Sources of American Law: An Introduction to Legal Research - 8th Edition

Reviewed by Carly Toepke, Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois University Carbondale on 3/19/25

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This text is comprehensive. The text begins in Chapter 1 by exploring the basics of the U.S. legal system to establish jurisdiction and court hierarchy to lay out the precedential value of resources. This opening is integral to a new law student’s ability to comprehend what the value or meaning of the sources they are looking through. It does not matter if they find the perfect source if it has not application in the jurisdiction their problem is set.
After Chapter 1, the text goes through the basic of electronic research databases, researching statutes and constitutions, researching case law, and using secondary sources. Chapters 2 through 8 traverse through the highlights each type of research source, when and what to use them to accomplish, and some insider tips. Chapter 8 is a very helpful chapter teaching about the different resources from Legal Encyclopedias to Form Books. First year (and first gen) law students may not have heard of the resources available to research their problem – especially using these secondary sources as “pathfinders” to help them understand the law/topic before diving into it.
Chapter 9 lays out the research process, going through the steps of legal research. The chapter highlights potential concerns or issues that legal researchers may face and how to solve them. This chapter is helpful, but it would be nice to see an example research plan laid out. In a different text I have seen a research plan in chart form, which proved helpful for students to have something to fill in as they research. Adding a filled-out plan in text and a blank plan in the appendix would be helpful. Then, students can download the Word version of the text and have the blank plan as their template to fill out with the filled-in plan as their guide.
Helpful easter eggs to find in the text were certain search terms and phrases that will help the learners get to the results they are searching. When starting legal research, the online resources seem endless, and it is easy to fall down rabbit holes. Having these search phrases to edit and plug in is useful. It could be helpful to add an appendix with a list of Boolean search phrases that can help students as they begin their legal research journey.
An idea for a future publication would be to add a Bluebook and ALWD citation (with rule number) to the many sources listed throughout the text. This will give an example to students on how to cite these resources as they start their research and ultimate writing. It is understood that this is not a citation or legal writing text but a companion piece for the legal research aspect; however, it could be an idea to broaden the scope and usefulness of the text for students and showing the continuity between the ideas.
There is no index but there is a glossary with definitions of some of the terms referenced. I am not sure how helpful the glossary is or if learners would use it. It may be helpful to also have a floating box with the terms highlighted on the page it is referenced. It could be added to the margin like a “side bar.” This will make the text visually interesting and result in the learner stopping to read the term and becoming familiar with it. I cannot imagine learners flipping to the back to read the definition; instead, I imagine them skipping it and not fully comprehending.
What would also be helpful are mini table of contents for each chapter to give the overview and quick guide for where learners can reference the certain topic they are looking to read.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The text is mostly procedural without any noted bias. It accurately describes the various resources available online and in print for legal research in an unbiased way.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The text goes over how to use the print resources as well as online databases and the connections between the two. While most students prefer online legal research, many jobs after graduation will not have access to free online databases; therefore, students must become familiar with at least the basics of using print reporters while in law school
Content is mostly up to date including sources about using AI in legal research, which is relatively new to the commercial to the electronic legal research platforms. The platforms like Lexis+ and Westlaw Precision have both updated their AI technology as of 2025, so this book (2024) is out of date in that respect. With many law students turning first to AI to help with their legal research, it would be good to have an updated edition that discusses those tools. Even an updated editor’s note in the beginning giving links or outside resources to better grasp these new features would be helpful to 1Ls learners.

Clarity rating: 5

The text flows and is clear and understandable. The content is well-researched as shown in the many cited sources. The text is written accessibly and would allow a new law school learner to follow along with ease.
The technical terminology is defined in the glossary. As noted above, it would be helpful to have these important terms highlighted in a “side bar” box to ensure learners stop to read and comprehend them.

Consistency rating: 5

The text flows and is clear and understandable. The content is well-researched as shown in the many cited sources. The text is written accessibly and would allow a new law school learner to follow along with ease.
The technical terminology is defined in the glossary. As noted above, it would be helpful to have these important terms highlighted in a “side bar” box to ensure learners stop to read and comprehend them.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is clearly divided into readable pieces that could be split and assigned per class. With the learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter and exercises at the end of most chapters, the text is broken up into clear modules.
Each chapter is broken into headings and clear subheadings that are easy to follow. For example, Chapter Two has 2.3 then 2.3.1. What would be helpful is to add a mini table of contents at the beginning of each chapter breaking down the subheadings and showing the page in case a student wants to navigate directly to that section.
Chapters are divided logically by topic and would make for easy breakdown in a syllabus. After the first few chapters on the fundamentals of the U.S. legal system and a quick “how to” on the parameters of online legal research, the following chapters are broken down by sources. Working closely with the legal writing faculty to align what type of law is being assigned in the problem (e.g. statutes and cases), the legal research professor could easily jump around the text assigning the relevant sections (for example Chapter 3 Constitutions & Statues).

