Legal Research and Management Refresher course

Legal Research for Law Students and role of Librarians

1. Legal Research and Librarian’s Santosh Kumar Kori (Librarian) Govt. College Chandla , Chhatarpur M.P.

2. Law Library Law library is laboratory for lawyers, Judges, budding lawyers and Law faculties in the Law colleges. Collection development policy is based on user’s requirement. Law library contains highly specialized materials, and this requires special skills to handle. Basically, legal material consists of statutory law reports of decided cases. Both these types of legal materials relate to the “authority” and “precedent” respectively collection consists of both print and non-print materials.

3. Legal Research Legal research is generally the process of finding an answer to a legal question or checking for legal precedent that can be cited in a brief or at trial. Sometimes, legal research can help determine whether a legal issue is a "case of first impression" that is unregulated or lacks legal precedent.

4. Skill set for Law Librarian Library Curtain Leadership Subject Knowledge Research Skill Highly Organized and Detail-Oriented Keep Up with Tech Trends

5. General Duties of Librarian’s While the traditional library seems to be disappearing from all but the largest law Libraries and law departments across the nation, the law librarian has not vanished with it. On the contrary, the librarian’s role has transformed and expanded. A few tasks that law librarians  commonly undertake are:

6. Managing law library operations, including monitoring budgets and allocating, organizing and disseminating legal resources. Conducting in-depth research across a wide range of focuses including practice-specific areas of law, business intelligence, public records, legislative history, medical and news/media.

7. Training lawyers, students, staff and others on the use of Internet-based legal research programs such as Westlaw, LexisNexis, SCC online, Manupatra , Open Access Legal databases such as SUPLIS, SUPLIB, LEGIS, OJAS and emerging electronic resources such as Google Scholar, electronic journals, online court dockets, and legislative materials .

8. Conducting periodic reviews of new and existing electronic resources with an eye toward improved service and research efficiencies.

9. Legal literature manifests itself in many forms such as (a) Bare Acts ( b) Commentaries on specific Laws (c) Manuals/ Local Acts (d) Reports Law Commission Report Committee/ Commission Reports Annual Reports Parliamentary Committee Reports Joint Committee Select Committee Standing Committee (e) Gazettes Central Government State Government

10. (f) Parliamentary Debates Constituent Assembly Debates Lok Sabha Debates Rajya Sabha Debates (g) Parliamentary Bills Lok Sabha Bills Rajya Sabha Bills State Legislative Bills

11. (h) Law Journals Academic Journals (Containing only Articles Law Reports (Containing Full text of caselaws only) Hybrid Journals, or those containing a combination of both articles and cases. Some of the journals also publish statutory material such as Acts, Amendments, Rules, and so on. Journals containing only legislative materials such as Acts, Rules, Notifications, etcetera.

12. Digests (j) Legal Dictionaries (k) Legal encyclopedias, such as American Jurisprudence, Corpus Juris Secundum , Halsbury’s Law of England and Halsbury’s Law of India.

13. Different types of legal literature are to be consulted for different types of information needs • Alphabetical Index to all Acts including details of amendments • Topical alphabetical index to important landmark cases • Topical bibliographies on important legal aspects • Union catalogue of current periodicals • In house Databases of case laws • In house Databases of articles published in journals subscribed in the library • Indexing of Government Gazettes Equivalent Citation Table

14. Librarian’s Task Promoting library services and resources to other departments, students, vendors, and the public. Coordinating technical services and troubleshooting technical issues. Performing various cataloging and Indexing procedures for all types of library resources . Supervising and evaluating the work of clerks,  library assistants, and other staff.

15. Thank You [email protected]