ABSTRACT
In a world of slow changes the body of literature and the sources necessary for legal research were quite manageable. The rapid growth of industrial societies and the technological revolutions so intimately connected with them created situations for which the courts had no precedents or for which the application of old remedies would result in grave injustices. As the bulk of law publications has grown to enormous proportions, so too has the need for research aids in the form of indexes, citations, and digests. Legal research problems may entail matching the conditions of a case with facts, with specific juristic concepts, or with specific statutes, regulations, or administrative edicts. The access tools for legal research are of two types: those providing access to the body of law itself and other publications providing coverage of secondary legal literature. The tools for accessing the law itself consist mainly of the indexes accompanying statutory or case compilations, of large multi-volume digests, and citators.
