3 Case Law
Introduction
Case law research is what many think of when they think of legal research. The process can be overwhelming because of the number of cases you can retrieve online, but there are ways to make finding, selecting, and updating cases more manageable.
After an introduction to the Georgia court system, the rest of this chapter will illustrate case law research.
Note: The videos below (and this week’s assignment) don’t use secondary sources or statutes to assist with finding cases because I want you to get a sense of how to use the case law research tools. You will use all of the methods together — secondary sources, statutes, and case law — in later assignments.
Georgia Court System
Just as I encourage you to use secondary sources so that you don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to research, I am also using a guide from the Georgia courts website that gives a great overview of the Georgia court system, including a chart illustrating jurisdiction. Here it is.
There are six levels of trial courts in Georgia — superior, state, juvenile, probate, magistrate and municipal— and all but superior courts are of limited jurisdiction. Superior courts are Georgia’s general jurisdiction trial court, and Georgia has two levels of appellate courts — Court of Appeals and Supreme Court.
Here’s a video on Georgia courts and precedent.
(All video links go to eLC. Let me know if you have problems accessing them. Also, they work best in full screen mode.)
Finding Cases
We’re going to be using 3 different legal research databases to search for cases: Westlaw, Lexis, and BloombergLaw.
Topical Searching
Using Citators
Keyword Searching
Selecting Cases
Once you’ve found cases on your topic or issue, you can filter results or search within results if you need to narrow the results by jurisdiction, a particular fact pattern, date, etc. There are also a number of new visualization tools that can assist you in selecting cases. While you’ll still need to do quite a bit of reading and synthesizing of cases, the latest research tools can help make this more manageable.
Filtering Your Results
(You can save the rest of the chapter for next week’s assignment, if you like.)
Updating Cases
Advanced Case Searching
Advanced Case Selection
I found this awesome article by Norman Douglas, and I was going to try and paraphrase it for you. But then I decided not to — I want you to read it for yourself. It’s that good. Here it is.