In this guide:
How to write scholarly papers for seminars, law reviews and law-review competitions, including a chapter on choosing a topic and developing a thesis.
An engaging text that provides practical advice from selecting a topic to negotiating editorial changes, also addresses ethical concerns.
Remember to check out the suite of short videos including the video on how to narrow your topic and find issues. We show you exactly how it is done!
Before a case or statute is discussed in law reviews, it is covered in newspapers, legal newsletters, blogs, or industry magazines and newsletters. Look up legal news using the three major legal research databases. Some legal resources enable you to search for circuit splits or cases of first impression that are worthy of writing about.
With each of these resource links below, click on the area of law you want to research, and you can either Boolean search those individual databases or review the featured articles on the home page of that area of law.
Remember to check out the suite of short videos demo-ing how to select topics. We show you exactly how it is done!
Both the ABA and Justia websites have blawg directories that researchers can search by subject. Legal blawgs frequently talk about hot issues and recent decisions and can therefore be a great way to find a topic.
Use the UNM Law Library's Finding Journal Articles research guide.
A preemption check is the process of determining whether the topic you are writing about has been substantially covered by someone else in the past.
To perform a preemption check, conduct a thorough search of available legal publications:
Remember to check out the suite of videos demo-ing how to consult indexes, search for law reviews and journal articles, search the Law Library catalog, check SSRN, and searching Google Scholar. We show you exactly how it is done!
A thesis statement is the central idea upon which your entire paper will focus and it includes the issue that you will resolve. Some things to keep in mind are:
Thesis: an original and supportable proposition about the subject.
It is not enough to simply identify a problem; you need to try to resolve it.
Narrow your thesis to something manageable.
Develop Your Thesis.
After you identify your thesis, test it.
Why document?
-Documenting makes you deliberate: it forces you to stop and think.
-You are documenting your strategy and your research path so it can be recreated.
-It makes you remember the steps you took.
- It provides you with protection; you've covered yourself and your organization by documenting your careful, thorough research.
Best Practices: your research log template should include:
-Date: both of when you are conducting the research; and of incident creating Issue
-Issue: including facts and chronology
-Track your Research: What terms did you use? How did you get to your information? Citations! Where did you get your
information from?
-Updating: What is the coverage date of the resource you consulted? Is it the correct time coverage?
-At the end of your research session that day/week: document the status of your research: Were more potential issues uncovered? Was the call of the question answered? What is the strength of your authority? Also document citation Info, including potential resources.
Remember to check out the suite of videos demo-ing how to strategize your research, including logging your research. We show you exactly how it is done!
Sample of one research log: 
Legal Writing Citation in a Nutshell by
Learning legal citation is one of the difficult (and sometimes admittedly annoying) tasks that students new to the law face. This book is designed to ease that task. It initially focuses on conventions that underlie all accepted forms and systems of legal citation.
"An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (approximately 150-word) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited."
"Abstracts are the purely descriptive summaries often found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles or in periodical indexes. Annotations are descriptive and critical; they expose the author's point of view, clarity and appropriateness of expression, and authority."
"L. J. Waite et. al., Nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults, 51 Am. Soc. Rev. 541-554 (1986).
The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living."
Credit: Cornell University Library's Tutorial on Annotated Bibliographies, at https://www.library.cornell.edu/research/citation/tutorial
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