access to family income, even if they don't have independent income, to qualify for new credit cards. And at the bottom, the very bottom of that first column, is the state and the federal register for comments. And what follows in the next column are instructions for how to submit those public comments. Following the review of the public comments, the Bureau issued its final rule again in the federal register, and this was just about two weeks ago. You can see in the second bubble here that it's already in effect as of May 3rd, although the credit card companies have six months to develop policies and procedures that comply. Reading, you'll see in the third bubble on the right that the Bureau received more than 300 comments from the public, including consumers' consumer protection groups, trade groups, retailers, banks, credit unions, basically anyone who had some kind of stake in this rule submitted a comment, and the agency read through them all and has summarized them in this final rule. You can also read the full text to most of the comments on a website called regulations.gov. And the easiest way to track those kind of things is using the regulatory ID number, the RIN, which is over on the left-hand first column. I don't have it highlighted here. And you can also see in this page on the federal register it explains what section of the Code of Federal Regulations would be amended. And you can go to the ECFR, which is an unofficial, more currently updated version of the CFR that's available on FDCIS. This is available through GPO. The official CFR on FDCIS and in print is updated in sections on a quarterly basis. And this version that's available on GPO's website is updated within a day or two. The screenshot is from last week. It's updated as of yesterday, today. So I like to use this ECFR version. Even though they say it's unofficial, it's more current than the official one, so it can be helpful in incorporating those newest rules. So just like statutory codes pointing back to session laws, administrative codes also include those parenthetical history notes, which point you back to the original rules in the federal register, gives you the citations to the two rules that have amended this code section in the Code of Federal Regulations. So bottom line with the executive branch, it's really important to also look for executive branch regulations in addition, just like you would look for statutes. They are the law, too. They're legally binding, and they can give you additional details that are not contained in your relevant statute sometimes. And when you're researching administrative law materials, you probably would want to start again with the administrative code for your jurisdiction, federal or state, or a combination, again. The executive branch also produces other legal materials that might be of interest to researchers. They aren't necessarily primary law, but are of interest. So things like memoranda, reports, press releases, and even administrative law decisions, which function very similarly to judicial branch courts, what's available is going to vary widely by agency, and the agency website will probably give you a good deal of access to a lot of this material, although some of the historical or exceptionally sensitive items might require a state or federal Freedom of Information Act request. So onto the judiciary. The law or the primary source material we're talking about here are court opinions and orders. And 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 a regulation to a particular situation. But in our common law system, these interpretations also add to the existing law by creating precedent for future courts to follow in similar situations that cannot be distinguished in some way. And I should mention here that the majority of case law precedent that you'll find is going to come from appellate courts, despite the fact that they are a relatively tiny fraction of the case law that's heard annually. So there's obvious practical reasons for this. There's a huge amount of number of cases in trial courts. I don't think a library could hold them all. And most of what you see in trial courts are fairly routine applications of settled law to a specific situation. When you get up to the appeals level, it gets a little more selective. Appeals to the intermediate court are usually of right. The losing party is generally entitled to that first appeal, even though they don't always choose to exercise that right. Appeals to the court of last resort are discretionary. So the U.S. Supreme Court and the highest courts in the states generally get to choose what cases they're going to hear. And so these are just a teeny tiny fraction of the overall case law in U.S. courts. So it's from these two top appellate levels where we typically will see our case law precedent being created. Sometimes you might get a researcher who's interested in researching a current civil lawsuit or a criminal trial. So looking at something in that lower, this pyramid's not the scale, but the big chunk of the pyramid here. Those materials are going to be generally less easily accessible, although the growth of electronic filing systems for lawyers have improved access a little bit. For state trial materials, generally you'd have to go through the court clerk's office where the case was heard or is being heard. New sources can also be a really good way to get a hold of high-profile cases that are big in the news. For federal materials in trial courts and trial courts back to the mid-1990s, PACER, Public Access to Court Electronic Records, PACER.gov, is your best bet for getting those filings. In both cases, though, there's going to be fees attached. So just be aware of