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The topics build starting from the foundation of the U.S. legal system to give learners the background to understand the hierarchy and connections between the legal systems and sources of law. By giving a brief overview of federalism and how different jurisdictions work together, new learners will be better equipped to use the research sources and understand what those source mean for their problem.
Each chapter beings with the learning objectives, giving a clear overview of the content and what learners can expect from the chapter.
The text is published through CALI, so there are some CALI lessons provided to students, which could be helpful for students to go deeper into the ideas.

Interface rating: 5

The text is downloadable in both Word and PDF versions. The PDF table of contents is clickable, taking the reader to the section they click on. While this is helpful, a wrong click will bring you to somewhere you may not mean to be and require a long scroll back to the top. If possible, it would be helpful to have a “return to top” type button at the bottom of each page that would make it easy to fly back up to the table of contents.
The images of screenshots from the only research platforms are clear, labeled, and aligned. The other figures, including the copy of the West Reporter were helpful and annotated to show the student what a page of a reporter looks like and how it relates to what they see on the virtual platform.
Some noted sections (such as 2.5 versus 2.6) have a different font or size that could be slightly distracting. This variation was not noted elsewhere.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

No obvious errors in spelling or grammar were noted.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text is procedural, building out the guidelines and “how to” for legal research. The examples and characters used are inclusive of different backgrounds and viewpoints.

Comments

This was a helpful introduction and guide to legal research in the United States. I plan to use parts of this book in future classes, and I look forward to the next editions.

Reviewed by Ann Su, Part-time Instructor, Portland Community College on 6/20/17

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

This text is very basic. As a primary source of information it may be adequate if heavily supplemented with information from other sources and used a reference more than a teaching tool. It is the type of text I might use to reduce costs for students if I was going to produces a lot of my own lectures/exercises and handouts because it gives no actual sample on how to conduct a research project from beginning to end. It also lacks an index or glossary. The table of contents gives you a basic idea of the content, but the chapters are fairly spartan. It would be a good text for a general overview of the research process, but has no examples of research problems nor does it provide answers for the few exercises that it suggests. There are links to online exercises, but those require membership and may incur fees for the student.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

I think the book is written in a fairly unbiased tone and did not notice overt errors. I do think that the text should include information about local jurisdictions and the local rules, UTCR, ORCP, OEC as types of law that need to be considered during research. I have had many cases that turned on technical/procedural issues, and I saw nothing about researching those primary sources or that they even exist.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

I think the introductory chapters on the structure of the legal system will be relevant and not require updating. But the links in the electronic research will need to be updated likely if an interface like lexis changes its system.

Clarity rating: 4

The prose is lucid and well written. I found the tone and style inviting without being overly jargon/technical. If anything, I would have liked to see more technical terms in bold and/or put into a glossary/index to be able to be referenced.

Consistency rating: 5

I did not find any problems with inconsistencies. The framework was logical.

Modularity rating: 4

Given the type of book it is I don't think it would be a problem to assign chapters separately or pull out certain sections. However, the very nature of legal research requires a logical progression in understanding. So, I don't know that it would make sense to take things out of order that much. The book has a reasonable amount of subheadings within the chapters. However, I did not see a way to easily cut/paste the book and/or manipulate it outside of simply assigning individual chapters/readings. What I mean is that it was written in a fairly traditional way that I would expect a print text to be laid out. It did not have a presentation as if it was aiding easy modularity like I have seen in other OER or newer texts.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

The organization and structure was logical. I would have liked to see a LOT more charts and/or figures to break up the text. Also, it would give a better visual understanding of the flow of research and how primary/secondary sources interrelate etc. Legal research is very complex and takes a long time to master. This book is primarily text with very few things separated out visually as charts/tables or even in bold--e.g. glossary terms.

Interface rating: 4

It was free of navigation problems. When I read the book on iBooks it often cut text or charts and did not present well. In PDF form it was awkward.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

There were no grammar problems that I noticed.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

There were not a lot of examples that required cultural relevancy because it was mostly about the structure of the legal system, legal authorities and the process of research. I did note that the usage of he/her was interchanged when there was a universal pronoun used and I appreciated that.

Comments

I think this book represents a gift as it is OER and want to acknowledge the effort and time it took to create it. I don't want my comments to seem overwhelmingly negative because it is a good text. I don't think it is comprehensive or as useful as a teaching text.