Let me weigh in on the subject of advanced legal research. I think that part
of the reason we don't have any consensus about what goes into such a course is
that very few of us have ever taken one. Until library schools offer these
courses, the librarians who teach them to law students are bound to be making
them up as they go along, with, at best, mixed results.
Let me offer three schools of thought about what ought to be in such a course:
(1) Advanced Legal Research is simply basic legal research in disguise. You
need to call it "advanced" to get it past the curriculum committee in your law
school, but the students know so little about research that there's no option
but to start at the very beginning and teach the basics.
(2) Advanced Legal Research starts where ever basic legal research training
left off, and does more of the same. If the most basic sources, like statutes
and cases, have been covered, you teach either less common sources (legislative
history, treaty research, foreign law, etc.) or special areas (tax, labor,
environmental, etc.).
(3) Advanced Legal Research looks at basic research tools and problems from an
advanced perspective. You study a little of the theory of indexing, and then
deconstruct the West Key Number Digests, Shepard's Citators, LEXIS, and
WESTLAW's WIN in light of that theory. You discuss the relative levels of
cognitive authority of legislative history and law reviews. You study the
history of law publishing, and understand American Law Reports, Corpus Juris,
and the National Reporter System both in the context of their original markets
and their present places in the world of law publishing.
The third model is far and away the most interesting to teach, and in my mind
has, in the long run, the most secure place in a law school curriculum. I've
tried to teach the third model in law school Advanced Legal Research courses at
the University of Texas and the University of New Mexico, and that's the
approach I'm now taking for my Advanced Legal Bibliography seminar in the UCLA
library school.
There are several who have, at least to some extent, tried to teach a course
that is genuinely advanced, in both content and method. Bob Berring's wildly
popular ALR course at Berkeley mixes models 1 and 3, and (though I don't know
what these schools are doing now) courses taught by Terry Martin at Harvard and
Morris Cohen at Yale also made it a point to discover the intellectual
underpinnings of legal research.
The great problem of model 3 is that most people are not teaching it, and so we
don't really know what's in it. It's a hard course to develop--it doesn't grow
naturally out of your reference practice, so it takes more time to put together
than a course based on model 1 or model 2. I've been teaching this approach
self-consciously for eight years, now, and I'm still wandering. But I've
learned from some mistakes. For example, I'll never again try to get law
students to sit still for a unit on descriptive cataloging.
--Dan Dabney, Asst. Prof., UCLA GSLIS
iasedpd@aix.oac.ucla.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03/07/00 PST