Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Conclusion
Fundamentals of Case Law
You should now feel familiar with cases. They are not much like the document fragments you
encounter in your law school casebooks. In their fully reported form, case law documents are
presented with editorial enhancements and other useful information. We discussed how digests
are put together and how to use them, and we introduced you to the West topic and key number
system, which provides access points to the legal issues discussed in cases. You should
understand now that checking the status of legal authority is an important habit to begin while
you are in law school.
The fundamentals of researching statutory law are discussed in the next chapter.
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