Missouri Legal Research

Missouri Legal Research was designed for teaching legal research to first-year law students, paralegals, and undergraduate students researching Missouri law. Missouri practitioners and others who need to be familiar with Missouri resources will also want this book in their library. Complex ideas and research processes are presented in a straight-forward manner. Outlines of the research process and short excerpts from Missouri and federal resources make the book easy to use. Web addresses and examples point researchers to the many sources for finding free Missouri and federal legal material online.

Concise explanations of resources needed for researching federal law and the law of other states are provided throughout. Thus, Missouri Legal Research can be used by instructors as a stand-alone text or in conjunction with a research text concentrating on federal law.

Written by authors with decades of experience teaching first year law students legal research skills, Missouri Legal Research focuses on the sources of law (statutes, cases, rules and regulations, etc.) and exposes the reader to those sources in a print medium and then through both free access and fee-based online databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis. This book provides guidelines for how to make judgments about which medium to access and when to access it. In the second edition, these judgments are illustrated throughout each research topic to better evidence how practitioners use both print and online sources on the same project.

For a practitioner, Missouri Legal Research provides a one-stop source, succinct in its presentation of all Missouri legal resources. A thorough, but concise, explanation of primary and secondary authority gives the researcher a reference to consult when researching resources that one only uses occasionally, such as Missouri and federal legislative history and administrative law
Missouri Legal Research includes a thorough explanation of citation using either The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation or the ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation. This book points out instances where Missouri practices may differ from the national citation manuals.

This book is part of the Legal Research Series, edited by Suzanne E. Rowe, Director of Legal Research and Writing, University of Oregon School of Law.