Unless you are well
acquainted with the area of law your research problem falls into, your
search for the relevant law will probably begin by consulting a secondary
source. Secondary sources consist of treatises,legal
encyclopedias, and digests. These will lead
you to primary sources which consist of constitutions,
statutes
and case law.
Reference Chart for
Researching California Case Law
Legal Encyclopedias are multi-volume, multi-topic
works which assemble dicussions of the entire body of law. Popular legal
encyclopedias are American Jurisprudence,Cal.Jur.3d and
Corpus
Juris Secundum.
Digests organize the entire body of law into
many individual topics with summaries of points of law from individual
cases. In the West Key Number System each point of law is given
a number and that number is assigned to every headnote in every reported
case which correlates to that same point of law. Thus, a researcher can
take a key number and find other cases that discuss that same point of
law. In addition to West's California Digest there is a General
Digest which includes federal cases as well as cases from all 50 states.
Every 10 years these cases are cumulated into a Decennial Digest
and a new General Digest is begun.
Digests also contain Descriptive Word Indexes.
By cross-referencing words from your factual situation a researcher can
be led to the Key Number topics which are in point. For example, a researcher
trying to determine whether umpires can be held liable for bad calls, can
look up the term "umpires" in the Descriptive Word Index, which would tell
the researcher that the relevant Key Number is found under the topic "Exhibitions
and Shows."
Legal Research 101