LLM Common Law Research & Writing Resources

This lesson focuses on case briefing. The lesson will guide students through cases identifying the most important part of cases to prepare for classes.

This lesson will take you step-by-step through a method of representing the content from cases in an outline.

A basic introduction (or refresher!) about sources of law, court structure, and precedent.

This is an exercise designed to introduce first-semester law and graduate students to the basic elements of a typical case "brief" and to teach them general methodology for writing their own briefs.

In law school, students are expected to read multiple cases to identify rules that will be applied on exams. Using non-law sources, students will learn how to extract individual rules from multiple articles to create one synthesized rule that can be used to solve new problems.

This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion.

This lesson explains some key differences between legal writing and exam writing. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between legal writing and exam writing. Next, the lesson explains the differences between legal writing and exam writing.

This series of exercises is designed to help the user recognize whether an issue involves federal or state legal issues, and to select legal research sources appropriate to the jurisdiction and the applicable law. This exercise assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of legal research sources.

This lesson covers Delaware primary legal research resources including the state's constitution, statutory code, legislative history materials, administrative code, administrative bulletin, case decisions, court rules, and legal ethics materials.

This lesson reviews the secondary legal research resources available for Delaware. The resources include practice guides, form books, form databases, websites, and current awareness services. The lesson also explains how to use general secondary legal research resources to find Delaware law. Both electronic and print format resources are covered.

This lesson will provide an overview of secondary resources used in legal research.

This lesson is designed to help law students develop their abilities to handle legal research assignments. Students who have some experience doing legal research or who have completed their first year legal research course will benefit the most.

This lesson introduces the student to the doctrine and processes involved in interpreting state and federal statutes. Statutes are a critical part of every substantive area of the law, so this is important background for every student, legal professional, lawyer and judge.

This lesson will teach you how to use all the major legal citators - Shepard's in print, Shepard's on Lexis, KeyCite on Westlaw and BCite on Bloomberg Law - to locate additional useful cases when starting with one case or other document, and to find secondary resources such as law reviews when starting with a case or other document.

This lesson provides an overview of the branches of the U.S. government and how each branch makes law.