that. It's important to know your relevant jurisdictions for determining whether a particular case you find is binding precedent on you or not. I've got links up here at the top to a map of the federal courts and also a link to the websites of state judiciaries to help researchers understand the court structures that we're talking about. It's also really important for a legal researcher to understand that there are parallel federal and state court systems and to know which systems their legal problem would be heard in because that impacts the research process. Our hypothetical patron who's suing his landlord in North Carolina about failing to repair broken windows is not going to care what a court in Hawaii has to say about that issue because it doesn't matter in North Carolina what Hawaii courts do about that same issue. If that patron were in Hawaii, he wouldn't care what North Carolina courts had to say. There are times when courts might be persuaded by what other state courts are doing or what outside courts are doing, but that's usually in the absence of any binding authority within the state you're in. And I've got to tell you, there's a lot of binding authority out there. So as you can see here, the U.S. Supreme Court binds both state and federal lower courts, although the state's courts of last resort are the final word on matters of purely state law. So basically as long as their state law doesn't conflict with the federal constitution, they're pretty much set. Intermediate courts of appeal tend to bind the lower courts within that jurisdiction, although if you're in a jurisdiction with more than one intermediate appellate court, you do often see disagreement among those different areas in the federal system that's called a circuit split for the circuit courts of appeal. And states will vary. Some only have one intermediate appellate court, so it's not really a problem and some have several. And finally, in both systems, the trial level courts don't create precedent. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, it's common not to be able to locate the decisions or orders at this level at all. There's a number of sources for finding case law within the federal system in the U.S. states. So I'll just highlight a few. First, our old friend Lexus next is academic. If your institution subscribes, 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 are little outlines and summaries of the main points of law that are contained in the case. Makes it easier to be able to quickly call it a glance whether a particular case is useful to you. A few years ago, Google Scholar added federal and state case law to its collection, which was very welcome from the free law community. And also, the Self-Help Web Portal Sign Law includes a number of case law databases, although they tend to be more segmented by their jurisdiction and you have to drill down and outline a little bit more. And their dates of coverage can vary, too. Whatever source you're using, it's really important to be aware of date limitation because old cases might still be good law and they might still be relevant law. So think back to our poor patron who had his problem with his landlord. In the North Carolina Code, we discovered that landlords seem to be on the hook for repairing a broken window on the ground floor because it's considered an imminently dangerous condition. But we wondered, does the statute also encompass fixing a broken window screen? So say my ground floor window is fine, but the screen is really torn up and ugly. The statute doesn't mention screens explicitly, so this is a good example of where a case law might flesh out the meaning of the statute further. And this time, I'm going to use that annotated version of the code, which is available in Lexus Nexus Academic. I pulled up the same text that we looked at before, General Statutes section 42-42, that discusses imminently dangerous condition. And in the editorial editions, the research headnotes that they add in this commercial version of the code, we start to see some cases that have been decided in North Carolina Courts. And we see standard of care is the habitability. There's a case here from the North Carolina Court of Appeals I can tell from the citation here at 100 NC App 395. From 1990, that suggests that landlords do not have a common law duty to provide or maintain protective window screens. So unfortunately for this plaintiff, whose child apparently fell through a window that had no screen or had a torn screen, perhaps, the court said, no, this isn't part of the landlord's duty here. So if you have access to an annotated code, that can be a real time saver in taking out a few cases, and you can snowball again your research from there. If you don't have an annotated code, you could run your terms through a full text case law database like Google Scholar. I did a simple search for our topic, landlord repair window screen in North Carolina Courts, and that same Moodisar case came up. So my next research question becomes, is this case still good law in North Carolina? I mentioned earlier that the law is always changing. Statutes get amended, they get repealed, they get overturned by courts for being unconstitutional. Regulations get revised, they get repealed, they can get overturned by courts. Case law can be overruled by later cases. It can be superseded by the passage of a new statute that makes the old case irrelevant, and so on. It's really easy for a researcher to find primary law on any topic. It's much harder to tell if it's valid or relevant for your research problem. So citator tools help bring a researcher's findings up to date. Unfortunately for pro se researchers, this is really where the