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Legal Research Methods in a Modern World: A Coursebook

All authors have taught university courses on legal research methods.
J. Paul Lomio is Lecturer in Law and Director of the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law School.
Henrik Spang-Hanssen is a Danish Supreme Court Attorney-at-law, Lecturer in Law, senior researcher with Danish and U.S. law master degrees.
George D. Wilson is Lecturer in Law, U.S. Attorney-at-Law, and Reference Librarian at the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law School.

This book covers the subject of legal research methods in the U.S. and Europe in a depth and detail not found in other works. It could be used as a treatise on the subject or a textbook for a foreign and international legal research class.

One specific strength of the book is its coverage of researching European Union legal research. It covers this subject in a level of detail not found in other works on the subject. This work digs deeply into EU legal research. It explains the functioning of EU institutions and the records and documents they produce. It is thoroughly footnoted with references to lead the reader back to primary source documents.

I highly recommend this title to any professor or student of foreign and international legal research and for any law library collection.

Lee F. Peoples, Professor of Law Library Science & Associate Director of Oklahoma City University Law Library

The internationalization of legal matters increases the need for lawyers to be able to orientate themselves with foreign legal systems. This useful book contributes to help lawyers in doing that. The authors have a good understanding of the different legal cultures. The book is well-written and instructive. It can be recommended to anyone that has a need to be instructed in foreign legal systems.

Peter Blume, dr. juris, Professor at University of Copenhagen

Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe is the first book that offers a comprehensive survey of transnational legal research methods, albeit focused on U.S. and European systems, meant to be equally helpful to common law lawyers and Civil law jurists. The book abounds with many useful asides regarding the similarities and differences of common and Civil law, which is useful to scholars and practitioners alike on both sides of the Atlantic. Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe has broken new ground by offering a concise guide to transatlantic legal research in a single volume. It is clear that as the practice of law globalizes, so too must legal education, specifically legal research methods.

Scott J. Shackelford, MPhil, Cambridge (U.K.) and Stanford Law Student

With the growing interest in international law, and the growing number of advanced legal research courses developing to meet the demands beyond the first year of law school, this book is going to find a welcoming audience.

Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Writing & Learning Resources Center,
The University of North Carolina School of Law, Ruth Ann McKinney

This is an invaluable tool and manual for students and scholars around the world.

Assistant Dean for International Programs, Washington University School of Law, &
former Executive Director, International Law Students Association (ILSA), Michael Peil

This book is of inestimable value and should be in arm's length of any lawyer working in the field of international relations.

Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law &
previous Director of the Henry Dunant (Red Cross) Institute, Geneva, Jiri Toman

This book will enable law students and lawyers from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean to speak each other's legal research language, a good first step for successful international collaboration and understanding.

2003-2004 UN High Commissioner for Human Right, dr. juris & holder of the prestigious Diploma in International Law of
the Hague Academy of International Law, professor of law at European universities, Bertrand Ramcharan

The global economy is becoming more interconnected, so thinking how to teach comparative and international law becomes more and more important every year.

Columbia Law School Dean David Schizer, The National Law Journal (September 10, 2007)

Lawyers today need to be educated more broadly if they are to serve their clients and society well.

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer

The case-study method paints a wrong picture of the legal profession for law students because of its reliance on using appellate cases to teach legal thoughts or reasoning based on the Langdell (Socratic) method.

Professor Douglas A. Berman, Ohio State University, ABA Journal (July 2007), at page 44

Vanderbilt University Law School is adding law classes based on statutes and regulations.

ABA Journal (July 2007), at page 44

During the last decades the legal profession has undergone fundamental changes. Providing legal service has become a global matter. It has become more and more obvious that an international operating lawyer cannot rely anymore on his knowledge of the national system only. He must be trained in comparative legal methodology and open minded to legal solutions of other jurisdictions ... Consequently, the national legal education systems have to adapt to this new generation of lawyers who are not anymore only concentrated on their own jurisdictions but are global players on the international legal market.

Universiteit Maastricht, The Future of Legal Education (June 2007)

Legal education has changed little over the past century. Yet the challenges today's lawyers must meet are wholly new and different. Lawyers can contribute creative and effective solutions if we prepare them to do so ... with innovative interdisciplinary and international programs, expand clinical education, and a deepened, nonpartisan commitment to public service.

John L. Hennessy, Stanford University President

Comparative Legal Studies [should] indeed inspire students to learn more about and rethink the biases of their own cultural and legal education.

Günter Frankenberg, Critical Comparisons: Re-Thinking Comparative Law,
26 Harvard International Law Journal 411, 412 (Spring 1985)

The interest in comparative studies in American law schools is a response to the increasing relevance of foreign law to the concerns of laywers and their clients on a shrunken, interdependent globe. Both as professionals and as leaders in the public and private sectors, laywers in the West participate in a continual institutional reconstruction of the relevant world. Now that their relevant world embraces both the common law and the civil law ... a familiarity with other people's law is indispensible to an adequate legal education.

Mauro Cappelletti, Preface to J. Merryman & D. Clark, Comparative Law: Western European and
Latin American Legal Systems (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1978), at vii

The common-law lawyer and civil-law lawyer each [has] assumed the modes of thought in which he had been trained to be fundamental and universal ... leading to horrible examples of legal provincialism ...

Roscoe Pound, The Place of Comparative Law in the American Law School Curriculum, 8 Tulane Law Review 161, 167 (Feb. 1934)

Tomorrow's lawyers will be plucking increasingly valuable data from exponentially-growing fields of information; working with colleagues and clients spanning the globe, and establishing automated systems to leverage scarce legal resources more efficiently ... Law plays a foundational role in American society, and increasingly in articulating our global community.

Gene Koo, New Skills, New Learning, at page 24

A comparatist should not limit to the staid and dry juxtaposition of the regulations of one legal system with those of another, with little or no critical analysis, as such comparatists do not compare, they contrast. What is required is analysis.

Werner F. Menski, Comparative Law In A Global Context (2007)

Otto von Bismarck famously compared laws to sausages - it is better not to see either being made. But while you can probably spend your life avoiding any sort of industrial food process, a life in the law will sometimes require you to scour what is known as legislative history. Legislative history, a term that is at once intimidating and boring, is the story of a law's creation.

Travis McDade, Student Lawyer (December 2006)