On teaching advanced legal research

Legal Reference Services Quarterly

Volumn 28, Issue 1-2, 2009, Pages 101-131

  Knott, Christopher A ^a  

^a University of Maine School of Law   (United States)

Author keywords

ALR; Competency; Evaluation; Fluency; Mastery; Syllabus

Indexed keywords

EID: 71049168268     PISSN: 0270319X     EISSN: 1540949X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/02703190902961502     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. See, for example, Ann Hemmens, Advanced Legal Research Courses: A Survey of ABA-Accredited Law Schools 94 L. Lib. J. 209, 220 (Spring 2002) (where nearly 64.9% of a large sample of law schools offered at least one ALR course in the 2000-2001 academic year).
2. An excellent recent examination of the current state of information literacy in beginning law students is Ian Gallacher, "Who Are These Guys?": The Results of a Survey Studying the Information Literacy of Incoming Law Students (July 31, 2007), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=1004088 (among the findings are that not only do law students lack adequate information literacy skills, but they also have an unrealistically positive view of those skills).
3. I often ask students in one of the first classes of a given semester to compose a Google, Lexis, or Westlaw query designed to find all of the cases in a particular jurisdiction dealing with capital punishment. When asked to do so, most students can navigate successfully to the appropriate Web site or database and enter a search for "capital punishment" without considering all of the variety of synonyms (e.g., "execution," "death penalty," etc.) that are used in opinions even within one jurisdiction. As the semester progresses, students thus prepared are better able to recognize and understand a risk of keyword searching far more difficult to overcome; the literal nature of the keyword search destroys context in many cases. In other words, the human mind can impose an order on concepts and ideas that transcends vocabulary. Finding all of the opinions from New York that mention Hamlet using a keyword search is easy; but using a keyword search to find all of the opinions from New York in which some instance of jury misconduct was found to be harmless is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.
4. See Appendix A for an example of a list of principles or concepts compiled during a recent semester. I wrote short explanatory paragraphs for each point I wished to emphasize and distributed this document to the students at the last class meeting. In my view, this does not constitute spoon-feeding students answers or insights, rather the document memorializes and amplifies what I have worked to impart throughout the semester.
5. See Appendix B for an example of a short-answer pretest I administered in a recent semester.
6. See Appendix C for an example of a multiple-choice pretest.
7. See Appendix D for an example of a research problem pretest.
8. See Appendix E for an example of a student outline.