premium legal research tools differentiate themselves from the free and low cost alternatives out there. Westlaw's Keysight Service and Lexus Nexus's Shepherd's Services are really the gold standard in determining the current status of a primary law source. And again, you're just not going to have access to these outside of a law library. And in fact, our law library is not able to provide any public access to Westlaw. But again, if your library has access to Lexus Nexus Academic, you do have a mini version of Shepherd's, which can be used for case law and for selected secondary sources. Unlike the premium product from law schools, you can't use it to shepherdize statute citations or court rules or regulations. The best work around there that I can suggest is to search for those citations as keywords. It's not a perfect solution. But pro se researchers can still take advantage of Shepherd's for case law in Lexus Nexus Academic. So I'll show it to you quickly here. On Lexus Academic, Shepherd's has its own link in the U.S. legal section. I'm going to enter the citation to the case. So that's the volume, case reporter abbreviation, and first page number. I could also have used the NC app citation. It's a parallel citation. So this case is published in two different freight reporters. You could also have searched for the case name by party in the look up the legal case section in the middle and then shepherdize it by clicking on the little symbol that's next to the case name within Lexus Nexus Academic. You'll see different symbols depending on how subsequent courts have cited back to the case. So that is if it's been treated positively or negatively. There's a legend at the bottom of the Shepherd's report, which I've linked there, but a green plus sign is pretty self-explanatory, right? In this case, Shepherd's found it's no later case law which is cited back to Moodisar. So it seems like it's still good law. There's just some citations to a statute and to eight treatises. Lower down the page, you can't see it. If I clicked on subsequent appellate history, you'd also see that there was an appeal to the court of last resort, at least an attempt. But the North Carolina Supreme Court denied review, so they chose not to hear that discretionary appeal. Let's see how Google Scholar stacks up to a commercial premium option. It includes later citations to a document in case law and secondary sources. It's linked at the bottom of the case as cited by and then a number. But it doesn't characterize the treatment as clearly as Shepherd's does. But I've searched for the case here, limiting the legal documents, and then to North Carolina courts. And you can see I get two results. So one is for the court of appeals case from 1990, and one is the full text of the North Carolina's denial of review, the Supreme Court's denial of the attempted appeal. And I see that Google Scholar knows about three citations back to that court of appeals case compared to Lexus Nexus Academics 9. So already I feel like something's missing. Like Lexus Nexus Academic, all of these are secondary sources and statutes. The statutes down at the bottom and then two secondary sources. What's missing from Lexus are basically books that are published by Lexus that aren't indexed in Google Books. The two books on Google are actually not listed in Shepherd's. So you can pick up different secondary sources within different citators. But certainly I hope that you would encounter all of the same primary law, which is citing back to your original case. That's where it gets a little scary to be using the free sources. If you're getting different primary law results, that's not a good sign. Legal researchers need to check the validity of every single source that they plan to use and a legal filing and also to keep up with the latest changes. And this can be really difficult with the free and general academic research systems. Both Westlaw and Lexus used to offer a la carte citator service by credit card to their key site and shepherd services, but they both discontinued those products. So it can be pretty difficult at this stage to really update your research with what's available. All right. So just to bring this all together, we still don't have a cut and dry answer if we're that hypothetical patron wanting to sue his landlord. We found a lot of what ifs in the secondary sources and statutes in case law, proving what I said earlier that the answer is always it depends. It depends what state you live in. In North Carolina, it depends if we're talking about a broken window versus a broken window screen. If it's a window, it depends on what floor that broken window is located. In other states, it might depend entirely on what your lease says, those states we found in the encyclopedia, and so on. I hope this quick overview has made legal research a bit more accessible to you and your patrons while still underscoring that it is an incredibly complex process, which is not for the faint of heart. And it's important to assess if a legal researcher who comes to you is really up for the challenge. If they're pushing for too much intervention on your part, they probably just need to be referred to an attorney. If they are comfortable with being set up with general background materials on their legal problem, getting them started with some secondary sources might be just what they need. And if they find some known citations within those secondary sources or if they're really comfortable with the intricacies of down-and-dirty legal research, then you're good to go. We don't have, unfortunately, very much time for questions, but if you think of any an hour later, please be sure to contact me. I've got my information there.