The textbooks give you an overview and broader understanding of the law on a particular topic or topic or on a legal issue. You will get a clear summary of the law and it will refer you to key cases and legislation. Understanding the Australian legal system is essential to effective legal research. This guide includes videos on how the Australian Parliament creates laws and how courts interpret and develop laws. Case citers are useful for identifying key cases related to your research topic. If you found a case similar to your scenario, you can use a Citator to see how subsequent cases followed that case. Legal research can be intimidating. By following the steps shown in yellow below, you can become effective in legal research. Computerized legal databases are not new, but the growing popularity of the Internet has made them more accessible to lawyers, students and laymen. In Australia, one of the largest of these legal databases is the Australasian Legal Information Institute (click on the link to open the homepage below).
The following website is a great starting point for legal research if you don`t know anything about the laws regarding your legal problem or topic. It provides access to useful, up-to-date and easy-to-understand information about the law in New South Wales. Legal dictionaries provide an overview of legal topics. The Staatsbibliothek subscribes to a number of legal databases useful to experienced lawyers. Lawyers regularly use these services to keep abreast of their area of law. They can be difficult to use, so we recommend reading the provider`s or publisher`s usage tips. If you are new to the field of law, we recommend that you start your legal research with more general resources such as the Legal Guide. If you want to know more about legal research, the State Library has a number of books in its collection. Return to the top-level databases. Let`s start by researching some of the laws of the Commonwealth. To see a list of Commonwealth databases, select Commonwealth (you will find the word “Commonwealth” on the AustLII database page as well as on the home page (or “homepage”) when you first launch AustLII).
Use legal dictionaries to define legal terms. The legal manual is a practical guide to 40 legal topics, the legal issues that affect people in their daily lives. Start with the legal textbook to understand your legal topic before doing more detailed research. The Staatsbibliothek has a large collection of legal journals. Browse the catalog or AGIS Plus to find journal articles. AustLII is not the only provider of legal information on the Internet. Others may be available on AustLII link pages. This is a selection of hypertext links pointing to “Off-Site” (non-AustLII) resources. In AustLII, these are other Australian laws.
The ANU library provides access to a number of legal databases. The following list is very selective and covers only the most important sources of case law and legislation. For a more complete list of law-related databases, click here or visit the Jurisprudence, Journal Articles and Legislation tabs for more databases covering this type of information. This guide is designed to help you find and evaluate legal information. It`s important that you take the time to think about what you`re looking for. What are the most important facts in your legal problem and what are the most important search terms? Write them down. Are you aware of any cases or laws that cover this area of law? If you don`t know anything about the law that covers your legal problem, start by finding simple information in plain language to give you a basic understanding. There are also other legal databases. For example, the Commonwealth Attorney General`s Department manages SCALEplus, a database of Commonwealth and Territory cases and laws (click now on the link to view the SCALEplus homepage). SCALEplus is part of the Right Window project. Here are some resources to help you get started. On the left, you`ll find links to legal resources and useful information.
Don`t know anything about the subject? Start with a legal encyclopedia like Halsbury`s or Laws of Australia, or a textbook (you know – that thing that cost you $150 at the start of the semester?!) – it gives you an overview of the law and gives you some basic information before you start researching a more complex topic. Now that you know how to use Netscape, we`re ready to use the Internet for legal research. In this lesson, we will briefly discuss the legal research tools available to you on the Internet and the main ways to access them. A more detailed list of legal texts and loose-leaf works can be found in the Staatsbibliothek catalogue. Be sure to check the publication date to make sure you`re looking at recent text. The most recent publications can be found on the reference shelves Loose-leaf services provide in-depth commentary and discussion on a specific topic or topic of law, including summaries of important cases and legislation. Loose-leaf services are updated regularly. Lawyers regularly use these services to keep abreast of their area of law. Let us take the example of the Commonwealth Crimes Act. We want the consolidated version, so click on Commonwealth Consolidated Legislation (like now). Summarize your findings – if you find a good case, write a short summary, write the most important paragraphs and results. This will save you a lot of time later.
If the system is under heavy load, you may need to wait a few seconds. When AustLII is ready, it will return a list of documents that comply with the “Crimes Act”. Click the document names to view the documents themselves. The list of documents found is the “list of results”. Write down your searches – the database, search terms, and the number of results you get. I do this in practice as a lawyer – I list the research I do to know that I have covered all the bases and that I am not accidentally replicating. To access AustLII, enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator or “Location”) in your browser. AustLII`s address is: You will probably get “more than 10,000” results and AustLII will warn you not to panic.
But at the top of the list should be criminal law. Click on it, then click “Table” to restore the table of provisions. Congratulations – your first search was successful. Searching for AustLII can be very simple. The quickest way to do a search is to go to the homepage (do it now – click on this link). At the top of the page is a small general search form. That is the end of this lesson. You should now have a good idea of what navigation is and the basics of searching (you type words, tap Search and retrieve a list). You can also search the indexes to see what other sites exist.
