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Legal Research for Scholarly Writing

Legal Research for Scholarly Writing

January 2024

Intro discussion	5 minutes
Getting organized	10 minutes
Expanding sources beyond case law and statutes •Secondary sources •Legislative histories •Interdisciplinary sources •Statistics	15 minutes
Advanced tools for searching	15 minutes
Ask for help and questions	5 minutes

Legal Research Plan and Research Log templates

Download templates for a legal research plan and research log that may be edited or to suit a research strategy or personal preference.

Tools to Organize Your Research

Zotero is a free, open source bibliographic management tool. It works with a desktop app and a browser extension. Use the browser extension (best in Firefox or Chrome) to save sources that you find online to collections in the Zotero app. Juris-M is an adaptation of Zotero that improves how sources are saved for legal information, especially primary sources from platforms like Westlaw and Lexis. This guide is an introduction to using Zotero/Juris-M for legal research: https://libguides.wvu.edu/law/zotero.