Secondary Sources and Practice Aids

Researching secondary sources is often a good place to start for areas of law new to a researcher; print resources in general are preferable to online sources for areas of law new to a researcher; therefore, print secondary sources are often where a researcher may want to start to gain a broad introduction and overview for such an area of law before delving into primary and/or online resources. Secondary sources include legal encyclopedias like Corpus Juris Secundum (C.J.S.) or American Jurisprudence (Am. Jur. 2d), treatises, practice guides, hornbooks, and Nutshells (condensed overviews of law published by West).

Legal encyclopedias provide useful summaries on a wide variety of legal topics, and are best searched using their subject indexes. Footnotes found in the summaries can be helpful by keying the researcher in to relevant primary authority. Oregon does not have its own encyclopedia, but I learned from Rowe's text that some states do, such as Florida and California. Treatises are often written for a wide legal audience as opposed to any given jurisdiction. However, there are some written that are Oregon specific, such as Kirkpatrick's Oregon Evidence. Treatises tend to be more comprehensive than hornbooks or Nutshells, but both give an overview of an area of law. Practice guides are less theoretical and more about how to put a particular area of law into practice. In Oregon, one of the most helpful secondary sources are the practice or deskbooks published by the Oregon State Bar. Another useful practice guide in Oregon is the Oregon Law and Practice series by West. Also useful are the Continuing Legal Education materials published by the Oregon State Bar that attorneys use to stay current; many of these contain practical and up-to-the-minute information. Rowe notes that how authoritative a treatise or practice guide is relates directly to how well-known and well-respected the author is.

Secondary sources also include law reviews and journals and bar journals. Review and journal articles, usually written by law professors, students, judges, and other legal practitioners, examine specific areas of law thoroughly and in detail, as opposed to being locked into the particular facts of any given case or client situation. While these articles are not updated in the way other types of legal resources are, it is possible to use a citator to see whether an article has been cited favorably, unfavorably, or at all. Periodical indexes are the easiest way to locate articles, particularly the Current Law Index (found in the LegalTrac database). Older print articles are best found in the Index to Legal Periodical and Books for older articles, which indexes articles back to the early 1900s. Finally, HeinOnline offers full-text searching of articles (and is what I used for locating articles for my research project).

Other kinds of secondary sources are numerous. American Law Reports is a unique secondary source that incorporates aspects of law reviews, commentary, and selected full-text cases in one resource. Its commentaries are known as annotations and are particularly useful. In the print versions, there are three ways to search for articles: the Quick Indexes, the regular index, and the A.L.R. Digest. Each index has a slightly different scope, so it can be useful to check all three for thorough research. Rowe discusses "minilibraries," which were new to me, that collocate both primary and secondary sources into one resource. Restatements of the law are collaborative works that provide organized and detailed summaries of specific areas of law. Model codes and uniform laws such as the Uniform Commercial Code or the Model Penal Code are often adopted by governmental bodies, and afterwards become a secondary source for those primary authorities, and are also published by West in an annotated version. Because of the wide range of secondary sources available and their attendant variability in authoritativeness, Rowe notes that careful judgment should be exercised in citing to them for official purposes, if at all.