ABSTRACT
A FIND THE BROAD LEGAL CATEGORY FOR YOUR PROBLEM 31
1 Does the situation involve European, national or local law? 32
2 Does the situation involve criminal or civil law? 33
3 Is the problem substantive or procedural? 34
4 Substantive civil law categories 37
B IDENTIFY SPECIFIC TERMS FOR YOUR PROBLEM 41
1 The Statsky ‘cartwheel’ approach 42
2 An informal approach 46
Chapter 4
This chapter helps you accomplish Step 2 of the legal research method (described in Chapter 2). First, it shows how to organise your legal question into the conceptual categories used by law book publishers, a necessary and preliminary step to finding appropriate background resources (which are covered in the next chapter). Second, this chapter introduces you to some techniques for using legal indexes. Legal indexes are most commonly used to find: • relevant discussions in the background resources you select • statutes in annotated series (Chapter 6), and • cases through the case digest system (Chapters 8 and 9).
