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Legal research guide

Legal research process

How to conduct legal research at Murdoch University

The legal research process

At its core, legal research in an academic setting is much the same as any other academic subject. The basic steps are:

  1. Plan your search
  2. Create a search strategy
  3. Find resources
  4. Evaluate resources
  5. Create a reference list

 

However, there are a few aspects of legal research that differ from general research, or some steps that take on increased importance when researching legal matters.

Work through the steps below to understand the legal research process.

Plan your search

To start with, work through our general guide to planning your search.

Analysing your legal research question involves identifying the appropriate area of law and any relevant legal issues at play. If you are researching a problem-based scenario, you should pay careful attention to identifying the facts.

Determine the:

  • Jurisdiction
  • Dates and timeline of events
  • Persons involved.

These facts will affect how you formulate your research question, as well as which websites, databases, and sources of legal information you will need to consult.

Once you have planned your search, you can move on to creating a search strategy.

Create a search strategy

Work through our guide to creating a search strategy, as well as the "Identify key words & concepts" section of our advanced research skills guide.

Now work through the "Apply search operators" section of our advanced research skills guide.

Find resources

Once you've created a search strategy you will need to determine the best resources to use. Read through our guide to finding resources:

When undertaking legal research, you will need also need to understand the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary materials.

Primary materials

Primary materials are documents that contain the law, such as cases and legislation. They are developed over time by bodies such as courts or parliaments. See the "About case law" and "About legislation" sections of our guide for more information.

Secondary materials

Secondary legal materials are documents about the law, including books, commentaries, journal articles. See the "About secondary materials" section of our guide for more information.

Tertiary materials

Tertiary legal materials are 'reference materials' such as dictionaries and encyclopaedia, which are tools for starting or clarifying research. For more on tertiary materials, see the "About tertiary materials" section of our guide.

When you are new to legal research or unfamiliar with an area of law, start by looking at reference materials (tertiary sources), before proceeding from general information (secondary sources) to more specific, authoritative information (primary sources). Secondary sources are written by subject-matter experts who can efficiently lead you to the key authorities you will need to use. You can then come back to tertiary sources as necessary to further define your terms or make adjustments to your search string. 

Alternatively, if you feel like you have a good grasp of the area of law and legal principles at play, you may wish to move straight to primary sources to answer your legal question.

You will often need to repeat the same search in a number of different locations. This process can be repetitive and time consuming, but is essential to ensure your search is thorough and your results are comprehensive.

Reading legal citations

In order to find high quality legal sources you will need to learn to read legal citations. Work through the legal citation section of this guide before continuing. 

Finding secondary & tertiary materials

See the "Finding secondary & tertiary materials" section of our guide for further instructions.

Finding primary materials

Searching for case law

See the "Finding case law" section of our guide.

Searching for legislation

See the "Finding legislation" section of our guide.

Evaluate resources

As you find resources, you will need to evaluate them against a set of criteria to ensure they are appropriate for the intended use. To start with, read through our guide on evaluating resources.

Status of a decision

When evaluating case law, you will also need to examine the status, or standing, of every case you look at using the following criteria:

  • Is the precedent in the decision still good law? When you have found and read a relevant case you will need to establish its current standing.
  • How has the decision been applied in more recent decisions? New developments in case law can occur whenever a case is decided (the decision is "handed down"). This means that when you have found and read relevant cases you then need to find out how the decision has been applied in more recent decisions.

For more information, see the "Case status" section of the guide:

Create a reference list

As you find and evaluate resources, you will need to create a reference list or bibliography to provide as part of your paper. Work through our guide on creating a reference list.

When writing papers for law, you will usually need to refer to the AGLC guide to determine the style of your references and bibliography. Refer to the legal citation section of this guide, as well as the AGLC guide, for more information: