Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Chapter 11
For example, to retrieve documents on hazardous waste in the New Mexico Statutes Annotated–
West’s database (NM-ST-ANN), you could restrict your Terms and Connectors query to the
prelim field as follows:
pr(hazard! /p waste)
Caption Field
The caption field (ca) contains the section number followed by a few terms that describe the
contents of the section. Restricting your search to the caption field can help you refine your
search when used in combination with a prelim field restriction.
Returning to the sample search for New Mexico statutes regarding hazardous waste, you could
modify the search to include a caption field restriction that would help you identify sections
containing statutory definitions of important terms:
pr,ca(hazard! /p waste & defin!)
Viewing Consecutive Statutes and Regulations
To view consecutive documents even if they were not retrieved by your search or Find request
(e.g., to view 26 U.S.C.A. § 402 even though your search retrieved only 26 U.S.C.A. § 401),
click Previous Section or Next Section in the document header. To return to your search result
or the document you retrieved with Find, click Original Results at the top of the left frame.
Using the Table of Contents Service
The Table of Contents service allows you to browse the table of contents for a publication, view
a document in the context of the sections surrounding it, and quickly retrieve related sections.
The Table of Contents service contains the tables of contents for frequently used publications
such as United States Code Annotated (USCA), Code of Federal Regulations, Uniform Laws
Annotated, Corpus Juris Secundum, and American Jurisprudence 2d, as well as state statutes
and constitutions, court rules, administrative codes, municipal codes, and other materials.
Accessing the Table of Contents Service
There are several ways to access the Table of Contents service.
■ You can access the Table of Contents service from the Shortcuts section of many tabbed pages,
including your tabbed state page. Select a publication from the Tables of Contents drop-down
list and click Go.
134 Winning Research Skills