It never fails here that if someone asks a question about, say, fireworks being legal in a certain state, one of the resident legal eagles will come back (usually in minutes) citing a case from New York in 1919 that talks about how the state was within it’s right to outlaw fireworks because of x, y, and z.
Or if you ask about, say, laws against drunk driving, within a nanosecond they will come back with how New Mexico was the first state to outlaw drunken driving on October 4, 1922 at 3:30pm and the vote was 19-14 in the state senate.
I’m guessing that there is some super-secret database that you subscribe to that you can put in search terms and get the relevant information. Is that true? If so, can regular people subscribe? Also, how do you do it pre-internet? Did you need case books from all 50 states?
My information may be somewhat out of date, but I did have a subscription to the Lexis/Nexis databases (where a lot of that kind of data resides) at one point. I remember full access being pretty pricey. I know most lawfirms subscribe, as do many large news operations. See https://www.lexisnexis.com for more info.
A free resource for this sort of thing is www.findlaw.com. Also, states typically have their statutes online somewhere in a searchable format.
The two big subscription legal research services are Lexis and Westlaw. Most lawyers have access to these through work (or school, for law students). They would be really expensive to just buy on your own (many solo practitioners don’t use them because of the cost).
There are also lots of smaller subscription services for specific areas (tax-related ones include Tax Analysts and RIA Checkpoint).
I don’t know what happened in those dark days before the internet. Mostly I try not to think about it.
Certain cases are really famous, and spring to mind quickly.
1a certain cases are famous to practitioners in certain areas of law, and spring to mind quickly for them even if its isn’t widely held knowledge.
Lawyers from [State X] are usually more familiar with how to look up laws than ordinary people.
Just for a basic example, if you wanted to know about a criminal law NY, you might use search terms like “Criminal” and “Code” that won’t net you many hits, because the criminal law in NY State is called the New York Penal Law. You also wouldn’t know that the Criminal Procedure Law is separate, and ‘CPL’ doesn;t mean “Civil Procedure Law” as it does in some other states.
Law students have free unlimited access to the two major legal databases, WestLaw and LexisNexis. Some of the posters may be law students.
Out in the real world, these services are really expensive, but powerful. Using these comprehensive databases, you can, say, find every case ever published with the word “spork” 20 or less words away from “negligen%” (negligence or negligent) in either New Mexico, or Montana or Rhode Island, including, or not including if you prefer, Federal cases from those districts. You can search individual courts or all of them, by case name, party name, docket number, boolean search terms or natural language. Oh yeah - and once you find ONE case, you can find every other case that ever cited it, including whether they disagreeed with any part. The results list notes which cases have been overturned. It is a skill you have to learn but it’s pretty kick-ass.
Right - LexisNexis and Westlaw are very, very helpful in that regard. If you have full access to state and federal decisions and decent database Search-Fu, you can find damn near anything. Sometimes you can even find what you want on google pretty easily, if it’s an on-point case you remember from law school but can’t quite put a style and citation to. Pre-internet it was (and still is) done by hand in the law library, with digests like the West American Digest System or legal encyclopedias like American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum, or by simply looking up the cases next to the statutes in the annotated code of whatever jurisdiction you’re researching.
The key really isn’t so much knowing which databases to search as it is knowing what terms to search. After a while you get pretty good at that.
And, as pravnik notes, in the olden days, we used digests. You’d look up your terms in the index, which then directs you to an explanation of the general law with citations to cases. You’d then read those cases to see if they matter, and then look at (in another book) all the cases that cite your case, and then read all those cases, and then the cases citing those cases, lather, rinse, repeat.
The online databases really revolutionized research, in that it made it much quicker to go through all the steps to find a case. But the fundamentals are the same – figure out what the right search terms are, and then figure out which cases fit what you’re looking for.
Besides prisons and law school students, I have LexisNexis access through my community college by virtue of taking a couple classes a year. I’ve only ever used it to find news articles though, never full legal searches.
My law school was the only one in the area (maybe even the state) that didn’t allow 1L students Westlaw or LexisNexis access; they wanted us to learn to research and Shepardize everything by hand in the law library first. Our astonished colleagues at other schools always asked if we had to take notes on the back of a shovel with a lump of coal as well.
This sounds remarkably like how academics find scholarly papers, both pre- and post-Internet. Except in our case, the databases are usually publicly-available, but the papers themselves are often subscription-only (and again, it’s always institutions of some sort that have the subscriptions, not individuals).
We were taught Westlaw and Lexis in our second semester, and the first semester we were forbidden to access them. And remember, all you old folk like me, having to learn dot commands for Lexis? That’s what made me a Westlaw devotee…
You also have practitioners texts which will have appropriate case law cited as well. If you are in England and a Criminal Barrister, pick up Archbolds and write.
Legal Research is the most basic skill a lawyer has. Any lawyer who cannot upon receiving facts, discover an obscure but relevant legal provision, find relevant case law and if necessary journal articles, and prepare a case note from above in under two hours should surrender his or her license.
I would like to add, that learning to go manually through a reporters index is something that should still be learnt; to this day despite protestations to the contarary, online databases are still not containing ALL cases.
