I have completed the first chapter of Suzanne Rowe's Oregon Legal Research 2d. The chapter covers the basics of types of legal resources, detailing the differences between primary and secondary sources, and mandatory versus persuasive authority. A primary source is a source originating directly from a source of law itself, such as legislation, administrative rules, judicial opinions, and so forth. A secondary source is one that provides commentary on or guides to primary law, including materials such as digests, annotations, treatises, and law journals. Sources that originate directly from the jurisdiction in which a legal issue exists are deemed to have mandatory authority; sources that originate from either neighboring jurisdictions or very similar topics and circumstances are considered to have persuasive authority.
It gives a brief overview of the two major online legal research database providers, LexisNexis and Westlaw, including an introduction to their organization and various search modes, such as searching with terms and connectors, natural language searching, and topic searching. Topic searching and natural language searching have the strength of returning results that can generate a greater number of terms under which your research question might be pursued, and therefore may be useful as a starting point. Terms and connectors, on the other hand, may be more useful once the researcher has generated an exhaustive term list, and has the advantage of being more likely to return a comprehensive and more consistently relevant list of hits. Boolean connectors are also given in a chart. The organization of both databases is touched upon briefly, including how to find and select databases and using search tabs. Finally, this chapter gives an outline for the organization of the rest of the text and appendices.
I also completed my first exercise in preliminary analysis last week. The hypothetical case presented concerned a Portland, Oregon homeowner whose dog bites an intruder into the back yard. Generating all the different possible search terms using the who, what, where, when, and why questions was an exercise that revealed the subjective nature of the research. I used a thesaurus to trigger any terms that weren't forthcoming off the top of my head; and there were definitely a handful of potentially appropriate terms that I would not have generated on my own. Yet I noted that many listed synonyms for a given term were equally inappropriate in their connotation or common usage, and so I made many judgment calls about which terms to select while still being as exhaustive as possible. I noticed that later in the exercise when performing searches on these terms, ultimately only a handful seemed to generate many relevant results. However, some of those in the handful would not have come up if I had not gone through the step of synonym generation; I can see why it is an important step to take.
Looking up the legal term trespass was also eye-opening. Not only were there many specific - and some very obscure - definitions of the word trespass alone, many versions of the term incorporated other terms (some in English, some in Latin!) as well, including the mouthful term that most closely resembled the exercise's research problem: trespass quare clausum fregit. This seems like quite a sophisticated and lengthy term for a relatively commonly understood conception of the word trepass in non-legal terms. When using legal terms, it is obviously very important to make sure the word you are using indicates precisely what you mean from a legal terminology point of view, not just common held (and often imprecisely used) terms.
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