Unit 6--Online Legal Research LEXIS

Unit 6 Discussion Make sure you go to the discussion board to post the holding, or ruling, of your case. The legal principle that your chosen case establishes is now a rule of law. The rule of law is the “R” component of FIRAC. Class, what does FIRAC stand for?

Assignments There are two assignments this Unit. 1) Workbook Exercises II.A and II.B located on pages of Sloan, A. E. and Schwinn, S. D. (2007). Basic Legal Research Workbook (3 rd ed.). New York: Aspen Publishers. 2) The Bluebook Assignment

The Bluebook Assignment The Bluebook Assignment is about parentheticals. You will need to use your Bluebook heavily to complete this exercise. In order to complete this exercise, you will need to create THREE different citations.

Citation #1: 1) Pretend that you are citing the dissent in your opinion (even if your opinion does not actually have a dissent). If your case does not have a real dissent, then pretend that Justice O’Connor is the author of the dissent. See my post in Doc Sharing about how and why to do this. See also Rule (page 91).

Citation #2: Pretend that the portion of the opinion you are citing relies heavily on an earlier case. This case can be any case, but you may benefit from finding an actual case related to your landmark case. Provide the name and citation to the earlier case in proper Bluebook form. See Rule (page 92).

Citation #3: 3) Pretend that your case was later over- ruled by Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528 (1985). (Do not worry if your case is actually more recent than Garcia.) Give me the citation that you would use to indicate that your case is now overruled. See Rule (bottom of page 93).

LEXIS How to find LEXIS in the Library Go to Look at the upper- right hand corner, under “Library”

Go to the Library

Browse the left-hand column

This is the first screen

Browse to the “Legal” tab

Click on the U.S. Supreme Court Cases, Lawyers’ Edition database. Note that you can also combine databases by putting a check in multiple boxes, but we don’t need to do that yet. In the beginning, it is best to start in the smallest database you can.

You can choose to search in multiple ways.

Natural Language A good place to start if you have a secondary source which is discussing the type of case you are looking for. For example: You have just read a news article about a recent Supreme Court case. See it here: /local_story_ html /local_story_ html /local_story_ html

You can copy some text from the article, such as You can copy some text from the article, such as “The recent decision by the high court regarding the use of race as a criteria for assignment will have a direct effect on the districts of Seattle and Louisville, Ky., only. It will not have detrimental consequences on Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. In this regard, the fears of the decision having a negative effect are unfounded.” Remember, don’t use the quotation marks! Use a date restriction (“Previous Year”) and the result will be ten cases. Our first result is the case you want: Parents Involved in Cmty. Sch. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 127 S. Ct. 2738; 168 L. Ed. 2d 508; 2007 U.S. LEXIS 8670 (2007).

Easy Search “Easy Search” is like Google. If you like how Google works with a limited number of terms, you may find “Easy Search” is best to start out with. You can use quotation marks to search for phrases.

Terms & Connectors Very powerful way of searching, but requires learning the skill set. Uses connectors such as AND, OR, and NOT Can search using exact phrases (“”) Nested searches and Order of operations Universal Characters (* !)