Legal Research for Educators

This book is in the form of a bibliographic essay, and addresses the needs of educators seeking access to legal research materials. The first item discussed is court decisions and examples are given which demonstrate the importance of legal precedent. An explanation is given of the complicated systems for reporting court decisions and how the educational researcher can find a case, read it, and apply its findings to the particular problem at hand. A section is devoted to finding information about legislation, codes and statutes, and understanding legislative intent. Included in this section are discussions on hearings and reports, researching bills that fail, determining the status of pending legislation, and state legislation. The next three sections discuss finding and using federal agency publications, list useful legal periodicals and reference works, and describe law library indexing systems. The final section discusses the revolution that has been brought to law libraries by the advent of computerized legal research and explains how an educator may make use of the complex resources available through computerized searches. (JD)