Orientation to Legal Research Webinar: Tracing Federal Regulations
Date: Thursday, April 4, 2024, 10:00 a.m. PDT – 11:00 a.m. PDT
This entry in the series provides an overview of U.S. federal regulations, including information about the notice and comment rulemaking process, the publication and citation of regulations, and the tracing of regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations, to the proposed rule in the Federal Register, to the regulation’s docket.
Ring in 2021 with Law Library of Congress U.S. Law Webinars
Orientation to Legal Research: U.S. Case Law: Date: Thursday, January 14, 2021, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST
Orientation to Law Library Collections: Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2021, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EST
Yes there is still a U.S. Constitution and it has its own day. Read about it at the Constitution Center and the Library of Congress where they also have Constitution Day Teacher Resources, for teachers and homeschoolers everywhere.
And don’t forget those extraterrestrials and the Bill of Rights.
URLs cited above:
You can go directly to the Law Library of Congress “Coronavirus Resource Guide” or if you want additional information on what Congress is doing, visit Congress dot gov. (You can link on Law Library News from there, too.)
“This is intended as a guide to laws, regulations and executive actions in the United States, at both the federal and the state level, and in various countries with respect to the new coronavirus and its spread. We are also including links to Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports ….” [Link to Law Library of Congress blog post for more information and updates.]
You can find PDFs of the official U.S. Reports at the Library of Congress (LOC) website (here’s a capture of today’s view of that LOC link at the Internet Archive).
More about U.S. Supreme Court Slip and Official Opinions:
You can read U.S. Supreme Court “slip” opinions online at the U.S. Supreme Court website, but these are neither final nor official opinions. Substantive and typographical edits are made before the opinions are published in the official U.S. Reports. Read the court’s disclaimer on their website regarding these “slip” opinions. (You can read their disclaimer below, i.e. as it appeared today.)
If your latest novel, or dinner table conversation, includes a duel, here’s a useful and humorous blog post for you from In Custodia Legis, a Law Librarians of Congress blog:
“So, you’ve been challenged to a duel. What are the rules?,” June 2, 2016 by Robert Brammer.
If you’re not an expert researcher or if you don’t have access to a large law library with professional foreign and international law librarians, the key to productive legal research is the “Legal Research Guide,” most of which are created by those professional and expert law librarians, many of whom also have US and foreign law degrees.
For example:
1) NYU’s GlobalLex (sample Researching Canadian Law)
“The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World,” April 28, 2015 by Jennifer Davis (Law Library of Congress)
“…. The centrality of interpretation to law and poetry is also explored by Wallace Stevens, most markedly in his poem “Metaphors of a Magnifico“:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
If you think you live in the most interesting of times, you are not reading enough history – or not reading the right wild and crazy stories that make reading history so absorbing and enlightening. The Library of Congress has marvelous history in small bites blog posts, like this one:
“Love, Adultery, and Madness,” February 13, 2015 by Robert Brammer, Law Library of Congress
Excerpt: “It is often said that love can drive you mad. As further evidence, take the 19th Century case that is said to have introduced the defense of temporary insanity in American jurisprudence. This case resulted from an affair between the wife of a member of Congress and one of Francis Scott Key’s sons….” [Link to full blog post.]
Oregon Legal Research Blog