Concise Guide to Legal Research and Writing (Aspen College Series)

Noted author Deborah Bouchoux's Concise Guide to Legal Research and Writing is a shorter legal research and writing text that provides a building-block approach to the fundamentals of legal research and writing. This clear, well-organized text is designed for the introductory legal research and writing course for paralegal students. Bouchoux covers Legal Research and Legal Writing in a concise and pragmatic manner, making it ideal for abbreviated legal research and writing courses and online courses. 

All-new research assignments in each chapter give students practice with both conventional print resources and online sources. Helpful charts, diagrams, and sample pages from research resources help students understand complex topics. In addition, Practice Tips in each chapter offer realistic and helpful suggestions for workplace success and Ethics notes are included throughout the book. Using Shepard’s in Print Form, a Sample Legal Memorandum and a Sample Court Brief are included in the appendices.

Key Features:

• New research assignments
• Chapter 3 (Statutory Law) includes a discussion of the new titles added to the United States Code
• Discussion of the new website GovInfo for free, official, and authenticated documents from all three branches of the government
• Discussion of new sources for conducting research, such as the Law Review Commons (Chapter 6), which provides free access to thousands of law review articles.
• Discussion of new tools such as Lexis for Microsoft Office and Thomson Reuters’s Drafting Assistant
• Extensively revised discussion of computer-assisted legal research in Chapter 8
• New information on practical concerns in citing to the Internet in Chapter 9
• Revamped discussion of citation form (Chapter 10)
• The information relating to Shepardizing using print volumes of Shepard’s has been moved from Chapter 11 to its own back-of-the-book Appendix
• Information on new research management tools such as Zotero, Juris-M, and Evernote
• An in-depth Instructor’s Manual includes an overview of the text, sample syllabi, tips on teaching strategies, chapter-by-chapter resource information, answer keys for all assignments, and a Test Bank.