 Hi, this is Mary Wissner from the Gallagher Law Library. Today I'd like to introduce you to secondary sources. As a reminder, primary sources are texts that have legal effect. They come from government bodies, like legislatures or courts, that are empowered to make law by constitutions. They include legislation, judicial decisions, and regulations and agency decisions. We have videos on this, see Fundamentals of Law Part 1 and Part 2. Secondary sources are writings about the law. They report, describe, analyze, explain, and criticize. And they do this while citing primary sources. This is really important for your research, because if you want to find primary sources, a great way to do it is to find a good secondary source that lays out what the important cases and statutes are. Secondary sources vary on many dimensions. They can be very short, like a tweet or a one paragraph blog post, or they can be very long, like a 30 volume treatise. They can vary in tone from something very casual, like a tweet, to something very scholarly. They can vary on how practical they are. From very practical, these are the steps you need to go through in order to file a will for probate in the King County Superior Court, or they can be very theoretical. What is property? Why do we have property? Why do we have inheritance? They vary on how current they are, from terribly out of date to very, very recent. They vary on jurisdiction. Do they discuss one state, many states, federal law, federal and all state? They vary on point of view, from a neutral description to ardent advocacy for a position. Here's a matrix where we consider just two of those dimensions, casual to scholarly along one axis and short to long along another. So we could have some things that are scholarly, but short, scholarly and long, casual and short, casual and long. For example, a three sentence definition from Black's Law Dictionary. The definition is very short, although the dictionary is not short, and it's scholarly. A blog post from above the law is short, and it has a casual tone. Federal practice and procedure is a multi-volume treatise by a team of law professors. It is very long and very scholarly. A law review article is medium length, say 50 pages, and scholarly. Working together, a legal guide for unmarried couples is medium length and casual. You'll learn about lots of sources and their features, legal encyclopedias, form books, American law reports, study aids, practice manuals, usage guides, restatements, and on and on and on. How will you learn about them? Well, you can read texts and watch videos like this one, but the most effective way to really learn about them is to use them. As you work on assignments and pursue your own research, you'll use different types of secondary sources. You'll get a sense for how they work and what's likely to be helpful for you for which type of question. Study aids are materials to help law students in their classes. We have separate videos about these. Study aids, part one, what are they? Study aids, part two, West academic, and study aids, part three, Cali. Law review articles are scholarly articles about law. We also have separate videos about law reviews. Part one, what are they? Part two, where to look them up? Part three, how to search for them. Now from here on out, I'm going to give you a real quick tour of several important types of secondary sources. First off, legal dictionaries. First, Black's Law Dictionary. It's pretty current. The 11th edition just came out in 2019. It is often cited by courts and by scholars. It is scholarly. It's available on Westlaw. A free legal dictionary that you might want to bookmark is from the non-profit Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law. Here's the URL, www.law.cornell.edu slash w-e-x. Here's an example of the definition of certiori from Black's Law Dictionary and Wex. The definition from Black's is more formal and scholarly. The definition from Wex is a little more conversational. Legal Encyclopedias. There are two big national sets. American Jurisprudence II called Amjur or Amjur II and Corpus Juris Secundum called CJS. They both cover hundreds of topics from abatement to zoning. Some articles are very long, even more than a volume. They cite cases from around the country. They are both on Westlaw. Lexus also has Amjur but not CJS. Here's an example of some pieces from the Products Liability article in Amjur II. We're in the middle of it. They're giving us an overview of when a manufacturer is strictly liable. You have a very dry sentence. A manufacturer is strictly liable in tort when an article here she places on the market knowing that it is to be used without inspection for defect proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being. Footnote one. And then footnote one cites cases. American law reports produces articles that they call annotations that gather and summarize cases from around the country on focused topics. Now we just looked at American Jurisprudence which has a long article covering all of Products Liability. Here's American law reports with an annotation liability of manufacturer or distributor for injuries arising from allegedly defective artificial knee devices or prostheses. If you're litigating an artificial knee case, this will be really good. The big general article on Products Liability might not say very much about artificial knees but this annotation does. On the other hand, if you want an overview of all of Products Liability, focusing on artificial knees first is not going to be helpful. Treatises and practice manuals can be one volume, several volumes, or more. Here we have a picture of the Washington Partnership and Limited Liability Company desk book. This is a practice manual. It's called a desk book because the idea is that an attorney can have a copy of it on her desk. We also have a photo of part of Moore's Federal Practice which is a very big treatise about civil procedure and you would have to have a very, very, very big desk indeed in order to have all of this on your desk. Typically, practice manuals and treatises have access points that include tables of contents and indexes. When you use them online, you can search them full text. Bloomberg Law, Lexis, and Westlaw all have treatises and practice guides. Note, this is important. Different systems license different treatises. Here are some examples. Federal practice and procedure on Westlaw, Moore's Federal Practice on Lexis, Supreme Court Practice on Bloomberg Law. So if you're a civil procedure expert, you might want to use all three systems. Damages in tort actions is on Lexis, DOB's law of torts is on Westlaw, and pharmaceutical and medical device law is on Bloomberg Law. For state-specific practice, California causes of action is on Bloomberg Law. The law of evidence in Washington is on Lexis. The Washington practice series is on Westlaw. Treatises and practice materials are also available in West academic study aids. Horn books sort of bridge the gap between study aids and something very serious that a lawyer would use in sight in a brief. I often consider a horn book a treatise. The Washington State Bar Association has desk books that we have available on our library website to UW users. Treatises and practice manuals might also be on other systems depending on what you're working on. So, for instance, we subscribe to many things on Oxford Handbooks Online, Elgar Online, which is especially strong for international comparative law, Checkpoint, which has tax materials, and the National Consumer Law Center, which has consumer law materials. Where should you start? How do you learn about these sources? Practice. The more you use the sources, the better you understand how they work. In Lexis Westlaw or Bloomberg, you can search across many secondary sources at once, see what you get, and then pay attention. Oh, I found something helpful in an encyclopedia. I found something helpful in this treatise. Oh, this is what an ALR annotation does. Georgetown Law Library has a terrific set of web pages called treatise finders that direct you to the leading treatises for different areas of law. And I think it's really great to ask a reference librarian. We don't know all the answers, but we generally have a good idea about the types of sources that are worth trying for a given project or question. So go ahead, ask us, looking for information about this case, looking information about the historical development of this doctrine. I want social science commentary on this legal development. We can often direct you to a good type of secondary source. We have a library guide on secondary sources, too, to recap. Secondary sources are materials about the law. Throughout law school and law practice, you'll use a variety of secondary sources, such as law reviews, legal encyclopedias, and treatises. The more you use them, the more you'll understand which tools can help you with which questions. Again, this has been Mary Wissner from the Gallagher Law Library. See our website for library services, research guides, and more. That's lib.law.uw.edu.