LexisNexis Overdrive Digital Library

If you are a student or a faculty or staff member, you can access the myriad of materials available on this new database by following this link (http://avemaria.law.overdrive.com/) and entering your library card number from your id card and then using your last name (all lowercase) as your password.

For those of you who don’t know, let me tell you a bit about this amazing new product and why we’re so excited to make it available to all of you!  According to their website, “OverDrive.com is designed to help you get digital eBooks, audiobooks, videos, and music quickly and easily. You can search for a title, then immediately see if it’s available to borrow, for free, from your library.”  LexisNexis adapted this program to provide access to their materials specifically in online, pdf format.  OverDrive works the same as a regular library.  You can browse through the materials the same as with a normal library catalog.  With LexisNexis OverDrive, you can “open the doors to your law library 24/7 with mobile access to primary law, deskbooks, code books, treatises and more.  LexisNexis Digital Library introduces a new chapter in library lending.” LexisNexis and OverDrive work together to provide access to a wealth of information at the click of a mouse.

We look forward to introducing you to all the amazing features that LexisNexis OverDrive offers!  

Thursday’s Tome

The ever-important treatise!  Do you remember back in law school how your professors always told you to begin your research with secondary sources?  We typically relied solely on the American Law Reports or Corpus Juris Secundum and went on our merry way.  But there are so many more resources available for explaining and guiding the legal researcher along the path to knowledge.  One of these is the treatise — a publication that explains the deepest contents of an area of law and often includes forms, commentary, and case law and statutes of relevance as well as citations to other legal resources for more information.

Two sample treatises are Collier on Bankruptcy and Nimmer on Copyright.  I’m studying bankruptcy this fall, and I know that Collier’s treatise will be a great asset to understanding all of the terms and concepts within that particular field of law.  These treatises are organized by a single editor who draws upon the legal knowledge and expertise of numerous co-authors.  These multi-volume sets provide an authoritative, in-depth analysis of the area of law, which gives the researcher a firm foundation upon which to build their further research.

Practical Research Steps

Secondary Sources.  Primary Sources.  Update the law.  Repeat.

These are the three basic steps to unraveling any research assignment that comes across your desk.  But what do these steps mean?  How can they simplify our legal research?  

First, secondary sources.  Assume, for the moment, that you’ve been handed a project concerning the trademark of an exclusive, organic cheese.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no idea what the law is on cheese or how it relates to trademarks.  Because I am at a loss for even a place to start, I will begin my research with SECONDARY SOURCES such as encyclopedias, treatises, dictionaries, law review articles, etc.  All of these resources provide various means of explaining cheese and trademark and how they work together.  From these secondary sources, I will also find references to case law and statutes that deal with trademark and cheese. 

Second, primary sources.  Your primary sources are the law (so long as you’re in the correct jurisdiction).  The law comes from statutes and case law.  You already have a few leads from your secondary source research, so that’s a good place to start.  From the cases you find or the statutes, you will find further references to other cases or laws that relate to the same topic.  Within these resources, you will find all the information you need concerning cheese and trademarking it.  Remember, once you keep finding the same cases and statutes in all of your research on various databases and in various sources, you know you’ve found all the relevant information.

Third, update the law.  This is the MOST IMPORTANT step!  If you don’t update the law, you risk citing law that is no longer valid.  You want to make sure that the cases or statutes that you are relying upon for your cheese trademark case are relevant and up-to-date and valid.  To do so, you can check the pocket part in a print resource, or you can check the flags applied by the major databases, or you can check the history of a particular case or statute.  Remember, with the flags on the major databases, just because there’s a red flag does NOT mean that the case or statute is wholly invalid.  The red flag may apply only to a specific jurisdiction or to a specific portion of the entire opinion.

If you rely upon these steps and follow them, you will be sure to find all the information you need to understand your case and defend your client.