Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Introduction
This is a guide for first-year law students and others interested in learning how to find the law. Our
goal is to provide information that you can use as part of your law school courses. We’ll introduce
you to a wide variety of research materials and methods, and especially to the products of West, a
leading and comprehensive publisher of legal and business information.
The first part of the guide (Chapters 1 through 5) discusses how the law is organized and published.
This information will help you understand how to use different types of research tools.
The second part of the guide (Chapters 6 through 15) offers detailed, step-by-step instructions in
using Westlaw, the computer-assisted research service from West.
We believe that learning methods of legal investigation and analysis is more important than
memorizing rules of law. Even very successful students may know little law at the end of their first
year. Successful students—and successful attorneys—know how to find the law.
Using This Guide
The following information will help you use this guide:
■ To enhance readability, Westlaw program items such as buttons, check boxes, and menu options
that you press, click, select, or choose, as well as examples of Terms and Connectors queries and
Natural Language descriptions, appear in bold type.
■ Westlaw database identifiers—the abbreviations you use to access databases on Westlaw—are
given in parentheses following the database names, e.g., the All U.S. Supreme Court Cases database
(SCT).
■ Abbreviations for print publications are given in parentheses following the publication names, e.g.,
United States Reports (U.S.).
Because of the evolving nature of Internet technology, there may be recent changes to the Westlaw
interface and functionality that are not reflected in this documentation.
Winning Research Skills 1