By Jason Wilson
From Miles Oscar Price and Harry Bitner, I give you an excerpt from Effective Legal Research: A Practice Manual of Law Books and Their Use (Little, Brown & Co. 1953):
D. Law Book Characteristics.
Because primary authority is usually published in chronological rather than in classified order, and because the latest statute or decision may substantially alter or affect a legal rule, law books have assumed certain quite definite characteristics, a knowledge of which is essential to the searcher. Most law books bear a striking resemblance to each other. The familiar National Reporter System “advance sheet,” is to a considerable extent, the epitome of law books. It has a table of cases (the most nearly universal of all law book features); a table of statutes construed (also, in some form or other, a common law book feature); a list of “words and phrases” defined (found in most digest and in many other books); and a digest or elaborate index which is the lawyer’s most necessary tool for extracting the rules of case law. Other features of law books are transfer or conversion tables (from one form of statute to another, or from one form of case citation to another).
What to Look for in a Law Book. The reader should first of all ascertain what the law book covers—by subject matter and date—and how it is put together. The title page tells who wrote or edited the book and what it is about. If it is a supplement to another book, dates covered are usually noted. The table of contents furnishes valuable clues as to the organization of the book. Frequently, a very useful feature is the preface or introduction, which may supply a background or history of the subject matter of the book which aides the reader in his understanding of what it is about. Other characteristics are mentioned in the paragraph immediately above, and their presence or absence in a book should be ascertained, and where in it they are situated.
Abbreviations. Lawyers cite thousands of authorities from hundreds of publications. In order to lessen the prohibitive labor involved in writing these citations out in full, an elaborate system of abbreviated citations has been evolved, which is followed in all legal writing. … Nearly every book in which abbreviations are employed lists them, together with the full title of the work abbreviated. These lists are a necessary part of the lawyer’s equipment….
Speed of Publication and Supplementation of Law Books. Nearly all types of law books except student and philosophical treatises and dictionaries aim to keep up with the very latest developments of statute or case law. Therefore, law books are geared to speed of original publication and to frequency of supplementation.
Importance of Publication Dates. The date of a statute, case, treatise, or citator is one of its most vital elements. A superseded bit of authority is not only useless but dangerous. A secondary book of index—as a digest, practitioner’s book or citator—depends for much of its value upon how recent it is. The searcher should therefore acquire the invariable habit of looking at the date, the title page, the notation on a supplement—anything which will tell him whether the publication he is consuming will do the job for him.
Tools for Using Law Books. The fundamental materials of the law—the statutes and reported cases—are by far the best indexed of all professional literature. Through the available indexes it is possible, if not always simple, to extract the legal principles set forth in every reported American case from 1658 to a few days ago; to find such a case by its name; and to tell whether it is still good authority. Similarly, this can be done for statutes and for English material. These tools are known as indexes, tables, digests, citators, form books, treatises (including also legal encyclopedias and periodicals), and dictionaries.
Nearly 60 years later, it strikes me as odd that most of what you might look for in a law book still applies, even with the prevalence of a digital medium. If you are new (read: law students, recent law graduates) to law books and, in particular, secondary sources, I would encourage you to pick one up and ask yourself, what characteristics of this thing make it useful, reliable, and most of all, valuable. Write them down, and then try to find those characteristics in other products you use to “find” the law.
[Image (CC) by cdsessums]
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