Advanced Legal Research: LLMs and SJDs

This course will offer LLM and SJD students an opportunity to gain in-depth working knowledge of American legal research methods and resources. The course will emphasize the use and comparison of a broad range of legal research tools. The course will review the complete range of federal and state primary sources, legislative history, administrative materials, and major secondary resources.

Upon completion of this course students should be able to evaluate research options and make choices that best suit the widest possible variety of academic legal research situations. Each module will focus on a specific type of resource or research process and will include prerecorded videos, demonstrations of relevant electronic resources, and opportunities for student participation via discussion boards. Each module will include a research exercise to both measure and enhance the student s expertise. This bibliographic approach to the legal research process will lay the groundwork for the course s capstone project, an annotated bibliography in an area approved by the instructors. Students are encouraged to choose an area related to their dissertation topic. The capstone project will provide students with an opportunity to review all the studied resources within the context of a discreet substantive question relevant to their interests.

Each student s course grade will be based on (1) homework assignments, (2) the capstone project, and (3) participation. Participation will be graded according to Canvas discussion boards and presentations of research exercises.

All assigned work for this course must be completed by the end of the semester. We will not give an incomplete.

Notice: The University has a license agreement with Turnitin, an educational tool that helps prevent or identify plagiarism from Internet resources. Your instructor may use the service in this class by requiring that assignments are submitted electronically to be checked by Turnitin. The Turnitin Report will indicate the amount of original text in your work and whether all material that you quoted, paraphrased, summarized, or used from another source is appropriately referenced.